The Gristle

Kicking the can, filled with cement

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

KICKING THE CAN, FILLED WITH CEMENT: With a new voice and new alliances, Whatcom County Council this week extended its ban on subdivisions in the Lake Whatcom watershed. Their six-month moratorium was laudable, but simply continues to delay ultimate and final decisions about how to best repair the City of Bellingham’s municipal water supply.

In a similar vein, Bellingham City Council kicked two responses to Lake Whatcom down the road.

City Council took public testimony on a proposed increase on water rates to fund the city’s property acquisitions program in the watershed, with provisions that would expand the program to include stormwater projects. The proposal would double the utility charge from $5 per month to $12 month. Ironically, the increase would then match a fee proposed in a 1998 citizen’s initiative to create a similar acquisitions program that failed at the polls by a handful of votes. Given that history and support, few spoke against the proposal Monday evening.

Council members listened. They were not prepared to vote on the matter this week, and seemed inclined to delay the entire matter for six months while staff completes the city’s study on water and sewer rates.

“The rate study will help identify the overall financial needs of the utilities and propose a structure that covers revenue needs while establishing equity between customer classes,” Public Works Director Ted Carlson explained, noting water usage can vary widely among Bellingham households. “As part of the rate study, we will be reviewing base rates and volume rates as we transition from a primarily flat-rate residential customer base to a metered-rate customer base.

“The rate study will also evaluate the most appropriate way to implement the surcharge to both single-family residences and multi-family residences” in a fair manner, he said.

While staff and council stress their interest in creating an equitable water rate, they dodged a central question of whether those who do not live in or visit the watershed should pay the same water rate as home­owners in the watershed who are putting stresses on the lake.

A citizen complained, noting it didn’t seem fair to charge everyone the same cost for cleaning the lake. He proposed a solution long on the table, the creation of a special taxing district around the lake to help finance acquisitions and water quality projects.

The comment mirrored those expressed by council members earlier in the day as they discussed a second issue, an agreement to share costs to manage the County Health Department’s monitoring program for septic systems in the watershed. The cost for the joint program through 2013 is $194,416. The city covers half, or $97,208, proposed to be paid from the city’s Water Fund. Council delayed action on the agreement as they debate its merits.

Here’s the rub: of the more than 700 septic systems in the Lake Whatcom watershed, only four are inside the City of Bellingham, unattached to the city’s sewer system. That’s a mighty imbalance!

Making matters much worse, county policymakers in 2010 destroyed the funding mechanism for their own on-site septic (OSS) inspection program. Under that program, homeowners paid a premium for periodic professional inspection, a premium that was intended to help build a loan program (assisted by state and federal clean water grants) through which these homeowners with aging and failing systems might apply to replace those systems. The premiums might have also provided a financing tool for water quality projects.

County Council shitcanned the program and replaced it with a $35 Do It Yourself package that is rife with violations and scofflaws, with a compliance failure rate of about 30 percent. Roughly 3 to 5 percent of these systems fail each year even under optimal conditions. Now these stumblebums wander into City Hall, hat in hand, bellyaching that they can’t manage the program without city assistance.

“We are paying for septic systems monitoring in the county when they are not charging fees sufficient to pay for the program,” City Council President Terry Bornemann complained.

“We’re spending a lot of money just chasing after people who want to ignore their responsibilities,” Jack Weiss agreed. “That would be the county’s problem, but it becomes the city’s problem because it is our drinking water supply.”

City staff agreed that without the city’s financial assistance, Bellingham’s water supply remained at risk. The political debate, staff said, could take years.

“If we don’t do this, it won’t get done,” environmental resource manager Clare Fogelsong lamented. “We have to either accept that consequence, or ignore it and face those consequences.”

“Every single taxpayer in the city already pays money into the county’s flood control district,” Weiss responded, “and we get very little in return when it comes to assistance within the city or within the watershed. Yet they’re taking city taxpayer money for projects all over the county, but not for projects we would like to see. Those are problems!

“The people who have the luxury, the privilege of living in the watershed should be the ones who pay for this,” Weiss said.

The exchange—about both the equity issues involved and the length of time it may take to resolve them—ably illustrates the larger picture, of a kind of political cowardice that leads all the way back to County Council’s fret over how to best compensate the land­owners in the watershed, inconvenienced by moratorium, who want to subdivide and expand the scope of the problem.

“The sun shines on the just and the unjust alike,” the proverb goes, or would—if the just did not live in the shadow of the unjust’s waterfront estates.

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