Airway Heights is amending its agreement to receive water from the city of Spokane while it pursues the possibility of drilling a new well to help the city’s beleaguered water sources.
Under the amendment approved by Airway Heights City Council at its Feb. 5 meeting, Spokane agrees to allow Airway Heights to pump an additional 250 gallons per minute of supplemental water as needed from its connection at Craig and McFarlane roads. The cities reached an agreement in 2018 to allow Airway Heights to pump an additional short-term emergency water amount up to 1,400 gallons per minute from the connection at Hayford Road and U.S. Highway 2 for up to two years — an arrangement that was increased to 1,500 gpm and extended to June 15, 2026 in October, 2022.
Under the amendment, Airway Heights is to pay a “capacity buy-in charge” of $642,857 within 60 days of execution of the amendment. According to the staff report to council, the charge of “approximately $2,600 per gpm compares favorably to other projects being considered for increasing long term supply.”
The city is also required to perform some minor improvements to the connection at Craig and McFarlane by paying for Spokane’s installation of a flow restrictor along with, at a minimum, verification of the pressure reducing value’s capacity located in the vault.
“The 250 gallons per minute will set us up for the next couple of years in much better shape than we have been,” Airway Heights Public Works Director Kevin Anderson told the council.
Water has been an issue for Airway Heights for decades, stretching back into the early 2000s when it sought to increase its supply through an upgrade of the former Park West Development well on the northeast corner of the Craig Road and State Route 902 intersection. When the well pumps were turned on, the increased pumping capacity led to a severe drawdown of the city of Medical Lake’s well located just across SR 902 to the south along with a drawdown of the Four Lakes Water District’s well a couple miles further south on Craig Road.
The conflict was settled in 2011 when Airway Heights signed an “agreed order” with the state Department of Ecology to phase out use of the Park West well by the middle of 2013. The city subsequently opened a new well at Lundstrom and 21st, and now only uses Park West in an extreme emergency.
In 2017, discovery of contamination from chemicals believed to have been used in firefighting foam at Fairchild Air Force Base led to the shutdown of all of Airway Heights municipal wells, along with many private wells on the West Plains. With the base’s assistance, the city resorted to distributing bottled water to residents until the agreement with Spokane to utilize some of its water supply was reached.
In 2021, Airway Heights applied for a “mitigated water right” to move some of its water rights from the West Plains to near the Spokane River in order to potentially drill a new well near the Seven Mile Natural Area and draw water from the Spokane/ Rathdrum Prairie Aquifer — a geological and hydrogeological different type of aquifer than the portion of the Columbia River Basalt Group aquifer located on the West Plains.
This past March, the city submitted a “mitigated determination of nonsignficance” to state regulators claiming the proposed new well would not have a probable significant adverse impact to the environment near the Spokane River at Seven Mile. The city of Spokane and other local water users submitted challenges to this statement.
Until a determination is made by the state, the city still relies heavily on Spokane for its water supply.
“We’re still having water challenges, and we want to solve those,” Anderson said at the Feb. 5 council meeting. “But what we can do in the short term, with this additional 250, is be in a much better place.”
