Breaking Down Water Adjudication in Whatcom County
EPISODE 5
What is water adjudication? How will this affect us in Whatcom County? Lately there's been a lot of talk about water rights, water metering, and new laws affecting how you use your water at home from your well. It's a complex topic that still has a lot of gray areas and confusing terminology so that's why we sat down with Dillon Honcoop of Save Family Farming to help demystify some of these concepts for us.
In This Episode:
Intro to Dillon Honcoop and How His Passions of Farming and Communications Collide
What is Water Adjudication and Why We Should Care About It
Water Rights and The Prioritized List of Properties in Whatcom County
Do You Need an Attorney?
The Affects of This Lawsuit on Our Community
What You Need To Do To Be Prepared For Proof of Your Water Rights
Podcast Episode Transcription
Intro:
Welcome to the (un)covered Podcast, brought to you by Manna Insurance Group, where we pull back the curtain on the insurance industry and provide valuable insights, guidance, and truth so that you can make informed decisions when choosing the right insurance.
Daniel Vander Kooi:
Hey everybody, welcome to the (un)covered podcast. Today I'm here with a good friend of mine, Dillon Honcoop. Dillon, welcome to the show.
Dillon Honcoop:
Thanks for having me here. Right here in your office.
Daniel Vander Kooi:
Right here in my office. It works out pretty handy here. Dillon and I have grown up together. Went to grade school together, graduated together, and then Dillon, you headed over to Trinity Western University across the line, communications degree. Maybe just share a little bit about your background, what you've had going on in the last man 20 years now, right?
Dillon Honcoop:
Yeah. Well, growing up around here, it's not that surprising to hear that I grew up on a farm. My dad was a red raspberry grower. Both sets of grandparents were dairy, so those are the big local crops. And then, yeah, I got my communications degree, but still had that farming in my blood. Worked in local media for 12 years at Cascade Radio Group.
Daniel Vander Kooi:
So this is really uncomfortable for you to be in front of a microphone.
Dillon Honcoop:
Yeah, no, sadly, I'm quite used to it now. I wasn't at the time. I remember when I started back in '06, my senior year, I started at the radio station and yeah, after that time I learned a lot about how the media game works and just it is a game, and how people understand issues, and how they communicate about them and how things become big issues or controversies between being a reporter and then an anchor, then a news director, and then I was a talk show host on top of that, just ran the gamut until I was in management at the station.
So in 2017, I had the opportunity to jump to my current job with Save Family Farming, where I could bring those worlds together. The farming world that I grew up in and then in the media public communication realm and marry those in a job that is just exactly my passion. Communicating about that world and helping folks who are no longer connected with that world maybe than their family was, or their parents or grandparents maybe had connections to farming they don't, and helping to communicate the realities facing farming in Washington State in a way that's relevant to them and is entertaining and helps change the landscape as far as what the public thinks.
Daniel Vander Kooi:
Well, and even part of that role that you have now is you have your own podcast, correct?
Dillon Honcoop:
That's right.
Daniel Vander Kooi:
Where can people find that? What's it called?
Dillon Honcoop:
It's called the Real Food Real People podcast. You can find it on the podcast platforms of your preference. I try to keep it on as many as possible and realfoodrealpeople.org is the website for that as well. So yeah, that's part of my job. It's really all about capturing the real stories of people growing our food in Washington State and being able to show that they're real people too, because that's been part of the disconnect with people not connected with the farm anymore. The perception is our food comes from a big machine and that's just not the reality, at least here in Washington State for people to understand it's families growing food here.
Daniel Vander Kooi:
Well, and even I think that's for us, we've connected over the years. Two is background with my family, my grandpa's small dairy farm and leasing land to dairy farmers and potato farmers and everything, and it is a cool way I still feel a little connected to that industry. It always holds a special place in my heart growing up, bucking bales and learning how to drive the old Massey tractor when I was five years old and listened to Dave Niehaus on the radio down in there. But reason I wanted to have you on today is there's, especially I feel like the ag industry, they've had a lot of battles they've been fighting right now in our state. And I think a lot of times people don't understand the impact that it's going to eventually have on them down the road, but a lot of it starts in the ag industry and the one thing we keep hearing over, and over, and over is this whole term water adjudication. And to be honest, sometimes it's a bit over my head.
