Tuesday evening at Whatcom County Council, a hearing on
the formation of four new Watershed Improvement Districts will take place. A
formality, this hearing precedes an upcoming vote by farmer—owners of open
spaces qualified properties on whether to initiate WIDs over themselves, and
join Bellingham, Whatcom County, the tribes, and the PUD as a tax assessing
authority at the table of water negotiations.
In the local world of water rights, quality and quantity,
this is a big development. Water is a big deal, and the prospect of farmers
successfully organizing into a cohesive group is—well, shocking, kind of like a
large brontosauros, waking up and looking long at your stilt house. Maybe the
farmers will change the water game. Maybe not.
Having made a serious effort to understand the water
issues, and participating as a small Whatcom County hobby farmer, I see several
factors.
Funding is a central issue in determining water rules.
Money pays salaries and determines balances of power. City
water managers, contract water managers, expert hydro-geological engineers, soil
conservation regulators, tribal water system managers and lawyers, state and
federal water oversight and grant agencies, NGO socio-environmentalist lobbies
generally can count on funding with generous amounts of not water, but money.
There are some things funding can’t buy, such as children
who work the soil for love of farming, foregoing the relative ease of urban
living. Many big farmers in Whatcom County advise their children to not take on
the increasingly onerous burden of perpetuating the family farm. Out of state
and country corporations and individuals continue to buy up prime Whatcom
County farmland.
Toughing it out, the average Whatcom County Farmer does
not have the luxury of a staff of water experts to secure ditch cleaning
permits, negotiate water rights, argue with Fish and Wildlife Agency activists,
and lobby other recalcitrant government agencies, often staffed by planners who
seem more concerned about their career peer legacies than walking a mile in the
farmers’ shoes.
Then, there are native tribal customs. If you have
opportunity to work in planning sessions with them, tribal leaders can be approachable.
However, there is a huge ring of appointed bureaucrats, activist judges,
government and non-government agency activists who hedge in the tribes, making
finding local solutions a big headache.
If the farmers are not at the table, they will be on the
menu. But do Whatcom farmers want to organize and represent themselves at the
table of water negotiations?
After attending a significant number of farmer meetings,
my observation is that farmers are highly independent, expect their virtues
will protect them from activists, and thus are really not interested in
collective funding or organizing, unless it is within their own crop sector.
Farmers have traditionally kept their heads down and tried to fly under the
radar. Most farmers choose partnerships with marketing boards, co-ops and
corporations who will buy their product in one annual agreement, freeing them
to roam their fields and have coffee with their friends. The people who grow
our food generally avoid us.
Muddying this further are well meaning conservative small
acreage holders. Not farmers themselves, they push back at the aggression of
socio-environmental activists in NGO lobbies and local county agencies. Having
the same adversaries, however, does not guarantee them understanding of, or
standing with their big farmer neighbors.
Some of the Whatcom small acreage people have revived the
state mandated WRIA 1 Water Planning Unit that was sidelined by the “Joint
Water Board” about five years ago.
The Lummi and Nooksack Tribes formally abandoned the
Planning Unit almost from the beginning. Contentious and dragged out legal and
water engineering studies destroyed momentum and farmer interest in the
Planning Unit, giving a cadre of well placed civic water officials the freedom
to move water policy along socio-environmental activist lines.
Unofficially, the tribes and the civic officials have
made a host of decisions behind closed doors. However, as conservative acreage
holders began observing the public meetings of related county and city
agencies, these plans were uncovered and challenged, and a movement to
resurrect the oversight of the Planning Unit took place. Farmers looked at this
with skepticism and open hostility.
Key civic officials scoffed at and sought to sabotage the
Planning Unit revival. And, the Planning Unit advocates have duly noted the
disinterest of the farmers in water rights issues for small acreage holders. On
the other hand, big farm advocacy groups have supported the County appeal
against the recent Futurewise lawsuit over “exempt” residential wells.
