DOH Water Source Protection: Defers Review of Potential Creekside Contamination Risks to 2028
- Amy O.
- 13 hours ago
- 4 min read
Why the DOH Response on Creekside's Risk to Drinking Water for 17,000 People Falls Far Short
BLAINE, WA (April 7, 2026): On March 31 and April 2, 2026, Water Planning Matters (WPM) submitted a detailed technical complaint to the Washington State Department of Health Office of Drinking Water (DOH). The filings documented specific source-water protection deficiencies for the Creekside at the Ridge development, a project whose initial 49-acre footprint is just the first phase of an eventual 144-acre, 586-unit master plan proposed inside a Critical Aquifer Recharge Area near Blaine’s municipal wells.
On April 7, 2026, the DOH issued its response.
Summary: The DOH adopted a narrow, deferential posture. The agency did not state whether it evaluated the submitted technical record or made a present risk determination under WAC 246-290-135(1). Instead, the Department shifted the focus to its inability to control local zoning and deferred substantive review of the water system to the next scheduled update cycle in 2028.
Key Facts
Project Scope: An eventual 144-acre, 586-unit development located entirely within a critical aquifer recharge area.
Risk Overlap: Over 25% of the broader project area overlaps the 5-year time-of-travel (TOT) zone for Blaine's Well 9.
Data Omissions: The project's aquifer capture analysis omitted active municipal Wells 4.1 and 8.1.
Agency Response: The April 7 DOH response did not state a risk determination regarding these specific, documented omissions.
Review Deferred: The DOH deferred further review of the Water System Plan to December 2028, pushing safety checks past the date of planned land disturbance.
Answering a Different Question
The WPM filings did not ask the DOH to take over land-use control or stop the project on zoning grounds. They asked a much narrower question squarely within DOH's authority:
Does the City of Blaine, as the regulated water purveyor, have a technically adequate source-water protection record for Creekside right now?
Director Holly Myers’s April 7 letter says almost nothing about whether Blaine's wells face a present risk. Instead, it emphasizes that DOH "does not have authority" to compel a developer or local planning agency to run a specific transport model, redesign the project, or halt work [Ex. DOH Response Letter, p. 2–3, 2026].
While it is true that DOH is not a land-use board, those assertions answer a question that was not asked. By framing its response around what it cannot order local developers to do, the Department left the real question about the purveyor's source-water safety hanging.
The request for review does not ask the Auditor to decide the land-use merits of the Creekside project. It asks for review of how the City responded to a separate state health petition concerning potential risks to Blaine’s drinking-water supply.
The Tools DOH Chose Not to Use
The administrative code is straightforward. Under WAC 246-290-135(1), the Department may require monitoring and controls if it determines a potential risk exists to the water quality of a source.
The DOH letter acknowledges the existence of this statute but never states whether the agency actually reviewed the Creekside-specific transport omissions, the missing wells, or the conflicting soils data. Consequently, it never states whether it reached a conclusion about a potential risk to Blaine's municipal wells.
The law provides the DOH with the necessary tools, but the agency's response chose not to say whether it even picked them up. The DOH response does not grapple with any of these physical discrepancies. It treats the mere existence of an approved plan as evidence that the substance of that plan is still sound. When reality on the ground changes or new evidence proves the old model was incompletea true safety regulator updates the model. In this instance, the DOH did not.
The 2028 Deferral: A “Safety Check Later” Strategy
In the Creekside record, the City's own aquifer assessment notes that slightly more than 25% of the broader project area lies within the 5-year time-of-travel zone for Well 9. Given the planned land disturbance and structural fill, contaminants introduced during construction could reach shallow municipal wells within this decade.
Against this backdrop, the DOH points to Blaine's next Water System Plan update, scheduled for December 2028, as the venue for evaluating additional system-wide controls [Ex. DOH Response Letter, p. 4, 2026].
For a development breaking ground inside a 5-year TOT zone, this is not a neutral timeline choice. It is a decision to push the safety review into the exact window when the risk is highest. Deferring review while imminent land disturbance occurs is the regulatory equivalent of checking the parachute after you have already jumped.
Climate Resilience, Deferred Past the Baseline
In 2024, the DOH amended WAC 246-290-100 to require a climate resilience element in Water System Plans for Group A systems, implementing RCW 43.20.310. This is meant to address the exact kind of extreme-weather-driven recharge pathways that Creekside presents in a region increasingly impacted by atmospheric rivers.
Yet, the DOH treats climate resilience as something to be handled with the 2028 update. By then, the initial 49 acres in question—and potentially much more of the eventual 144-acre footprint—will likely have been cleared, graded, and built out.
Climate resilience planning after a forested recharge area is gone is not resilience; it is a post-mortem. You cannot measure the vulnerability of a baseline that no longer exists.
Next Steps: The 30-Day Legal Clock
The DOH's April 7 letter adopted a posture of narrow jurisdiction, deferring to local paperwork, and shifting meaningful review to the 2028 cycle. Crucially, it did not state that it reviewed the technical defects and found no risk; it simply avoided the question.
This is why WPM's next step: filing a Petition for Declaratory Order under RCW 34.05.240 is legally vital. This petition forces the DOH, within a strict 30-day window, to either issue a formal interpretation on the record or explain in writing exactly why it refuses to do so.
At that point, the "narrow jurisdiction, defer to later" approach stops being an administrative style choice and becomes a legally reviewable policy position. Read our reply to DOH Here
