I am totally opposed to Crown Columbia Water Resources LCC’s application for an area-wide water permit for water banking in the Columbia River Basin.
Requesting an area-wide water permit for the Columbia River Basin is a new approach to water banking. It would provide Crown Columbia the opportunity to control water resources from the Okanogan Highlands to the Pacific Ocean on the Oregon border. Water rights from the upper reaches of the Columbia River, such as the Methow River basin, would be especially attractive to acquire because they could be sold as mitigation credits for new uses all the way down to the Pacific Ocean. Given how much water they are requesting, and at market rates for water, this proposal could earn the company an estimated $73 million to $364 million per year.
The proposal was originally submitted in 2021. The Washington State Department of Ecology decided that year to place the application on hold. In an email they stated, “We recognize the many issues at stake as we consider all the policy aspects of water banking and the future of water management in Washington. We believe it is in everyone’s best interest to allow time to work with tribes, counties, cities, legislators, and stakeholders to engage in these policy discussions together, before making a decision on this permit application.”
Ecology has studied it, but they have not been able to get state lawmakers to adopt amendments to existing state water laws. The Crown Columbia permit application is thus still on hold.
I would like to go on record against this approach to water management.
The first problem with this proposal is that it takes a finite public resource and puts it into the hands of investment bankers. Crown Columbia was formed in 2015 by Petrus Partners Ltd., based in New York City, which invests in real estate and farmland. About half of Petrus’s investment capital comes from retired partners of Goldman, Sachs, & Co.
Second, according to an article in the Methow News, the company “wants to appropriate public waters from all surface water and groundwater in hydraulic continuity with surface water, within the mainstream or tributary of the Columbia River within Washington State at the instantaneous rate of 49.9 cubic feet per second (cfs) for the purposes of irrigation, domestic and municipal water supply”, Department of Ecology said 49.9 cfs is just below the threshold of 50 cfs that would trigger a SEPA review. Who is going to measure the amount of water that accurately, especially when they are not saying from where they would be withdrawing or transferring the water?
Additionally, there are already water rights allocated within the Basin. Okanogan County Commissioner Andy Hover made local government opinion very clear by saying, “They (Crown Columbia) are trying to grab any and all water rights to put into their portfolio in order to sell it downstream. How can they ask for water out of our basin when we already have junior users whose water rights get curtailed?”
Mary McCrea, a retired water attorney and former chair of the Methow Watershed Foundation, further elaborated local sentiments by stating, “Privatization of water, a public resource, is not something we in the Methow support at all. Crown is a for-profit manager of a public resource. They are speculating using the public’s water.”
The town of Twisp echoes this sentiment. They have had firsthand experience with needing water to fight wildfires threatening their citizens. They also had to go through a years-long effort to restore water rights that were lost due to a legal challenge by a local environmental organization.
The company’s application was filed in 2021. The Department of Ecology put the Crown Columbia Water Resources application on hold in March, 2021, and stated that they would work with the state legislature to resolve objections raised by tribes, counties and municipalities in their comments about the application. To date the state legislature has not passed any of the bills proposed to address those problems, and the application is still “unprocessed”.
Hopefully, this will remain the case and the proposal will not move forward.
Krag Unsoeld is a retired environmental planner, a former educator of incarcerated youth and community activist in Olympia.
For more information go to
https://columbiainsight.org/equity-firms-proposal-would-lock-up-columbia-basin-water-in-washington/
and
https://methowvalleynews.com/2021/03/31/ecology-suspends-work-on-water-banking-proposal/
Be First to Comment