Court: WSU can pump from aquifer

OLYMPIA – Washington State University can keep pumping from a Palouse aquifer for its water needs, including to keep its golf course green.

The state Supreme Court Thursday upheld WSU’s water rights to the Grande Ronde Aquifer, which were challenged by a local resident and environmental groups. In a 6-3 ruling, the court majority said the state Department of Ecology properly ruled in favor of WSU in the complicated fight over rights to a declining aquifer that also supplies Pullman, the University of Idaho, Moscow and the surrounding communities.

WSU’s water system has a number of wells, some in use and some not, and rights that had been acquired over decades during several changes in state water law. But for years it never used the total amount of water allotted under those rights.

Over the years the university combined the wells into an integrated system that was never authorized by the Ecology Department. When WSU asked the department to approve the integrated system, using the total amount of water allowed for all the wells, local resident Scott Cornelius objected. He later appealed on a series of points when Ecology granted all but one of WSU’s requests.

The department and the Pollution Control Hearings Board, which also ruled on WSU’s requests, did not expand the university’s rights, they merely confirmed those existing rights, the majority ruled.

One of the challenges was WSU’s watering of its golf course, which Cornelius said didn’t meet the standards of a “beneficial use.” He described seeing sprinklers operating during the day when temperatures were in the 90s and water runoff on nearby hillsides. The Pollution Control Hearings Board dismissed that challenge, and the court backed that decision.

Those observations might prove the sprinkler system isn’t absolutely efficient, but the standard for challenging WSU’s rights to use its water was “reasonable efficiency,” the court said in an opinion written by Justice Susan Owens. There was no proof the system wasn’t operating with reasonable efficiency.

The Legislature’s rewriting of state water laws in 2003 protected WSU’s rights to the water, she wrote.