Dillon Honcoop:
Same man, same.
Daniel Vander Kooi:
And so that's why I thought at least you're a communicator, so hopefully you can help point us in the right direction. Our whole goal with this podcast is whether we had Brent from Charlie's Auto Body on or Sam Roth from ServiceMaster, Justin from Millennium Brokerage, group of life insurance, long-term care, retirement planning. Our whole point is just to help educate people. There's no hidden agenda behind it. We just want to, actually, this is the reality. You might hear all these things or read stuff online, but this is from real people, Your Real People, Real Food. This is real people going through real scenarios, dealing with this, and that's why I wanted to have you on today because there's water adjudication, there's been all this talk is our wells going to be metered, water rights stuff, all these different things going on that I'd love to tackle for about 20, 25 minutes today with you and dive into it. So can you explain a little bit what water adjudication and that process is?
Dillon Honcoop:
And that's where, you say, well, it's a little bit over my head. Same for me. It is over my head oftentimes too, and when this all came about... Honestly, adjudication was a term that I'd heard years ago as a possibility here, considering some of the long-time struggles that we've had with water and more specifically water rights and the legal side of who has the right to use what water when. Overlaid and a big part of this whole picture is how it's overlaid with salmon and our streams, water quality and water quantity and what that means to our larger community, our local tribal communities, everybody who's connected to the Nooksack River in this basin where-
Daniel Vander Kooi:
Which is a ton of people.
Dillon Honcoop:
It is, it's a lot. So I had heard about that. I didn't really know what it meant, and I believe, I hope I don't get this year, I think it was in 2020 when suddenly the State Department of Ecology said, "No, we're working towards doing this in Whatcom County.
And suddenly it was like, "Okay, we were working on various other advocacy issues." It's like, "Stop the presses. We got to figure out what are we doing here?" There were people who have been involved in this for a long time. Farmers like Marty Maberry, Henry Bierlink at the Ag Water Board. Fred Likkel, the executive director of Whatcom Family Farmers that I work very closely with as Whatcom Family Farmers, by the way, is a chapter or a connected organization with Save Family Farming that I work for. And so for me, at that point I was like, I had to learn what is this thing? What does it really mean? And essentially what it is to distill it down, it's taken me a long time to get to the point where I can explain it this way, but it is a lawsuit where the state of Washington and specifically the Department of Ecology sues everybody in the Nooksack Basin that uses water.
And you're like, "Oh, timeout." Yeah, that's everybody. Now, if you live in a city and your water comes from the city, then the city has to deal with that. Ultimately, it could impact you in terms of tax dollars and utility bills and things like that, because they're going to have legal bills and all these things. For private well owners, it's really scary because it’s unclear what all it will mean for them, but they have a well, they use water. And certainly for agriculture it's very scary as well, because agriculture relies on water to grow food here locally. So what is that going to mean? Of course, the purported goal of it is to protect the water in the Nooksack River and have that be connected to restoring salmon. Chinook salmon are struggling in the river. Other species aren't necessarily at all, but chinook salmon are their endangered species listed.
So that's what it is. It's a lawsuit to say you need to prove that you have the right to use the water that you're using. And in the process of doing that, the bigger picture for ecology is to then, through this adjudication, develop a list of everybody who has a right to use water, know how much water they're supposed to use, and then most importantly to them, because of how western water law works, determine where they are in a priority list based on seniority on time. So who has the oldest water right, who has the newest water right, and where does everyone line up in between? Because the way that water rights work in the west generally and very specifically here in Washington State is you need to, if your water use is somehow impacting somebody else, back in the day they had to figure this out, the old days of like, well, not everybody can just... What if somebody at the end of the stream, or ditch, or whatever runs out of water the way they did it in the old days, that's not fair.
