WD 19 proposes water share reform

Housing developers face all the usual hurdles on Vashon, from permitting to material and labor cost and delays from bad weather.

But securing access to clean water may be one of the toughest and most unusual bottlenecks for those seeking to build on the island.

Water District 19, the island’s largest water provider, implemented a moratorium on new connections in 1996; commissioners at the time worried that unchecked development would outpace available water.

The district lifted that moratorium in 2023 and held a lottery for water shares, creating new questions: Should anyone get priority? How should the district handle speculation? And what about shares that go unused?

WD 19 has been working with input from developers and other community members for months now to come up with what district board members believe are better answers to those questions.

On April 9, the district released a new draft of its Water Allocation Policy that incentivizes affordable housing and motivates new water shareholders to either build or sell their shares back. A draft of the changes and contact information for the district are available at water19.com, and the district will take comment on the resolution at a 6 p.m., Tuesday, April 22 meeting at the Land Trust building.

Moratorium limits development

Most of Vashon’s fresh water comes from the island’s sole-source aquifer, which is accessed either through private wells or through water districts, special government entities that collect groundwater and rainwater, purify it and deliver it to their customers.

Water District 19 serves roughly 1,500 connections, including Vashon’s rural town area. The district sells “Equivalent Residential Units,” commonly referred to as water shares, that allow those properties to tap into the district’s water.

But the moratorium on those shares chilled development on the island for decades.

“Water has been a de-facto regulator on development on the island,” said Mary Bruno, member of the Groundwater Protection Committee.

“If you couldn’t get a water share, then you couldn’t build on your property, unless you could afford to drill a well,” she said. “Some people were happy about that — it was one way to regulate development. Other people have been very frustrated by that and think it’s not a very good system.”

But thanks to the adoption of low-flow appliances and conservation education, average water demand per household has decreased over time, creating supply for more shares.

For much of the past two decades, WD 19 was operating under the assumption that the average single-family household used 800 gallons on a peak day. When they conducted a new capacity analysis in 2022, they discovered the actual peak demand was only 600 gallons on a peak day. This lower usage allowed them to start clearing their long-standing waiting list for water connections.

So in accordance with existing district policy, the district held a water share lottery in spring 2023, selling 28 water shares at a price of $11,900 each. Applicants who didn’t get a share were placed on a buyback list to purchase any shares reacquired or reallocated by the district.

That system helped the district dole out water shares cautiously and impartially. But many lottery winners didn’t tap into their water, contributing to roughly 100 shares which are currently going unused. And the system wasn’t reliable for affordable housing developers, despite the fact the county has tried to incentivize those projects on notoriously-expensive Vashon.

By area, most of Vashon is zoned for single-family homes on large parcels, and only the town center is zoned for multi-family developments. That makes WD 19, which serves the rural town, a key figure in affordable housing conversations.

Vashon HouseHold, the island’s primary affordable housing developer, is no stranger to this dynamic. According to zoning rules, affordable housing developers can double density in some areas — on a 10-acre parcel zoned R-8, for example, they could potentially build 160 homes. But without the water to support those homes, those zoning allowances are meaningless, according to Kim Goforth, vice-president on the board of VHH.

Goforth believes the current lottery system did not support projects that would benefit the island, in part because some of the shares were issued to individuals or developers with no immediate plans to build. “Selling water shares to speculators is not a good practice.”

Island developer Morgan Brown, who is also a member of the Groundwater Protection Committee, has criticized the water moratorium and the district’s lottery system.

“There are a lot of reasons why it’s difficult to do housing here on the island, and I could list a half dozen of them, but the number one, without peer, is the uncertainty of having water to be able to develop,” Brown said.

Brown is in the permitting stage of building a large, environmentally ambitious housing development alongside SW 178th Street between 103rd Avenue, which he plans to allocate 10 to 20% for affordable housing and the rest to be rented or sold at market rate. The goal is for the development to accomplish the Living Building Challenge: energy and utility self-sustaining, including relying on rainwater catchment and drilling the new wells without tapping into utility water.

Brown purchased three parcels of land for this project with an associated 18 water shares, according to WD 19, all of which remain untapped. Brown has held onto the shares as a matter of insurance; they add significant value to the property if he needed to sell the land or apply for a loan for development.

Brown said he has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars over the past decade to purchase and hold onto these water shares. He bought the properties and shares in 2016 and has all the while paid the bimonthly WD 19 fees — currently set at $93 dollars per share — to keep ownership of those water units. Brown said he would consider selling the shares back to the district if his development successfully relies entirely on his own water sources.

Brown sees solving the water allocation problem as paramount in the island’s dire need for more housing.

“The only reason, in my opinion, it’s been allowed to persist — the moratorium/lottery — is because the community has a belief that there’s no water available, that the aquifer can’t support it, and there’s no science to back that up,” Brown said.

Brown, the former chair of the Vashon Community Council’s Affordable Housing Task Force, supports the intention of the new draft policy, but is skeptical about how much it will actually fix. Prioritizing affordable housing is noble, he said, but will put market rate developers, who are more common than nonprofit developers, at a disadvantage for acquiring shares and building homes.

“I think when you get into the business of being the one who decides this sort of thing — having the scarce resource that’s determining if housing happens or not … you’re going to make mistakes, and there are going to be inefficiencies, and you’re going to have some unintended consequences,” Brown said.

Proposed changes

Water District 19’s new policy would allow commissioners to set some water shares aside for “special uses,” including affordable housing developments that commit to 50 years of affordability — for households earning 80% or less of the area median income — and for those who have an emergency loss of an existing water source.

