Washington well users sued by the state; Whatcom County farmers brace for the fight ahead
Salmon vs. cities vs. farmers in Washington state
About 30,000 water users in Whatcom County, Washington have been sued by the state government for their water use. Well owners and users will need to prove their rights, and some will likely lose access. Farmers and ranchers say they are vulnerable to powerful urban interests in a fast-growing region.
“It’s really devastating,” says Brianna Widen of Widnor Farms in Custer. She says she is concerned that unchecked urban development will take priority over food production, forcing farms and ranches out of business.
Salmon vs. cities vs. farmers
The state Department of Ecology filed the Water Resource Inventory Area 1 (WRIA 1) watershed adjudication in Whatcom Superior Court last year. Adjudication is the legal process where the government decides who has water rights and who doesn’t. The state must now quantify what those rights are and how they apply.
After talks between tribes and local committees deadlocked earlier this year, parties decided to no longer meet and allow the process to go into full adjudication. The main point of disagreement: How much water must stay in the Nooksack River basin for Chinook salmon. The fate for farmers and rural residents is now in the hands of the court system.
“With the major parties now in disagreement over the crucial claim of instream flows, we can expect a protracted legal battle,” said Fred Likkel, executive director for Whatcom Family Farmers, in a press release. “The stakes are huge for all of these larger parties, and we can expect lawyers and streamflow experts to be lining up their arguments.”
In March, farmers and rural homeowners were “served” in a lawsuit shaping up into another contest between farmers, developers, and salmon advocates.
Local farm advocates blame failure in leadership
In an op-ed in Cascadia Daily News, Perry Eskridge and Fred Likkel say the impacts on salmon lie further up the river and accuse the government of failing their leadership duties and abandoning the community to an enormous and expensive lawsuit, with farmers and rural residents left in the lurch:
The saddest irony of this litigation is that farms lacking sufficient water rights for irrigation will suddenly have immense pressure for housing development. With housing water easy to obtain, any agricultural entity that loses sufficient access to water or has junior water rights may have few options but to convert that farmland to housing development.
Many farmers feel their needs will be drowned out by more powerful interests.
“Water rights are determined based on seniority,” Widen says. “If the city has senior water rights to my farm, they supersede me. The problem is, there is a ton of unchecked urban sprawl. Those kinds of things are what is going to take water rights away from us, even though we have water rights. There is a huge discrepancy over how that is going to be determined simply because the state is going to get to decide. But at what point does city expansion and increased water demand force us to face restrictions? That’s what this is all about.”
Farmers left vulnerable in long, protracted legal battle
A similar adjudication process in Yakima County in Eastern Washington took 42 years—finally resolved in 2019 after initial filings in 1977. This county had only around 4000 wells and water rights to sort through. Whatcom County has over 30,000.
Eventually some farms in Yakima County did lose their water. Of 4000 surface water rights claims, only 2300-2500 were confirmed. It will take years to process Whatcom County’s water issues. Until then, water users can expect to be metered, their water use watched closely.
“I grew up on the Swinomish Reservation,” says Widen. “I really struggle with this. I do believe there should be full access to salmon. But the science on whether the Nooksack River is really being affected is up in the air—it’s not really clear or concise.”
Widen says the senior water rights of urban communities that have exploded in unchecked growth create a dangerous situation for rural Washingtonians and farmers.
“This concept is nuanced; adjudication actually did need to happen,” she says. “Ferndale City drilled a well so deep they dried up a few water associations. Those water associations have zero water left and now they have to be tied into the city. That kind of thing needed to be solved. It’s just a matter of: At what point are farms going to be protected? We just don’t know. It will come down to what the judges decide.”
For information on what to do if you have been served in Whatcom County, click here.
Whatcom County supplies 60% of the raspberries in the USA. I always liked Bellingham back in the day. My daughter went to the college there. That was back around 1997. I suppose the area is very different today.