Anonymous billboards are popping up around Spokane making claims about water rate increases and Spokane Valley – Rathdrum Prairie Aquifer stats. Here’s a few quick thoughts.
Photo courtesy of the Spokesman-Review
In case you missed it, the Spokesman-Review reported last week about five new billboards in town criticizing the Spokane City Council and Spokane Mayor Mary Verner for their decisions related to water rates. The two main points of the story were the fact that whoever is responsible for the billboards is and intends to remain anonymous and the political implications associated with these billboards.
The ex journalist in me focused on the major error in editing, which for anyone who has tried to visit the website that they put on the billboards has likely found out themselves, while the Riverkeeper in me focused on the claims they make about the aquifer. First, let me save you the headache. If you type the address they put on the billboards, you are greeted by a “404: Page Not Found” error. This is what I believe you call a #fail. I tried digging on the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality to find where they might have been trying to send people but I was unsuccessful. So here’s a link to a search results page on the Idaho DEQ site for you to investigate yourself.
As for the actual water claims, I checked with a very reliable source who confirmed that the numbers on the billboard are in the right order of magnitude and are as good as one is likely to come up with. The nature of saying doubling and tripling of rates is questionable at best, and the Spokesman pretty much says this without saying it, but the numbers are pretty much accurate. BUT, that’s not the point, and those numbers are meaningless in any discussion about water rates and water use in Spokane As my reliable source points out, “we don’t draw water from the 10 trillion gallons of storage, so the amount of water stored is not relevant to the issue.” We use water from the annual recharge, the “flow though”, and the amount we use effects the flow of the river. The “flow through” is dependent on the season and the amount of snowpack / precipitation for the year. And as I’ve pointed out on this blog in the past, that “flow through” is what maintains the summer river flow. So every gallon we pump from the aquifer in the summer is “robbed” from the river. 
Once again, I feel the need to stress that playing fast and loose with water resource numbers and flying under the assumption that our aquifer is an unlimited resource is just downright idiotic. As I said in July in an op-ed in the Spokesman, “like all resources, water in Spokane is far from unlimited. It’s quite the opposite in fact, and to believe otherwise is both dangerous and wrong.”
