Like many places, the citizens of Whatcom County and the nearby tribal governments, the Lummi Nation and the Nooksack Indian Tribe, rely on access to clean water. According to the Environmental Working Group's Tap Water Database, the water quality in the cities of Bellingham, Ferndale, and Lynden is easily in compliance with federal standards as of now, although all have several chemicals with concentrations above the EWG's own guidelines. In these places, the only violation of water regulations this author could find was a Clean Water Act violation by a Darigold plant in Lynden.
Interestingly, the Group does not seem to have information about the local tribal jurisdictions' water quality, which is instead located on tribal websites. The Nooksack Tribe seems to indicate that their water is in compliance with federal standards. Looking at the information provided by the Lummi provides a more complicated picture. In their tap water, levels of pollutants are in compliance with federal law. Among local bodies of water, for which the Lummi have their own standards and monitoring system, many places have amounts of bacteria, oxygen levels, temperatures, or acidity in violation of tribal standards.
The data from the Lummi point to a broader reality in the region: safe tap water is not the greatest water-related challenge. Rather, the greatest challenge in water distribution is making sure all residents in the region have enough. Whatcom County's population is growing quickly, with a projected increase of almost 70,000 people over the next two decades, all of whom will need water. Copious amounts of water are also needed for farming, which is put in jeopardy by a lack of clarity regarding water rights. Finally, wildlife such as salmon need to have an adequate amount and quality of water, which human overuse could jeopardize. Unfortunately, on top of population growth, climate change is complicating the situation. Less snowmelt and glacier runoff mean significantly less water for streams, which in turn means the water that remains will be warmer and lower in oxygen, threatening fish populations.
Some of these issues are supposed to be resolved in the courts through a complicated process known as "adjudication." According to Washington State's Department of Ecology, through this process, Whatcom County's Superior Court "will make a decision that lists water uses in priority (old to new), including where and how much water is legal on each parcel of land." The completion of the adjudication process seeks to clarify water rights and prevent overuse as supplies become increasingly constrained in decades to come. This is an especially slow process — a similar situation in Washington's Yakima Basin took 42 years to resolve.
Alongside adjudication, a variety of local, state, and tribal governments work together through a body known as a Watershed Management Board to manage water resources that must be shared throughout the region. The WMB and its predecessor organizations have been involved in water planning in the region since 1998, however, the website is unclear about what actual results this process has yielded. In a recent article, two community members argue such a lack of results has been a frequent occurrence for the Board as a whole, criticizing the failure of their abundance of meetings to lead to substantial action.
When something as essential and versatile as water is in short supply, it is unsurprising that it would be contentious, particularly when small businesses and tribal rights are also on the line. At the very least, all parties seem to agree on the need for collaboration to sort out water rights in a timely manner, even if the process by which that collaboration should happen is disputed. Hopefully, this shared recognition of the need for results can lead to such results actually happening, and hopefully, those results distribute the region's water resources in a reasonably just manner.