Dr. Michael Brady, School of Economic Sciences, WSU

Wed. Feb 1, 2017 | 3:10 pm | PACCAR Bldg (PETB) Room 202

In 2013, the Washington State Supreme Court ruled against a 2001 amendment that set aside groundwater reservations for development within the Skagit River Basin.  As a consequence, hundreds of properties no longer have a secure, uninterruptible water right. The objective of this study is to identify the least cost mitigation option in a spatially explicit manner for all of the properties whose groundwater rights were invalidated by the 2013 Supreme Court ruling. The core analysis focuses on piping and trucking water for streamflow augmentation, but we provide coarse comparisons to other alternatives, such as storage reservoirs for winter flow capture, trucking and piping for direct consumption, and rainwater capture based on information from existing studies. Further, while we focus on mitigation for the 451 properties developed since April of 2001, we provide several general results relating to water provision for future development in the otherwise closed sub-basins

This project was funded through the Engrossed Senate Bill No. 6589 and administered through the Department of Ecology, State of Washington Water Research Center and WSU.  Co-authors include: J. Padowski, Q. Yang, E. Jessup, and J. Yoder. Project development, coordination, and review was accomplished with the help of David Christensen, Thomas Buroker, John Rose, Tom Culhane and Barb Anderson at the WA Department of Ecology.