Olympia must support the Whatcom County water users it sued | Opinion

It’s time for Washington state leaders to get real about the costly impacts their decisions are having directly on local communities, including family farms.

A glaring example is Olympia’s recent move to shortchange the more than 30,000 people it sued in Whatcom County over water rights, slashing budgets intended to support those residents and farms as they navigate the state’s water rights adjudication court case.

Despite the fact that the state is legally required to provide support to those it sues in such cases, lawmakers cut over 70% of what Whatcom County requested to cover the costs of managing the case and helping residents file their court claims.

What about the overall state budget shortfall? The answer to lawmakers should be simple: cut something else, and uphold your obligation to Washington citizens who never asked for this burden in the first place.

But the reality is that while lawmakers slashed support for the very Whatcom residents the state itself sued, they fully funded the state’s own Washington Department of Ecology efforts on the case.

State lawmakers’ apparent indifference to Whatcom residents’ and farms’ needs is exactly the posture that the farming community statewide has been experiencing for years. A misguided new farm overtime law that is now hurting the very farmworkers it was supposed to help; a broken promise to shield farming from costly new climate fees; repeated efforts to mandate large, inflexible stream buffers despite farming’s warning that such land grabs would ultimately harm the salmon they aim to protect. And these harmful efforts are on top of many other costly and restrictive rules and regulations that state leaders continue to proliferate.

Olympia’s decision to fully fund its own litigation machine on water rights in Whatcom County, while at the same time reneging on its legal obligation to support its own citizens now in the crosshairs of that effort, is sadly emblematic of the state’s troubling disregard for the residents, businesses and farms groaning under the weight of its demands.

Certainly, state leaders are keenly aware of the pain of so-called ‘unfunded mandates’ and the devastating impacts they can have within government agencies. But will those same leaders continue to turn a blind eye to the unfunded mandates they continue to impose on the residents and the family farms of Washington state?

Dillon Honcoop is communications director for the Everson-based nonprofit Save Family Farming.