This year’s legislative efforts to restore groundwater availability after the Washington Supreme Court’s decision in Whatcom County v. Hirst resulted in a partisan deadlock that also side-lined the state’s $4 billion capital budget. Economic impacts of the deadlock are now estimated to run to $11 billion and cause a $37 billion decrease in the value of undeveloped land,[1] which will dramatically shift property tax burdens to urban areas. Legislative compromise efforts stalled pending the November special election and are now unlikely to resolve these issues without a new set of tools and ideas to bring disparate viewpoints and objectives together.
This new paper by Tom Pors explains how natural resource conflict problems such as the Hirst and Foster decisions can be resolved using recognized ethical principles and shared community values. The ability to resolve a conflict ethically implies that to not resolve the conflict violates these same ethical principles. This is not just a challenge to state lawmakers and the stakeholders who lobby them, it is a comment on the current state of polarizing politics in our nation and state. In both the creation of this state’s water resource conflicts and in the process of avoiding workable compromises, we have sacrificed community moral values and ignored ethical principles. The author contends that in order to change course for the public good, we need to increase our collective awareness of the connection between water availability conflicts and these recognized ethical values. Please read the full paper at this link, or download a pdf here.
[1] “Economic Impact Research of Exempt Wells,” HR2 Research and Analytics and BIAW (Sept. 7, 2017).