Legacy Crossing and PBAC Cap

Back in March I posted about a small annexation going through P&Z and the water budget questions it raised. Joel Hamilton commented with a resource from the Army Corps looking at ways to divert surface water for municipal needs of Moscow and Pullman.

At the Feb 27 P&Z meeting, Nels Reece and students showed this Legacy Crossing Conceptual Model. (See the model at City Hall, very cool.) April 12 the Legacy Crossing URA redevelopment plan will be the subject of a public hearing at P&Z. (Public notice as PDF). Nels' students' project addressed only the southern portion of the URL, south of 6th, and going SW to Hwy 95. They were assigned to see how much housing density the could create as part of a mixed use development in the area. The handout they had is part of the Feb 27 P&Z Minutes. It describes fitting 650 dwellings (6.5million sqft) on the ~20 acre site.

I've been reading the PBAC 2006 annual report (PDF) (PBAC home) which has these two graphs on the historic water pumping by Moscow. (Graphs for other entities are in the report as well).


This is the pumping rate (blue) compared to the agreed PBAC rising cap. Only recently have we gotten our conservation efforts in line with our pledge.

In addition to the 1% rate of increase pledge, we have also pledged to stay below an absolute cap of 875 million gallons.


This graph shows our actual pumping (bars) compared to the 875 ceiling (line). This difference is the 30-50 million gallon "headroom" that Bill Belknap described in the March 26 P&Z minutes. The available headroom in Moscow's pledge for 2006 was 875-856 = 19 million gallons.

Here is the problem. The Council committed 2% of our total pumping allowance to Hawkins (and 111% of the available headroom). There was a furor (for multiple reasons). Nels Reece's students' ideas for just part of Legacy Crossing would commit 8% of our pumping allowance, see table below and 363% of the headroom.

Project	use	gal/yr	acre ft	% headroom	% of ceiling
Moscow Ceiling (125% baseline)	all uses	875,000,000	2685	-	-
Moscow 2006 pumping	all uses	856,000,000	2627	-	-
Moscow Headroom	all uses	19,000,000	58	-	-
Hawkins	Potable	14,663,295	45	77%	2%
Hawkins	Irrigation	6,517,020	20	34%	1%
Hawkins	all uses	21,180,315	65	111%	2%
Macrch 27 1 ac rezone	all uses (1 dwelling estimated)	106,000	0.3	1%	0%
Legacy Crossing	all uses (650 units estimated)	68,900,000	211	363%	8%