So if the most junior person on the list, lowest on that priority list is affecting somebody else, or if somebody higher on the list doesn't have enough water, people on the list lower in seniority than them have to shut their water off until that senior water right on the list is no longer impaired as they say.
Daniel Vander Kooi:
How can you actually figure that out? Is it possible or is it just a crock?
Dillon Honcoop:
It's possible, it's incredibly complicated and it will involve... Again, the starting point here, it's a lawsuit, so it will be hashed out in front of a judge. And so yeah, there are some things that probably ultimately you could never say for sure, other than a judge is going to have to decide, "Okay, this is your priority date, so this is where you are on the list of seniority. This is where you're supposed to be taking your water from. This is how much water you're supposed to be taking." The idea is you have a whole list of that and then the state can do more enforcement once they have that all lined out to determine who should be using water and who shouldn't.
Daniel Vander Kooi:
So again, all of a sudden it becomes the state's decision on who gets priority or who gets access.
Dillon Honcoop:
Yeah, who-
Daniel Vander Kooi:
Okay, so let's take it for instance, we were just in the process with some family property looking back at stuff and we have a water claim, not a water right, I learned all this in the last year.
Dillon Honcoop:
Yeah, it's crazy that this is all different terms.
Daniel Vander Kooi:
We have a water claim dating back to 1974 on a piece of ag property.
Dillon Honcoop:
Which isn't very old in terms of seniority around here, believe it or not.
Daniel Vander Kooi:
And so by having a claim versus a right, it actually depreciated the value of the land because of this adjudication process going on. We had an appraisal come in originally compared to a bunch of other lands or other properties, but then when they compared it to ours, well those all had water rights and there's some other reasons why, floodplains, that kind of stuff too. But a big piece of it, the water adjudication process and whether they could get access depreciated the value of that property quite a bit.
Dillon Honcoop:
Well, it's going to depreciate the value of a lot of the property. That's one of the big questions is what's this going to mean for the tax rolls in Whatcom County when a lot of properties drop in value?
Daniel Vander Kooi:
Well, they just increased mine more than the bank appraisal did.
Dillon Honcoop:
That's a can of worms. I don't think I'm ready.
Daniel Vander Kooi:
Yeah, let's not go there-
Dillon Honcoop:
... moment but yeah, the number that I opened in the mail wasn't a point of being happy either for me. But yeah, a lot of people are going to lose property value, but it's a lot more than that, because it is a lawsuit. People will be getting court summons to defend their water… they have to, again, prove to a judge that, and we can get into what it's going to take to prove that. And it's pretty complicated and that's where things get murky. But regardless of any of that, there is now an open court case connected to that property and that water right.
So what does that mean then for financing? If you want to try to buy a piece of property or sell a piece of property that has an outstanding court case, it becomes a lot more difficult. And it may in some cases, depending on where things are at, you may not be able to buy and sell properties in that situation. Even deeper than that, a lot of farms survive on operating loans. So it's not just buying and selling land, it's year to year. You need to have the operating capital, you have to have a line of credit. What's often the collateral for those loans is your property.
And if suddenly the value of that property has dropped significantly, the kinds of financing that you can get to essentially even out the bumps in cashflow that farming presents highs and lows, you may qualify for a whole lot less than you used to and you may not be able to continue farming the way that you were or farming at all. And this is what we're telling people in the farming community once there is a lawsuit filed against your water and thereby connected to your property.
Daniel Vander Kooi:
So when you're talking about all this stuff with the court case being open, things like that, at what point in time... Do I need to have an attorney looking at this?
Dillon Honcoop:
Possibly.
Daniel Vander Kooi:
Okay so then you look at where interest rates are right now. You look at the economy trending in a certain direction, inflation at record highs. This is just becoming more and more of a burden on the people that's being put on us by our state. And there's no way around this, huh? Because even when I first heard about this is I said, I've heard the term that they're going to meter our wells, and so I was like, "Well, screw that. I'm not going to... It's my property, it's my land." And I think that's the biggest thing that frustrates me is, and there's probably a lot of people that agree with me about it and probably a lot of people that don't, but it's like, do you even really own your land anymore because I paid for that. I pay taxes on it every year that have gone have over tripled since when I bought the property and now it is just one thing after another. The hits just keep on coming. And are other states doing this or is this just our lovely state of Washington that's impacting this right now?
