Well Water and Water Rights in Kittitas County, Washington

How a comprehensive-plan lawsuit turned into a multi-year building-permit freeze

The chain of events starts with a challenge to Kittitas County's comprehensive plan and development code before the Eastern Washington Growth Management Hearings Board, which found several provisions noncompliant with the Growth Management Act -- including failures related to rural and agricultural densities and uses, zoning techniques, land use near airports, and, centrally, water resources. When the case reached the Washington Supreme Court in 2011, the justices specifically addressed the county's reliance on permit-exempt wells: the record showed evidence of water shortages in the county and subdivision applications that effectively evaded RCW 90.44.050's groundwater permitting requirement by structuring developments around multiple exempt wells rather than obtaining an actual water right for the project as a whole. The court held that a county comprehensive plan cannot permit this kind of evasion.

The consequences were not abstract. Because the county's development regulations were found noncompliant, parts of Kittitas County effectively stopped processing building permits for roughly six years, with the area specifically around Ellensburg affected for roughly four-and-a-half years. For a county built substantially around Ellensburg's growth and the broader Kittitas Valley's rural land market, a multi-year building-permit freeze of this scale is a genuinely significant historical event -- and it's the direct reason the county now treats water-availability documentation with real rigor rather than routine exempt-well reliance.

The parallel 2009-2014 groundwater moratorium

Separately but related, the Washington Department of Ecology grew concerned that unrestricted exempt-well drilling by landowners and developers in Upper Kittitas County was affecting the ability of senior water-right holders to receive the surface water they were legally entitled to under the Yakima River Basin's prior-appropriation system. Nearly 3,000 exempt wells had already been drilled in the lead-up to formal state action. When negotiations between Kittitas County and Ecology broke down in 2009, Ecology imposed a groundwater withdrawal moratorium across Upper Kittitas County -- a freeze that remained in place for five years, until 2014.

What this means for a new well today

The Yakima River Drainage Basin, which covers the majority of Kittitas County, remains fully appropriated -- meaning there is simply no water legally available for new appropriations under the ordinary state permitting process. Getting a building permit tied to a new well anywhere in this portion of the county requires proving water is available not just physically (a well can be drilled and will produce water) but legally (the withdrawal won't impair an existing senior water right). Kittitas County's regulations require new water uses connected to county development permits to be mitigated against the basin's Total Water Supply Available -- in practice, typically through purchasing or transferring senior water rights, or participating in an available water bank -- and this mitigation obligation extends to compensating for the cumulative historical impact of exempt-well development in the county going all the way back to the 1945 state groundwater code.

1. Before purchasing any parcel in the Yakima Basin portion of Kittitas County that would depend on a new well, confirm directly with Kittitas County Public Works and the Department of Ecology whether water is currently, legally available for that specific location -- don't assume a physically viable well site means a legally permittable one.
2. Ask specifically about current water-bank options and mitigation costs, since acquiring senior water rights or water-bank credits is often the practical path to a legal new-well permit here, and pricing and availability change over time.
3. If a parcel already has an existing, legally documented water right or a previously permitted well, confirm the specific terms and any conditions attached to it -- an existing well's legal status doesn't automatically transfer the same way a physical structure would.
4. For land outside the Yakima Basin portion of the county (a smaller share of Kittitas County's total area), confirm which water-rights framework actually applies, since the fully-appropriated-basin constraints described here are specific to the Yakima drainage.