Moscow Water Budget Questions

The issue on the table tonight at P&Z was a request to annex a 1.04 acre parcel and to amend the Comprehensive Plan and rezone the parcel to R4.

The current (1999) Comprehensive plan says this about water:

"Future planning decisions concerning any new development in the Moscow area should consider the amount of water to be used by the development, the nature of the water use, and the source of the water supply. The city should establish guidelines for water usage based upon the nature of the new development."

I asked, Does the city have a water budget that would help P&Z think about these "guidelines for water usage?"

Mr Belknap indicated that the 1992 PBAC agreement is the closest thing we have to a water policy, its the only action the city has taken relative to the issue.

I asked how much water will be used by this new parcel in either the SR or R4 zoning

Mr Belknap indicated that in SR zoning (which staff recommended), one dwelling/acre would amount to 106,000 gallons/year and R4, guestimating 15 dwellings/acre wold be 1.6 million gallons/year. This is rule-of-thumb data, not based on observed water consumption patterns in Moscow.

The Comprehensive Plan goes on to say this about water: "Finally, the city should develop mechanisms to insure that new developments continue to meet the established guidelines as set forth in the management plan."

Mr Belknap had previously indicated to me that the only "Management Plan" as referenced in the Comprehensive Plan is the Ground Water Management Plan September 1992, the so called, PBAC agreement. In that plan the City agrees that it will "require developers to project water use."

I asked Mr Belknap when this water use projection should happen: annexation time, rezone time, or plat time? and he indicated at the time of rezone. He also indicated that while this is effectively City policy, it is not adhered to in practice.

Which brings me to the real focus for this post. If the PBAC pumping limit is the closest thing we have to a water policy and we have a 30-50 million gallon headroom (in recent years) between consumption and the cap (and the margin of variation year to year is large enough to drive the City over the cap) how do we proceed to manage our water budget?

My good colleagues on the Commission could see the direction this questioning was headed and argued that we could not take this issue out on any one land owner, that it was a policy question, and that as a community we needed a solution to the problem. To which I agree -- but there is no policy-making action and the PBAC agreement, which is the closest thing we have to a water policy, is not adhered to.

Which begs the question -- if we don't like implications of the line of reasoning above, how do we develop a water budget that spreads the burden around the community and yet not abdicate actually addressing the issue of a scarce resource?

Here are two ideas that come to mind:
1. Approach it like carbon credits, allow a would-be new developer to buy water capacity for their project by implementing structural changes that lead to conservation in other areas of town, for example, buying low flush toilets to replace existing, installing xeriscape to replace water intensive landscape, etc.

2. Adjust water rates based on the previous year's pumping experience. If pumping exceeded the PBAC cap, prices would rise the following year by an amount calculated to reduce water demand to the cap level. (There should be some life-line usage level that is exempted from this.) This would lead water users to develop more conservative practices to the extent that they feel market pressure. It might also raise additional revenue to be used to augment the supply.

The former approach hits the developer, and requires organizations and mechanisms that presently do not exist. The latter will hit the resident and create a new inflationary pressure on the cost of living. Is there another mechanism I'm not thinking of?

If the PBAC cap is not really the carrying capacity of our aquifer, is there a plan that would help us gracefully transition to the level of usage and types of sources that would be sustainable?

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Note. Per suggestion of Commissioner Shilberg, I have replaced my term "de facto" in the first version of this post with the phrase "the closest thing we have to a water policy is" which is closer to the language used by Mr Belknap.