Water District 19 poised to end moratorium on new water shares

The district’s 26-year moratorium on new water shares stirred controversy, sparked a lawsuit, and limited development in Vashon’s town core. It could soon end.

After 26 years, Water District 19’s moratorium on new water shares – a cap that stirred controversy, triggered a lawsuit and limited development in Vashon’s town core – could soon end.

District 19, the largest water purveyor on Vashon, was able to offer shares to the last three people on its once-years-long waiting list in November, finally exhausting that list. A 10-year water system plan, just approved by the state Department of Health, indicates District 19 now has enough water to begin issuing a limited number of shares annually, commissioners said.

“When that plan was finished at the end of last year, …. we were able to make some projections based on a longer record of consumption trends and production trends from our various sources,” said Seth Zuckerman, who chairs District 19’s three-member commission. That analysis, he said, “suggests that yes, we do have enough water to cover the foreseeable growth that’s projected in the plan.”

The commission is scheduled to meet at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, Jan. 10, to discuss the end of the moratorium as well as a plan for how new shares will be issued. Mike Weller, another commissioner, said the board wants to hear islanders’ questions and concerns before they formally vote to end the moratorium – which could take place on Jan. 10 or at their next meeting in February.

“At the rates we’re pumping, we’re not seeing any long-term indications that what we’re doing is unsustainable,” he said. “I feel pretty comfortable about that.”

Under the district’s current regulations, Weller and Zuckerman said, new shares are to be issued via a lottery, giving everyone who wants a share an equal shot at obtaining one. Whether such a lottery makes sense will also be a topic of discussion at the commissioners’ meeting in January, Weller said, adding that he hopes the commission can establish a fair system for issuing new shares.

“We don’t want one person to be able to run in and buy all of the available shares,” he said.

District 19 provides water to nearly 1,500 connections across six square miles, a service area that extends as far north as The Harbor School, south to Quartermaster Harbor, and east to the shoreline. Vashon’s entire town core is within the district.

In 1996, facing pressure to sell more water than the commissioners at the time felt was sustainable, the district instituted a moratorium on new shares. Those who wanted a water right were added to a waiting list that at one point numbered in the hundreds.

The moratorium stirred controversy over the years. Some islanders said the cap was a courageous response to the limits of a small, island-based water system; water from Vashon’s aquifer was limited, new infrastructure was costly and an over-commitment of shares could result in shortages during peak usage, they said. Others argued that the limits were arbitrary, that increased production could occur sustainably, and that the cap was being used to limit growth, which in turn curtailed much-needed affordable housing.

The issue culminated in a lawsuit filed by a developer who wanted to build a 24-room inn on the north end of town. The developer and the water district ultimately agreed to a settlement in 2008, awarding the developer some of his legal fees and opening the door to a smaller version of his development, which eventually became The Lodges.

In the years since, the district has been working steadily to figure out a way to extinguish the waiting list and end the moratorium. Weller said such an effort was only right: “As a water district, we need to make a good-faith effort to meet our duty to provide water to our service area.”

In 2008, the district launched a water share buy-back program, enabling people who had purchased a share and never used it to get their money back; those shares were then sold to people on the waiting list, helping to address the backlog. Meanwhile, others on the list opted to relinquish their request for shares, which further shortened the list, sometimes considerably. Some who decided to get off the list had requested as many as 30 shares, said Melody Snyder, the district’s office administrator.

The waitlist was officially closed in 2002 – no new people could get on it after that, Snyder said. It was extinguished this November, when two of the last people on the list said they were no longer interested in buying a share and a third person – the last on the list – bought a share at its current cost of $11,900. “It’s taken us 20 years to get through that waitlist,” Snyder said.

The district has also worked to increase its supply of water, current and former commissioners said. District 19, which gets its water from two streams and several wells, long faced problems with the reliability of its three wells at its wellfield near the Sheffield Building. Over time, Zuckerman said, “their production had diminished quite a bit.”

The district has worked to rehabilitate those wells over the last couple of years, creating a more stable level of production, Zuckerman said. The commissioners also made a significant policy shift, said Bob Powell, a former commissioner who stepped off the board a year ago. Instead of fixing a well only when it was beginning to fail, the district adopted a policy of regular maintenance, harder and more expensive than the fix-it-when-needed approach, but also far more efficacious. “This made a night vs. day difference in the production capacity,” Powell said.

The district began to work on its aging infrastructure as well, raising rates to do so, Powell said. Several lines, for instance, were leaky; their repair was another step in improving water quantity, he said.

Finally, demand for water per household or business has dropped over time, enabling the district to recalculate the number of shares it could offer, said John Martinak, the district’s general manager. “Every time a homeowner replaces something, they install something that’s more water efficient,” he said. Previous analyses put peak usage at 800 gallons per day per single-family residence; under the district’s new analysis, based on five years’ worth of data, the maximum daily demand is now around 600 gallons per day.

Over the years, some islanders have voiced concern about Vashon’s ability to provide water to a growing population – a concern that stemmed in part from the Carr Report, issued in 1983, which documented the limits of Vashon’s aquifer. Martinak and Zuckerman said the district monitors the drawdown and recovery of water levels at its wellfield to ensure their production is sustainable.

Said Zuckerman: “The (water) level continues to recover to the same elevation year after year, giving us confidence that we are not overtaxing the aquifer.”

The end of the moratorium, should it occur, will be a “major milestone,” Powell said, capping years of technical problems, staffing issues and a “seemingly endless stream of major challenges” for the district. The commission and staff have steered the process well, he added. “I trust that the three commissioners will do right by Vashon,” he said.

What matters next, he added, are post-moratorium policies – how, for instance, to ensure a developer like Vashon HouseHold can buy the shares it needs to build more units of affordable housing.

That might mean issuing blocks of water shares rather than a “laissez-faire” approach of issuing small quantities, he said. “There’s still a lot of work to be done.”

Meanwhile, whether the question of the district’s water policies continues to stir controversy is uncertain — Weller said the commission meetings over the last few years “have tended to be very quiet.” But either way, both Weller and Zuckerman noted, they plan to stay focused on the district’s duty to provide water — to “distribute water fairly and equitably among the people who live in the district,” as Zuckerman put it.

Planning decisions about growth and development should be determined in other policy circles, Zuckerman added. “We were not elected to control development. We were elected to make sure we have a safe, clean, affordable, reliable supply of water,” he said.