Dillon Honcoop:
Well, this particular situation here in the Nooksack Basin only.
Daniel Vander Kooi:
It's just northwest Washington basically.
Dillon Honcoop:
Nooksack Basin only. It will set precedent though for some of the things that have never been decided in a court that will, if this process plays out the way that they're talking about, if they do that, they will decide some things that will affect people across Washington State because of the precedent. But yeah, Washington State previously did this whole process in Yakima, in the Yakima River Basin.
Daniel Vander Kooi:
And did it go through, did everything.
Dillon Honcoop:
It took 42 years to hash it all through a few decades of that were just full on fighting in court. From what I've been told, everything short of physical violence of people so upset and angry about this because it was so difficult to hash out and it pits a neighbor against the neighbor. It pits cities against farming against tribes against the court and the state. Our court system is an adversarial process, and so generally it's dealing with an issue that everybody has to work together on, and that's something that we've been saying in our advocacy. It takes us in the opposite direction of where we should be going, which is collaborating and working together to deal with the water management issues that we do have in this community.
Daniel Vander Kooi:
Because I do feel like there's been a really conscious effort between farmers, communities, tribes, everyone coming together. I've seen a bunch of stream restoration projects. There's just a bunch of stuff. So I drive the county a fair amount visiting clients or shuffling kids from a sport game to sport game or whatever it might be. And I like going God's country, I like taking the back roads and things and all of a sudden you'll just see a little sign pop up, "This restoration project was done by..." And so it feels like there had been a bunch of progress made and now this feels like now we're taking, we took two steps forward. We're taking five steps back.
Dillon Honcoop:
Exactly, because now there's tenuous trust building happening that's allowed that progress to happen. We need more of that to happen and people were learning about each other and getting to trust across communities and across cultures really. And now this is a scenario that yeah, it breaks that trust. It puts people at odds with each other and that's what's really in the big picture to me, the most scary about it. I think the impacts of the actual case could potentially be devastating to our community, but a community that doesn't trust each other that's been at war with each other in a court for decades, that's even worse and that could totally change the whole feel of this small town area that we live.
Daniel Vander Kooi:
And that's one thing. It's interesting, we talk internally a lot and within our leadership teams conflict, I think a lot of times gets a bad rap. Trust me where I'm going here, conflict-
Dillon Honcoop:
No, I agree.
Daniel Vander Kooi:
... can get a bad rap if everyone's in the pursuit of truth and they're okay with what the truth is going to be, conflict can be extremely healthy and it can actually bind you together and strengthen you. But if it's not done in the right way and it gets adversarial like you're talking about and it starts pitting person and people start questioning the other person's intentions behind it, that's where it can destroy things. And all of a sudden you look where there's been so much progress made to try to bring some unity to situations to get to know people. We in a society a lot of times we listen to respond, we don't listen to understand, and so the good Lord gave you two ears in one mouth use it proportionately. We struggle with that a lot of times and all of a sudden now you get into court and you're fighting over something. I'll call it basic, it can be complicated too, but as water where our food comes from, what we need every day and our-
Dillon Honcoop:
Basic needs, food, water, shelter.
Daniel Vander Kooi:
It can mess things up. Okay, so let's turn a corner here. 2024, I was out of town for a work thing, but there was a big meeting I know that I think you guys helped put on with the ag community and just community members could come and learn about it. Out of that meeting, I started seeing all these Facebook posts and social media posts about you need to do this in 2024, you need to do this. I think I called you a week later and was like, "What's going on?" Because we've heard a lot of things about metering water. Our wells are going to get metered.
And again, going back to my thing is like, "Doggone," which maybe it's just Daniel trying to be tough and no reality to it, but what's going... because now I've heard that that's actually not the case. That there are certain people that I've heard of now that are actually privately metering their wells so that they can understand how much they're using, but then it's basically boils down to your water right issue. So we talked about the adjudication, now where are we going and what do we actually have to do, so if we end up in court, how are we properly prepared to attack this, whether it's on our own or we have an attorney with us or whatever it might be?
