[Vision2020] Re: Trolly on old Railroad Tracks & P&Z hearing Wed nite

[Mark Solomon]

Tom,

Following is my Town Crier column of last week 
which goes into the Hawkins issue. To the best of 
my knowledge, Hawkins has resubmitted a SEPA 
application to Whitman County that is different 
from the one they withdrew a month or so ago in 
two respects only: some additional detail on 
traffic and wetlands issues. Nothing on where the 
water supply would come from.

Mark


Town Crier II, Mark Solomon

Just the other day I was working with my chainsaw 
thinning and pruning my daily quarter-acre of 
tangled cedar and grand firs in the draw below 
our house when the sky suddenly went black.  I 
hiked quickly to within sight of the house and 
the sheet of rain approaching getting inside just 
as the rain and hail came hammering down. A 
torrent of water poured off the roof disappearing 
quickly and quietly into the soft forest ground 
where it will nourish the trees and feed the 
streams and aquifers below.

On the ridges of Moscow Mountain the connections 
between water, rocks, soil and life are naked, 
exposed.  In town, one has to look beneath the 
surface of things requiring a commitment most of 
us don't have time to make.  We end up relying on 
our leaders to educate themselves and make the 
right decisions to balance the community's need 
for new development and the availability of water 
to support it.

Unfortunately, very little of this discussion has 
been taking place in the forum created for it, 
the Palouse Basin Aquifer Committee (PBAC), even 
though it has been meeting monthly for over 15 
years.  PBAC members appear to prefer process to 
product.  The committee recently made the 
decision NOT to discuss the effect a major 
220-acre commercial development in the 
Pullman/Moscow corridor would have on our 
groundwater supply.  PBAC remains silent on the 
now-under-construction WSU golf course and all 
other major development proposals in the 
Moscow/Pullman area.

Fortunately, not everyone is remaining silent on 
proposed development and its effects on our 
aquifers. Moscow citizens are speaking by 
changing their lawn watering habits making last 
year the first time in a decade that Moscow met 
its PBAC Agreement pumping goals. The Palouse 
Water Conservation Network (PWCN), in their 
testimony to the Moscow City Council on the 
Thompson rezone, presented an analysis they 
termed the "unfunded water liability". PWCN 
counted all the lots in Moscow that have already 
been approved for development but not yet built 
upon.  Using current city per capita water use 
rates, they calculated that the City is committed 
to providing another 140 million gallons of water 
per year - a 17% increase over the volume pumped 
in 2005 - when those lots are turned into homes 
and businesses. Meeting that commitment will take 
us well beyond the agreed to PBAC limit. The 
Thompson rezone would have required another 62 
million gallons per year.

Proponents of the east side commercial 
development keep saying that if we don't allow 
big boxes to be built there then they will be 
built in Whitman County starting with the Hawkins 
Companies proposal just across the state line. 
What they fail to factor into their thinking is 
the difficulty of securing water for that 
development.

Washington State has had a de facto moratorium on 
issuance of new water rights while they complete 
a statewide assessment of their water resources. 
Once that analysis is completed, sometime in the 
next few years, there's a backlog of new water 
right applications they estimate will take 
another five to ten years to process.  The 
Hawkins Companies could acquire and transfer an 
existing water right, but there's a catch: the 
water right in question has to draw from the same 
"source" as the new diversion or well.

We know quite a lot about the nature and extent 
of the groundwater "source" in the vicinity of 
the Hawkins' proposed development.  The 
Washington water rights database reveals that if 
every existing commercial water right in the 
source area, mostly in the corridor, were 
acquired and transferred, Hawkins would be only 
half way to meeting their water demand. Acquiring 
and transferring all the water rights would 
preclude any other development in the corridor. 
They could collect the water that falls on the 
development's roofs, build and pay for a huge 
reservoir and a treatment plant but even that 
would only net them less than half of what a 
750,000 square foot retail development typically 
requires.

Water and development. Development and water. 
They are not mutually exclusive but they are 
sequential. The water needs to be there first. 
Seattle doubled its population over the past 
three decades, but only by instituting an 
intensive and effective citywide conservation 
program. Seattle now uses less water, in total, 
than they did twenty years ago. It can be done in 
Moscow and Pullman, too, but it won't happen 
until PBAC, our community's leaders, developers, 
and citizens make connections and get real about 
conservation.


At 3:35 PM -0700 6/13/06, Tom Ivie wrote:
>I agree about the water thing.  We haven't heard 
>much lately about the proposed mall on the 
>Washington side of the border and the water 
>issues with that.  Does anyone know what is 
>going on with that?  Also, have the County 
>Commissioners ever weighed in on the water issue 
>and actually taken any steps (proactive or 
>reactive)?
>
>
>Nils Peterson <nils_peterson at wsu.edu> wrote:
>
>There was a thread here recently about a rail-based shuttle from Moscow to
>Pullman. That strikes me as more interesting and valuable than a interal to
>Moscow trolly -- there isn't much track left in town.
>
>ALSO-- the reason there is less track is that several of the railroad using
>businesses are going or gone. There is a P&Z hearing on 3 parcels of
>industrial land (grain elevators at the south end of Main) to convert them
>sites to Central Business District.
>
>I hope to go to the hearing Wed nite, to support the idea. Moscow growth in
>the CBD and mixed use ways that these sites suggest is MUCH more interesting
>to me than generic motor business growth on the edge of town. If the
>buildings can be re-used in some way, that would be cool also (but this
>hearing in about zoning, not a specific use).
>
>Besides, I want to go to one of these hearings and speak for the proposal,
>rather than against it.
>
>My one reservation is water. We still need to come to grips with having and
>balancing a water budget.
>
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