— from the Eastsound Water Users Association (EWUA) —
In 2015 EWUA will begin the process of developing our next Water System Plan, which is required by the State Department of Health every 6 years. Foundational to this process is documenting EWUA’s service commitments to insure that
we have the capacity to provide service under peak demand situations.
During the 4th quarter of 2014 EWUA sponsored the Guest House Upgrade Initiative. The program had two goals. First was to accurately identify each living unit served by EWUA, including members with more than one living unit on their property. The second was to provide a reasonable path through which members could upgrade their membership to accommodate a guest house if a guest house was not part of their current membership agreement. You may be aware that this program generated some community debate.
As of the Dec 31, 2014 application deadline the program has stimulated conversations with 140 of the residential members, and generated 72 membership upgrade applications. At the Jan 2015 EWUA Board Meeting, 41 membership upgrade applications were approved for sale to members with existing guest houses. 9 membership up-grade applications were approved for sale to members planning future guest houses. A dozen membership upgrades were approved at no charge to
members that qualified for EWUA’s “grandfathering provisions”. Ten other members found alternativeways of insuring their membership did not require upgrade.
All participating members have been notified that their applications have been approved, and the paperwork required to complete the process is underway.
At the beginning of this process EWUA had 25 memberships designated as capable of supporting a Guest House. After this program that number will be near 100. EWUA now has a more accurate understanding of actual number of living units supported by the water system. This will help insure future system reliability and the accuracy of our Water System Plan. EWUA’s longstanding, State-required Guest House policies are now more consistently applied to all members. The program has also helped members enhance their property value, and will help support a smooth property sale at some
point in the future. Overall, EWUA is pleased with the success of this program and appreciates not only the support from our members but also the dialog that the program stimulated.
It is interesting that some years ago when Ted was running the system I went to him and asked to be sold a guest house membership. I had two rented structures with one membership. At the time no more memberships were available. I told Ted that I didn’t want more water, I was already using the water. I felt that it was in my long term best interest to be in compliance. As it turned out Ted crunched the numbers and when he factored in all the units out of compliance it lowered the ERU’S in the system and he was able to make more memberships available. This is Orcas Island. Being in compliance is a very valuable asset long term. The district was more than generous in its proposal. Now, if we could only merge the sewer and water we would probably have lower total overhead.
I am not an EWUA customer so this doesn’t directly affect me, but I have never been able to understand the logic of the guest house membership.
We have a guest room in the barn that technically would be considered a guest house under EWUA’s guidelines. For that we would need to purchase an additional membership in order to have friends and family come and visit us for 15-20 nights total per year. We have a total of three bedrooms in two structures. But if we’d built our house as a single dwelling with three bedrooms, or even 10 bedrooms, we’d pay only a single membership.
Shouldn’t water costs and planning for future use be based upon potential use, not the number of actual structures that are present on a lot? Or have I overlooked some subtlety in regards to water planning?