Spokane Valley sizing up water providers within its boundaries

To many Spokane residents, city water is just city water: It’s provided by a city department and it comes out of the faucet when you turn it on.

However, if you are one of the roughly 108,000 water customers living in Spokane Valley, your water comes from 1 of 16 different water and irrigation districts, depending on where you live.

City of Spokane Valley staff presented a detailed analysis of those water and irrigation districts to the City Council on Tuesday, research that was done as the city prepares to update its comprehensive plan.

Half of the water districts fall within Spokane Valley’s boundaries; the others straddle the boundary or have customers outside the area. The city of Spokane also provides water to industrial and residential customers in Spokane Valley.

Inside Valley boundaries, the largest water service provider is Vera Water and Power with 24,962 customers, and the smallest is Holiday Trailer Court with 12 customers.

Community Development director John Hohman said some of the water districts are interconnected but most are not. And water charges vary from district to district.

“It is very difficult to compare them,” Hohman said.

He added that a 2006 study didn’t do a good job of examining the water and irrigation districts.

“We now have to project growth for the next 20 years for the comprehensive plan update,” Hohman said. “We have to make sure we have utilities covered.”

Spokane Valley ended up with this patchwork of water purveyors because it was settled by farmers who formed cooperatives and dug wells as they were needed.

This is also why some are water districts and some are irrigation districts – originally meant for farming – and even others are a combination of the two.

“It is an unusual situation,” Hohman said, “but people forget this was an unincorporated area until 2003.”

Assistant engineer Adam Jackson collected and organized the data for the water district study, and he told the council it gets very complicated when it comes to the difference between irrigation and municipal water rights and how they may be used.

The Department of Ecology regulates water rights. Jackson pointed out that Vera Water uses 100 percent of its allotted water rights. For comparison, Modern Electric Water Company uses only 22 percent of its rights.

And then there’s pricing: Jackson said the average monthly price is $30 for 25,000 gallons of water, with Spokane City Water charging $58.65 and Irvin Water District 6 charging just $18.19 for the same amount of water.

He cautioned against direct cost comparison because the districts don’t all read water meters in the same manner, and some disagree with the Department of Ecology about how many water rights and of what type they were assigned to begin with.

“It gets really murky,” Jackson said.

This was the first time the City Council saw the study, and Jackson was asked to provide more information about how water rights are assigned, and how they can be used.

“We are trying to learn as much about what we have as we possibly can,” Hohman said.