Dillon Honcoop:
Well, and it goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning, what is an adjudication? At the end of an adjudication, what you have is a seniority list of who is in which order. What do you do then, as I was saying, it's a court case for you to prove where you are on that list, how much water you can use and how much seniority you have? You need to do certain things to be able to prove that in court based on water law, and a lot of that has to do with proving that you have been using water because our state has what's called a relinquishment law, the use it or lose it law. If you have a water right, you have to prove that you've been using that water right and any portion of that water that you haven't been using, the state's going to say, "Okay, you haven't been using that," it's now relinquished back to the state for them to allocate elsewhere. And since they would say this basin is over allocated.
There's more water, paper water as they call it, which is water rights on paper then there is actual physical water. They want to do that to legally balance things out. I understand that, but the process is so damaging and there are other ways to go about this and that's what everyone needs to be thinking about. At the beginning, this was like, "Oh, that's a farmer's issue," and we had been trying to say from the get-go, no, no, no, no, this isn't just-
Daniel Vander Kooi:
It's everybody.
Dillon Honcoop:
... farming, this is everybody. Of course it'll be a huge deal for farming, because farming uses a lot of water to grow food, but everybody, particularly people, like we said earlier, with private property who have a private well in the county, which is a lot of folks in our rural based, especially North County. All those folks need to be clued into this as well. And it's been cool this summer, a lot more people, for whatever reason, things have happened and people started to wake up to the fact that this was going to affect them too, not just the farmers. And that's when we saw a meeting in Ferndale, a standing room only. We had over 300 people at the fairgrounds. A couple of months ago, a meeting that you were talking about educating people about what they need to do to be ready for this court case, ready to receive a summons in the mail, a court summons that says you need to appear in court.
Well, you need to file documents to prove your water right, that will be entered into the court record and you have to appear in court to prove your water right and to be able to maintain what you already have. To some people, and I've felt this way as well, it almost feels like being guilty until proven innocent rather than the other way around. And almost like you're having to prove you have the right to something that you already had. So it's almost like not having it and having to do it all over again. Even if you, and a lot of people think well this is for people who don't have the documents in order, don't have... And there's a whole range of people who never got the right paperwork at all for their wells. People who have some of the correct paperwork, some people who have all the correct paperwork but don't have the documentation that they've been using it.
They're actually talking about going back to historical photos from the '40s to be able to show that water was being used and all this kind of stuff. Even those though that have all the documents, all the documentation of use, everything will still have to prove their right in court. And so people are recognizing when they get that, what am I going to do to prove that? And that's where this metering question comes from and that's been a sticking point for people along going back to the Hearst case, we don't have time to get into that can worms all this stuff with water rights that people have become aware of, particularly private well owners in Whatcom County. And there was the concern that the state was going to force people to put a meter on their well and then restrict them or find them if they were using more than a certain amount.
And to a lot of people, like yourself and myself, that feels intrusive. Feels like the government's going to say, what are they going to do? Come in and shut my water off once I've used over 500 gallons or whatever, and what if they change that number and will I have enough for my family and my garden or there's all these questions. So I get that concern. My understanding and I've asked a lot, because I'm not an expert on this myself, I'm the in-between that's trying to understand this to be able to communicate it in a way that makes sense. I don't know if I'm making any sense.
Daniel Vander Kooi:
No, I'm tracking. You're doing a good job, you're doing a good job, but needing to prove your water use. You actually may want to, and you mentioned hearing about people doing this, you may actually want to meter your well yourself to create that data to show that you have been using X amount of water to be able to keep that amount of water because again, use it or lose it law that we have here in Washington says if you aren't using all of your water, the part that you aren't using the state is going to take that back under their control. So you actually may want to do that. The case itself, to my understanding, isn't going to force people to put meters on their, that could be down the road once they come up with a priority list and all that stuff. That could be an enforcement strategy that ecology uses.