So, to sum up—on one side is a host of well funded (by
the taxpayer, in various ways) non food growing “guardians” of water and land,
and on the other side is a ragtag, conflicted band of farmers and small acreage
conservatives.
Enter Watershed Improvement Districts. Central in water
conflict resolution elsewhere in Washington State, Watershed Improvement
Districts in Whatcom County have the legal potential to absorb irrigation and
diking/drainage districts. Assessing a tax, WIDs will have more or less money
to secure grants, and coordinate and carry out projects with other peer
agencies with legal standing, whether county, state, or federal, whether
volunteer or salaried.
Farmers have duly noted the sluggish agency staffers who
soak up irrigation and diking/draining funds, and county administrators who
transfer these funds to other contentious projects outside the initial scope of
the tax assessments. Hence, there is a plan to create a joint WID board,
representing the two existing and four proposed WIDs, and not with county staffing
or administrative service.
What does it mean to improve a watershed? WIDs have a
broader scope of endeavor than irrigation or diking districts. Assuming
watershed responsibilities can be a headache, but has been looked on with
significant favor by state legislators, who have provided very large financial
grants to WID projects in other counties. The key is working out a watershed
improvement plan acceptable to WID members and other entities such as tribes
and cities.
This early October ballot will allow farmland holders in
Whatcom County, whose land is in the “Open Spaces” reduced tax program to
decide to organize as WIDs. In other words, the WIDs are being organized in a
way that gives farmers control of their agenda.
A temporary committee of farmers, framers of the
watershed “boundaries” have modified the initial boundary lines to increase the
chances of the 2/3 approval needed to establish the WIDs. And, votes are based
on acreage, specifically, 2 votes for every 5 acres enrolled in the boundaries.
This “gerrymandering” has been contentious, not only with “yes vote” farmers
who have been excluded, but also with “no vote” farmers who have been excluded.
My informal observation is that the volunteer boundary
committee is pressed to the limit by lack of organizing staff and bare bones
funding, just as the Planning Unit revivalists are struggle as County officials
fund meeting facilitators handsomely, but provide relatively little staff or
funds for Planning Unit members to carry out real life, non-meeting projects.
In other words, “gerrymandering” accusations seem to be
largely fears that the WIDs will be a foe of legitimate Planning Unit
processes, becoming a power center that overshadows the Planning Unit and
further marginalizes rural non farm conservatives on the Planning Unit. Farmers
and Planning Unit conservatives need patience and a servant’s mindset here.
There is no perfect, eternally static balance of power or system of checks and
balances. It is the open hand that undergirds community life. And, the consensus
decision making process of the Planning Unit is onerous and notoriously slow.
What sets apart pretending and legitimate water curators
here? 1) Children. 2) Growing food.
Thirty or fifty years from now, whose children will
manage the water and land resources? Progressive partners have few children.
Farmers’ children don’t stay on the farm. Many tribal children move off the
reservation and out of the boats. Grey headed activists, environmental and
conservative, rarely have their children and grandchildren engaged locally with
them.
Perhaps, the greatest contribution towards good water
policy will be farm sensitive youth living on food producing parcels, who can,
in community and good faith, without endless overlays of urban officials,
negotiate water use rules that provide balanced stewardship of natural
resources.
Who provides food from the land and the water? It is the
tribes and the farmers. Working the soil and the seas are the hard scrabble
trusts that validate water policy expertise.
Maybe the WIDs and tribes can work together to sweep away
the Seattle based, UN/federal agency funded NGO encrustments in Whatcom County,
to model service based, not adversarial driven agreements. Again, the open hand
gets things done. The closed hand destroys.
Maybe the big, local Whatcom farmers will pursue a model
that allows global sales, yet also enables local urban and suburbanites and their
children to again produce value added foods, to balance and preserve farming
with businesses and cash flows, farms not so dependent on bank financing and
government subsidies.
Maybe.
