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Seventy-seven lucky lottery winners get water

By Meg Olson

Local property owners and developers representing nearly 500 water connections put their names in for the recent water permit lottery. Eighty percent of applicants came up dry.

“It was hard handing out the sad news,” said water district commissioner Madeleine Anderson at the September 13 meeting. “Someone spit on the door.”

On September 10, a list of 77 random numbers went up on the door of the water district office, each one corresponding to a successful application in the district’s recent allotment of 100 water connections (qualified as Equivalent Residential Units, or ERUs). The district had received 420 applications for 485 ERUs – 73 single residential applications were allocated, one long-plat for 20 units came up lucky, and three short plats.

“We’re drafting an acceptance letter now,” said district manager Dan Bourks, which would notify successful applicants by certified mail. Upon receipt of the letter, he said, successful applicants will have 60 days to come in and pay their general facilities fee, water connection installation charges, and a hundred dollar fee to get a certificate of water availability, valid for one year.

The general facilities fee is $5,500 per connection, and commissioners approved a new resolution establishing installation charges would be billed to recover district costs – higher if new water lines needed to be laid or a road breached – and the district requires a $2,150 deposit. The 20-unit long plat, for example, needs to pay $112,000 to hold onto the ERUs allotted to that project. A single family unit would need to pay $7,750, a number that could go higher after water meter installation depending on costs.

If the fees are not paid in 60 days, or the availability certificate not submitted as part of a building or development proposal within a year, the ERUs associated with the application are considered available again and will go to the 23 applications currently on a “waiting list.” If enough ERUs become available to fill the waiting list applications, any additional ERUs will be handed out in another allocation planned for March 2008.

To get beyond the current limited pool of water connections it can allocate, the water system needs to upgrade its capacity, and the district’s comprehensive plan is the roadmap. The catch is that the state department of health did not issue a letter of approval following its review of the water system plan. It issued a nine-page letter enumerating 26 needed revisions. “These comments must be adequately addressed prior to approval,” wrote engineer John Thielmann and planner Richard Rodriguez.

“It’s a little overwhelming,” Bourks said.

An engineering meeting in Point Roberts needed to be scheduled to have district engineers from Hammond, Collier, Wade, Livingstone of Seattle tell commissioners why the plan they prepared had so many holes. “We paid for an approved plan and I don’t want to pay any more engineering fees,” Bourks said.

Bourks added some additional engineering and funding would have to be added to move up replacement of water mains. “We’re going to have to bite the bullet and roll some of that out with the storage tank,” he said, explaining that they were seeing a proliferation of water main breaks that are time consuming to repair and pose a risk to property. ”Three breaks in one day,” he said. “It’s killing us.”

A mechanism to fund a new storage tank proposed in the current water system plan was included in the recent allotment. A major infrastructure reserve of 60 connections was set aside for developers who committed to paying for the infrastructure, to be released to them when the new tank goes online. Bourks said funding for new water mains would have to come from loans, grants, or ratepayers.