I guess the one silver lining is the case is going to be so long, which is a bad thing ultimately, but in some ways it gives people time to figure some of these things out. And in the near term, in 2024, people will be getting that court summons. They're going to go out in different batches. So not everyone will get them at the same time. And it's like, I think, don't quote me on this, but 20,000 different people that are going to receive mail on this and that will give some information. We're waiting to see. We've been asking the state, "Well, okay, what's the form going to look like that you're going to send people? What's the form that they're going to have to fill out," because you will have to file a court record about your water rights.
So we want to know, okay, what's all the information that that's going to be required? We have a pretty good idea, but we haven't seen the final form yet. And we're certainly going to be communicating with the community about that. Once we get that, be like, "Okay, we got the form now. This is the kind of documents that you need to be pulling together, the kind of data, photos, whatever kind of evidence that you're going to need so you can submit it to the state to protect as much of your water as you can." And really it's beneficial to the entire community the more people engage in that. Because if somebody doesn't respond, if they throw the court summons in the trash, if they don't fill out the application or the filing with the court, all of their water is gone. They will no longer have a water right.
Dillon Honcoop:
That's crazy. I won't even get started on how much mail's been stolen out of my mailbox and all these other things.
Daniel Vander Kooi:
So the key here is you need to start working, you're going to need to find out what documents you need. There are links to-
Dillon Honcoop:
But we don't know that yet, right?
Daniel Vander Kooi:
So I guess that's the question is today, it's a couple of weeks before Christmas here, 2023. What do I start doing now? Is there anything I can do now?
Dillon Honcoop:
Well, a couple of things, and you can go to whatcomfamilyfarmers.org. We've linked a bunch of the info in the whole slideshow from the team of experts that presented at this meeting that we were talking about give some background. It certainly is a lot more beneficial to have heard them explain each slide, but we're trying to provide as much information as we can on the website and also links to other info sheets about this. We do have a pretty good idea of what's going to be required to file, but one of the starting places that they're walking people through is to go to ecology's website. We put pressure on ecology to make all the records available that they have because that's another... They're the ones suing. You want to know what evidence do they have or don't have.
Daniel Vander Kooi:
The burden should be on them, but doesn't feel that way.
Dillon Honcoop:
Well, and they would say that, well, it is, but do you want to protect your water or do you want to leave that up to a state agency to determine your family's future?
Daniel Vander Kooi:
Dillon-
Dillon Honcoop:
Let's leave that there.
Daniel Vander Kooi:
... I don't want to go down a political thing, but I saw a comment by an elected official in the last week or so on social media. People were complaining about some of this stuff. They were complaining about other things, and he says, "Well, this isn't going to be very popular," you maybe have saw this too, "but the reality is there's only like 30% voter turnout in Whatcom County in this last election." And people are always up in arms about it, but people aren't coming out to vote either. And so how much of some of this policy and stuff gets swayed? Does it have an effect? Is it stuff that in the political realm can be affected by our representatives or is this just how it is?
Dillon Honcoop:
At this point, this case is, it's 99.9% sure that this case will be moving forward. The State Department of Ecology, which is state administration under the governor, has the authority to file a case like this. One of the questions within the last couple of years was, would the legislature, they have the power of the purse so to speak, would they give ecology the funds to do this case, because it's going to take hundreds of millions of dollars over the years to do this. And even in the short term, millions of dollars just to get the case started. So that was a point where we were advocating for, and the county, Whatcom County, was somewhat as well, advocating for the state to also allocate some money toward a collaborative solution, which is what we mentioned Yakima earlier. That's what ended up bringing that community together, because people have fought so hard for so long, they were tired of it.
And a couple of guys, higher ups in between the tribes and the local farming groups and water user groups got together and said, "Hey, wait a second we're people, we have common interests. We live here in the same community. Let's work together. We can figure this out." And they did. It wasn't easy for them, but they worked it out and they made compromise and they reached a settlement that was able to wrap up the case if it would've just stayed in court and they wouldn't have had that conversation over the back of a pickup that led to meetings and some trust building like we were talking about. You need that trust to have the good kind of conflict, which is what they did. They built the trust and then they had the conflict of, well, I need this and you need that and let's hash it out. And then that can be constructive conflict. As you mentioned, obviously you must've been back in the day reading Patrick Lencioni.
