Brand-new Edmonds school remains empty due to water dispute

Edmonds students won’t be starting in their brand-new Madrona K-8 School in September; instead they will be heading about 15 minutes away to the former Alderwood Middle School in Lynnwood — all because of a water dispute.

Edmonds’ Olympic View Water and Sewer District stated to KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson that it will not provide water to the school because of a disagreement over the testing of wells.

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“We entered into an agreement with the school and the City of Edmonds that said that we were not going to provide water to the site until an agreement had been reached on how they were going to monitor and test the water that goes into these wells that goes into our water,” explained Olympic View General Manager Lynne Danielson.

Danielson said that the wells are 80-120 feet deep in the water district’s 10-year wellhead protection area. The water in the protection area flows into Deer Creek, which Danielson said provides nearly a third of Olympic View’s water.

The school had worked with City of Edmonds on permitting during 2014 and 2015, but according to Danielson, “Olympic Water was never contacted.”

“Our hydro-geologist believes that what they’re doing does not meet the state rules as far as protection of the groundwater sources,” she said.

When Dori asked what the odds were that the school’s current water system would contaminate Olympic’s aquifer, Danielson said that she could not give the specific odds.

She did say, however, that Olympic Water would be fine with providing water to the school — as long as the school agrees to regularly test the water that it puts into the ground and put in two additional monitoring wells at about $50,000 to $60,000 each. Danielson noted that the school still needs to drill 13 more wells.

“What we do know is what we’re requesting,” she said. “What we’re requesting … is additional testing to the tune of eight tests a year for the first three years.”

According to Danielson, the district does not want to conduct the requested tests. She noted that the tests cost roughly $500 to $600 each.

The entire problem, Danielson said, is that the water district has been left out of the conversation between the school district and the city.

“We’ve tried everything we can to enter into the negotiations,” she said.

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