ML City to acquire new water right

MOSES LAKE — The Moses Lake City Council voted unanimously at a regular meeting on Tuesday to spend roughly $762,000 to acquire an irrigation water right for 50 acres located just north of the Port of Moses Lake.

“That, unfortunately, is what water costs,” said City Council Member Mark Fancher. “I don’t think it’s a bad market price.”

The council approved the purchase of the right, which comes from a shallow well and provides 220.9 acre-feet per year to 50 acres near the intersection of Stratford Road and Road 10 Northeast, as part of an ongoing effort to secure shallow well water rights to improve the city’s water supply and eventually reduce the amount of water the city draws from its deeper wells.

City Engineer Richard Law said most of the city’s current wells are deep wells, drilled down into the basalt layer, and tap fossil water that is at least 10,000 years old and not being replenished. The shallower wells, which tap an aquifer just below the surface, were used extensively when the region was initially settled, but were replaced by the deeper wells because the quality of the deep water was better.

“We will have to be conscious of how it’s treated,” Law said, noting that some of the shallow water is high in nitrates, or manganese, or both.

Law explained that under Washington state law, all water — whether it falls from the sky, flows in rivers or sits underground in aquifers — belongs to the state, which issues certificates to users specifying how much water they are allowed to draw out and for what purposes. For example, according to data from the Department of Ecology, which manages water rights, the right the city is buying is currently owned by Franklin Sharp and is certified to provide 1 acre-foot of water for domestic use and 219.9 acre-feet to irrigate 50 acres yearly.

According to documents available at the Ecology website, the water right was issued in 1972 and authorized a single, six-inch-diameter well 150 feet deep.

The city will have to apply to the Department of Ecology to move the water right to a new location and petition to change the use in order to add it to the city’s inventory, Law said.

New wells are necessary, according to Kirk Holmes, the interim director of the city’s Department of Municipal Services, because six of the city’s 20 wells are restricted and unable to pump as much as they were originally permitted. For example, Well 17, located in the Wheeler Corridor, was authorized to pump as much as 1,600 gallons per minute but is currently restricted to 650 gallons per minute, Holmes said.

Holmes, speaking to the city council during a study session prior to the meeting, also said the declining levels of the deep basalt aquifers is a regional problem that affects not only Moses Lake, but other cities like Othello and Quincy as well.

“We’re all having water problems,” he said. “We need to limit our dependence on the deep aquifer.”

Among the ways the city can do that, Holmes said, would be to upgrade the water pipes in the city’s distribution system, focus more on shallow wells to add to the city’s water supply, look at utilizing more of the water stored in the city’s water towers — roughly two-thirds of the water in the city’s water towers is unused in order to maintain pressure in the system — and consider alternatives to landscape and turf irrigation, since so much domestic water is used in the summer by the city, businesses and homeowners to irrigate lawns.

Mayor Don Myers said one small thing the city can do is rewrite the landscaping portion of the city’s building code to make it more conservation-oriented.

“It can have a big impact, actually,” Holmes responded. “The city is one of the biggest users of water for parks and landscaping.”

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at cfeatherstone@columbiabasinherald.com.