County offers literal bail-out?

Another story in today's Daily Record about the Upper County well moratorium, which the county precipitated in the summer of 2009 by insisting on supporting developers who were abusing the exempt well option¹.

I'm afraid not much has changed since 2009: In published statements the county seems willfully unaware that the state, three counties, and the Yakama Nation have important interests when it comes to Yakima River flows. The county continues to equate real estate development with economic development (Paul Jewell is quoted in the article: "...this is costing the community jobs and is costing us lost opportunities for much-needed economic development.")

My favorite part of the article is the "centerpiece of the county's ideas," a domestic water reserve program. The idea is that the county will buy water rights in order to allow developers to offset new wells -- an almost literal bail-out of the developers who got us into this mess in the first place. Why should the county do this?

The county needs to do a better job of explaining the economic benefit of the Upper County development proposals. It needs to a much better job of reassuring us that county commissioners are not simply doing the bidding of their very large campaign contributors. And they need to get a clue about what real economic development means.

Footnotes:

¹For more on the well moratorium, see my Well Moratorium Summary.