A two-year agreement that will provide Airway Heights with up to 2,900 gallons of Spokane water every minute will be considered by the Spokane City Council on Monday.
Airway Heights has been using Spokane’s water supply exclusively since June of last year after the U.S. Air Force informed the city the water table had been contaminated with potentially dangerous chemicals used in firefighting materials on Fairchild Air Force Base.
Airway Heights had been buying water under the terms of a deal negotiated in 1984 to provide emergency supplies.
That agreement did not limit the amount of water Airway Heights could purchase, nor did it require the city to make efforts to conserve the water they were buying.
The new agreement does both of those things, and could serve as a template for future water agreements with other communities, such as Medical Lake, which have expressed interest in buying Spokane’s water, said City Councilman Breean Beggs.
“It’s going to take us a while to get the situation fixed,” Anderson said.
“This is basically just a short term, limited period of time agreement to purchase additional water from the city.” Airway Heights purchases its water from Spokane at a wholesale rate charged to out-of-city customers.
Neither the city of Spokane nor Airway Heights could immediately provide a figure for how much water the city has purchased since the beginning of that agreement, but Spokane officials have said the city routinely buys about 92 million gallons per year for seasonal use.
That could include digging new wells, more permanent filters or some other option, but Anderson said Airway Heights is not interested in exclusively relying on Spokane water permanently.
Beggs said after the immediate need for Airway Heights is addressed, he plans to bring forward a city law that will govern future water agreements with surrounding cities sometime this spring.