In August, voters on the West Plains will decide whether to tax themselves to protect their source of drinking water. The ballot measure proposes to create the West Plains Aquifer Protection Area.
Washington state law allows counties to form aquifer protection areas to collect money and fund activities related to protecting groundwater within a certain area. The county has operated the Spokane Valley-Rathdrum Prairie Aquifer Protection Area for about 40 years. Last year, nearly three-fourths of voters within its boundaries agreed to reauthorize the tax for another 20 years.
Officials think it's time to do something similar for the underground water source on the West Plains.
SPR's Doug Nadvornick talked with Ben Brattebo, the water programs administrator for Spokane County.
This interview is lightly edited for clarity and length.
DN: Are there priorities when it comes to West Plains? If there was an Aquifer Protection Area that you would want to study first?
BB: It's a great question. We haven't had funding to study the aquifers on the West Plains for a number of years. We did quite a bit of work in the early 2000s for watershed planning and there was a lot of look at water quantity. We'd want to look at water quantity, both groundwater and surface water. When the surface water transitions from underground to above ground, there's places where we can see that happening and we could understand that better. The big topic right now in the community for the West Plains is PFAS contamination. So I suspect we would use some of the funding towards PFAS.
But generally we don't have a specific plan of how we want to use this. We want to have funding available to put together a plan, work with the cities on the West Plains to work with them to see what their priorities are.
DN: Who would physically do the work? Would you contract with private companies or does the county have the ability to do that?
BB: The county has staff that have been doing aquifer protection activities in the Spokane Valley and north Spokane for a number of years. We likely would hire probably another person or a person would have a lot of their attention focused on the West Plains. But we can also use the funds to hire a contractor to, for example, put in a monitoring well where there was no information about what the groundwater is. In that case, we could hire a contractor to do that. We can also use these funds to supplement or use as match for grant funding. We might be able to use these funds from the aquifer protection area to apply for a grant to do a larger study and that could be county staff. It could also be city staff. Maybe the cities on the West Plains might have some interest in studying their water supply that they use for their city.
DN: Would this have happened without the PFAS discovery?
BB: I don't know. I think there has been a lot of focus on West Plains water in recent years.
DN: Because of growth?
BB: Because of growth, because of water availability. There have been places where water wells, the water levels have dropped significantly and cities have had to change how they get their water. There's been expansion of water supply from the city of Spokane up onto the West Plains and there has been areas of high water tables. So there's places where there's too much water on the surface and this would be funds that could be available to use to study those and hopefully come up with solutions for the community.
DN: Let's take a step back for the Spokane-Rathdrum-Prairie aquifer area. Tell me about how you think that's been beneficial over the years.
BB: A few things. It's created a long-term database of how the water is doing in the Spokane Valley Aquifer. It's tracked water level and whether it's declining and generally it's not in the Spokane Valley-Rathdrum-Prairie Aquifer.
And then it's tracked water quality. One of the big projects Spokane County partnered with the city of Spokane was a septic tank elimination program where we eliminated onsite wastewater disposal and this aquifer protection area created a database and collected samples to see whether or not that work was effective. And we found that it was effective.
There are areas where water quality is declining in the Spokane Valley Aquifer and we're keeping track of those. And then the other pieces, we've had an opportunity to provide a lot of education. We meet with students and explain how water resources, water right under their feet is important and how their activities on the surface can impact or damage their groundwater. And so that's created that where we meet with students. Adults will come through and recall having aquifer education. They understand that the groundwater that they use in their home comes from underneath their feet and there's a good recognition of that. And so that's been effective too.
DN: In the West Plains, would the aquifer protection area be separate from PFAS or is it kind of all together?
BB: It's kind of all together. PFAS is the big contaminant that we're very concerned about right now and there's a lot of activity towards that.
But 20 years from now, I don't know what the attention will be and so this is a very predictable fund for the county and the cities to use and answer questions.
DN: Do you think that once you start collecting information, that will help you to determine how are we going to attack the PFAS contamination issue?
BB: Yeah, I think so. I think more information is better and there's a lot of directed activity right now towards PFAS with the Department of Defense and Spokane International Airport and city of Spokane and Spokane County all doing activities looking at how to provide clean drinking water to homes and remediate problem areas.
I don't know that this aquifer protection area would be used specifically towards remediating the PFAS issue. There's other players in that maybe would take the lead. But people are also concerned about development causing declining water levels and so we can start to better understand that.
DN: In terms of how much people would pay if the area is created, what are you telling people right now?
BB: If you use water at your home, you're charged an aquifer protection area fee. For a single family residence it's $15 per year. If you also dispose of your wastewater through an onsite septic system, that's another $15 per year. So a rural home that's on a private well and a septic system would pay $30 per year. If you're in an area that has a public sewer, you don't pay the fee for the septic system. You still use water, so you'd still pay $15 for a single family residence. So it's somewhere between $30 and $15 for a single family residence. A duplex pays twice that and businesses and multifamily facilities are charged based upon water meter size.
DN: Is that equivalent to the Spokane-Rathdrum Prairie Aquifer charges?
BB: Yes, exactly. The fees have been constant through 41 years and we think it is reasonable to use that same fee to the West Plains.