Any remaining shares would go to the general use pool — market-rate housing or commercial projects, for example. Both general and special use pools would still be doled out in lotteries if more people apply for shares than the district can serve.

Also under the new policy, affordable housing developers who hold a legally binding option to purchase a parcel of land — not just current landowners — would be able to purchase water shares for that parcel.

That would help organizations like Vashon HouseHold avoid a Catch-22 that tends to slow housing projects and pile on costs: Affordable housing developers can’t get financing or apply for grant funding unless they own the land they would develop. But it’s a risky waiting game to buy the land first and hope that you’ll obtain the water shares later.

The new policy also stipulates that those seeking shares to develop a home or business would have to get permits and finish the project in a certain time frame or else lose the water share assigned to them. Those who want shares for water use where permitting is not needed, such as watering a garden, would need to explain to the district before the lottery why they need the share for the foreseeable future.

Harder to solve are the district’s roughly 100 already-issued but currently unused water shares. WD 19 cannot simply force water share holders to give or sell them back. But the new policy introduces a voluntary incentive: Water share holders could opt to sell their shares back to the district specifically to be resold into the special uses pool, including for affordable housing.

Seth Zuckerman, president of the WD 19 Board of Commissioners, believes that this approach could appeal to owners who aren’t using their shares and would rather those shares benefit the community instead of being flipped over to another speculator.

Finally, because the district got more applications for shares than it could serve when it held its lottery in 2023, it also proposes offering first right of refusal on new shares to those on its 2023 Buyback List — a list of applicants who didn’t win the lottery but to whom the district has offered shares periodically when existing shareholders have sold their shares back to the district. Once that list has been fully served, the district wouldn’t maintain a list of unsuccessful applicants after future lotteries.

After the new water allocation policy is set, John Martinak, general manager of WD 19, said he will advise the board to perform another capacity analysis to determine if any more water shares may be issued.

Beneath the soil

The complex water policy is intrinsically tied to the island’s equally complex water sources.

WD 19 is one of seven Group A water districts that manage municipal water systems, where smaller Group B systems serve neighborhood clusters. In some areas, such as much of the island’s south end, residents rely on private wells, of which there are around 1,300, according to the Vashon-Maury Island Land Trust.

WD 19 gets about 60% of its supply from surface sources, Beall and Ellis Creeks, and the remaining 40% from six wells drawing from the aquifer system. But both systems come with limits. The state Department of Ecology mandates that streamflows must remain above a certain level, and well production is unpredictable.

“What we’ve seen in terms of the reliable performance from our wells and the availability of water from our streams is indeed finite,” Zuckerman said. “We’re up against the limits of our right to withdraw water from some of our sources.”

Issuing a water share is more than an administrative task. It’s a long-term legal commitment that a customer who owns a water share has the right to collect.

“You can’t apply hypotheticals to a water system’s capacity — it’s about what you can do right now,” said Martinak. “We can’t issue water units that we can’t serve.”

Geologist Steve Bergman points to the district’s track record of underperforming wells as evidence that caution is essential when it comes to tapping into the aquifer system.

The WD 19 Basic Planning Data supports that conclusion. Well #2, once expected to deliver 250 gallons per minute, consistently underperformed, and despite multiple costly redevelopment attempts, ultimately failed in 2005. The district secured an emergency loan to drill a new deep well, but that well also fell short — producing under 200 gpm before requiring its own expensive repairs. Today, district staff agrees that the sustainable yield from the entire wellfield is set at 150 gpm.

Drilling new wells is a gamble. Vashon sits atop a glacial outwash aquifer system composed of sands and gravels. These materials are permeable and store water, but the system is complex and irregular. The aquifer is also recharged solely by rain and snow, with no input from surface reservoirs, and it interacts with surrounding saltwater — meaning that over-pumping can result in collapse or contamination.

“Why do some drilled wells not flow? Sometimes it’s the geology, sometimes it’s the way they were drilled,” Bergman said. “… It’s not a simple story. It’s not one aquifer, it’s an aquifer system that’s really complex.”

Bergman says more data and better geologic mapping are needed to fully understand the aquifer’s capacity. The last island-wide geologic mapping was completed in 2015, and existing studies lack the detail needed to predict how the aquifer will perform long-term or where new, effective wells should be drilled.

Ideal geological analysis already exists on Bainbridge Island, which similarly relies on a sole-source aquifer for their drinking water. In 2011, the US Geological Survey completed a $5 million study of Bainbridge’s aquifer. Unlike Bainbridge, Vashon lacks the basic understanding of aquifer and aquitard distribution that would provide a foundation for such a study, as well a city government that can finance and propel such a study on its own.

Still, local researchers are making headway. The Groundwater Protection Committee granted University of Washington geoscientist Kathy Troost $3,000 to continue her research into the island’s subsurface geology. She will synthesize and collect more data to the research she and other experts have gathered over the past 20 years. Bergman and other island hydrogeologists will serve as volunteers on the project.

Also, an amendment by King County councilmember Teresa Mosqueda in the county’s recently-updated Comprehensive Plan calls for a “comprehensive analysis” of Vashon’s water systems, but the timeline for much of this work is still to be determined.

“It’s not a simple issue, ” Martinak said. “Water is a puzzle.”

Mari Kanagy is a contributing journalist to The Beachcomber. A longer version of this article appears on vashonbeachcomber.com.