Daniel Vander Kooi:
Oh, I love-
Dillon Honcoop:
Five Dysfunctions of a Team and Five Temptations of a CEO and all that kind of stuff.
Daniel Vander Kooi:
The Motive is one of his latest ones. Really good. Yeah, he's phenomenal.
Dillon Honcoop:
But that's what happened there and that's how they were able to get through it, and that's what we would like to see happen here as well.
Daniel Vander Kooi:
Is that still a possibility where we're at and if this goes forward and all these summons go out and everything like that, is it still a possibility to get to that point?
Dillon Honcoop:
Yes, it is. It won't be easy. And in some ways, honestly, it's a long shot, but I still have faith that there is a chance that that could happen. And that's what we need to happen, because we share, we all live on the same landscape. We share so many of the same values across all these various communities that would be and will be pitted against each other in a court case. How about we come together and say, "Okay, you need this, I need this. Let's make the compromises. We need to get the best outcome for everybody rather than an arcane, arduous acrimonious court case that's going to tear people apart, cost hundreds of millions of dollars, both for people having to defend their water rights, private individuals, and for our state government, which we're also paying for. We're paying both sides of this case. How about let's come together and we can accomplish so much more."
The floods of 2021 highlighted so well, a lot of people didn't notice, but the summer right before that was super dry and there were streams that went dry that people, their grandpas had never seen them go dry. It shows the problem that we have here. It's a water management problem. If you look at the 30,000-foot view here, it's a water management issue. We have enough water, we just don't always have it at the right time. Sometimes we have too much, sometimes we don't have enough. A water rights adjudication doesn't legally have any ability to solve that issue.
Daniel Vander Kooi:
To solve a management problem.
Dillon Honcoop:
But a settlement that deals with those issues that are being hashed out in court and an adjudication instead, if they're hashed out as a settlement, then all those other solutions that we need so desperately can be brought in as well to an agreement that people can come together and bring to our government.
Daniel Vander Kooi:
There's so many other rabbit trails I want to go down right now, but we got to wrap things up here, but maybe we'll have to do a part two at some point after the new year. But again, so you had hit on it a little bit earlier, if people want to access resources and whatnot, they can go to the Whatcom Family Farmers website. What's that again?
Dillon Honcoop:
Daniel Vander Kooi:
Whatcomfamilyfarmers.org. And we'll make sure to tag that in the comments section below or in our description here too as a link for that. And you also said head into the Department of Ecology website as well.
Dillon Honcoop:
And in the documents that we've posted, there are some slides and write-ups about how you even go about searching. It's a deep site with all kinds of data on it. How do you find your property? How do you find your record? And once you get it, how do you even know what you're looking at? So that was a lot of the education that happened at that meeting, and some of that information is contained on our website for people to take a look at. We hope to have another educational meeting like that, hopefully as early as possible in 2024. It could be maybe March, we're thinking, and we're hoping it's after the state lets us know exactly what all of the details are that people will have to file their water rights claim to basically have a seat at the table in court.
Daniel Vander Kooi:
Okay, cool. Dillon, thanks so much for your time today. This has been super educational and I hope this helps everybody out there. If you like this, you like this kind of stuff, please like, subscribe, give us a five star review. Go over to Dillon's podcasts and Real Food Real People podcast. Check it out. Give him a five star review. Their podcast is really sweet. I listened to it a fair amount, and you just get to hear stories. And I think that's the thing that's missing in this whole thing we talked about today, is looking into the eyes of somebody else listening to hear their story and understand their story, and then coming together as people and as a community to get better altogether and to be unified in that. And the more division that's created, the farther away we would get from that and recognizing that we're really not that different from one another. And so anyway, thanks for tuning in guys. Have a great week. And Dillon, Merry Christmas.
Dillon Honcoop:
Merry Christmas. Thanks so much for having me.
