INSIDE

Commissioners back at the beginning again

By Meg Olson

Four meetings and hours of public comment later, water district commissioners find themselves where they were last month: looking down the barrel of a difficult but necessary decision.

“I don’t think we heard anything we don’t know,” said commissioner Sue Johnson at the district May 11 regular meeting as commissioners went over testimony received at a special meeting two days earlier. “There were really no alternative solutions and it was a little disappointing in that regard,” said commissioner Madeleine Anderson. “It was not necessarily everyone agreeing or saying the same thing but the main thing was “‘I bought my property and I want my hookup now,’” said commissioner Renee Coe.

The May 9 public meeting drew over 75 community members asking for relief from the current moratorium on new water connections. If there was a theme common to most speakers it was that the district commissioners choose a method of handing out remaining connections that wouldn’t hurt their chances of getting one.

“I think you should be doing it by seniority, the people who’ve been paying taxes longest,” said B.C. resident Ron Mullen who said he wanted to build a cabin on property he’s owned for many years. Karin Pruss, poised to build a new home on Whalen Drive but stymied by the lack of available water, wanted special consideration for people in the middle of a project. “I think it should be based on how far along it is in the process,” she said.

Speakers were split on the allocation process, presented by engineering consultant Jay Regenstreif, some acknowledging it was fair and others worrying it would let developers take too large a chunk of the 180 connections available. “The random allocation seems fair but when you get players it becomes unfair,” said Peltier Drive resident Steven Sweetwood, intimating the process could be tainted by corruption.

Regenstreif helped design and administer an allocation process for the Sammamish Plateau, which recently emerged from the second of two five-year moratoriums while they secured additional water supply. “It takes a lot more time and energy to manage a water system that doesn’t have water,” she said.

The system that she proposed could be used here starts by taking applications and numbering them. An independent company then randomizes those numbers, and the application number that comes out on top gets the number of connections requested per property on their application; for a single home that could be one but for a subdivision proposal it could be 100.

“We called it the anti-lottery,” Regenstreif said. “You didn’t have to pay to enter but you paid if you won.”

Successful applicants have 60 days to pay for an availability certificate and if they do not do so that connection goes to the next unsuccessful applicant held on the list of random application numbers. If the holder of the availability certificate does not pay for a meter and connect to the system the connection goes into a pool that will go into another allocation, which could be held annually or more frequently.

“Not everybody is happy when you go through a random allocation process but this was a method that worked,” Regenstreif said. Asked how many times in a row an applicant had failed to get a connection in 18 allocations the Sammamish district ran, Regenstreif said 10.

District attorney John Milne said that the method addressed the primary requirement commissioners were legally bound by: equal protection. “Our laws require that where people are similarly situated they have to be treated equally,” he said. “A developer is a property owner as much as someone who wants to build a single family home.”

Regenstreif said their system treated all applicants the same but they did made clear that their goal was to serve those ready to use the resource and for larger developers they required up-front payment of some of the connection fees. “We were very concerned about speculators asking for the world that couldn’t use the world. We made them put some dollars on the table,” she said.

At the May 11 meeting Johnson suggested they continue to consider the first come, first serve approach she felt might favor those hungriest for a water connection. “I just hate the allocation,” she said. However, she thought perhaps they could put conditions on the process, such as a requirement to build in a certain period. “We cannot pick and choose who we serve, it’s equal rights,” reminded water district manager Dan Bourks. “I’m trying to help people and it’s horrible,” Johnson said.
“It has to be legally defensible, fair and equitable,” Coe said. “The allocation process has the most validity of anything I’ve heard.” Coe said perhaps they could have sequential allotments of smaller amounts. “It would allow larger commercial users to maybe have to wait.” At a May 18 work session Bourks said the lawyer had nixed that idea, again on the basis of equal access to the resource. “We serve everyone,” Bourks said. “We don’t tell them they have to build a house or paint it gray. Bottom line is if they request service we treat them equally.”

Commissioners continued to meet to discuss the issue at a series of three May work sessions. They approved a request for Regenstreif to draft a resolution establishing the allocation plan, without yet committing to it. “It will be important for us to read it and get our questions answered,” Anderson said.

Asked about a timeline for lifting the moratorium and distributing the available connections, commissioners said they first needed to amend the existing comprehensive plan to update the connection charge, but they would not wait the six months or more for the new comprehensive plan to be completed, as suggested by some speakers at the May 9 meeting.

“It’s hard to get a timeline with so many people’s schedules involved but I’m going to push for July,” Coe said. “We want to do it as soon as we can but I don’t want to make mistakes by being forced into something.”