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Editor’s note: Both the Lake Sawyer Advocacy Group and the Covington Water District use data graphs to argue their points about lake levels. Two are presented in the picture slideshow above.
A grassroots group in Black Diamond has accused a local water district of draining Lake Sawyer as it delivers water to its customers, greatly affecting the local environment, the residents, and the city as a whole.
The Lake Sawyer Advocacy Group, an ad hoc committee with the Lake Sawyer Community Club, delivered their case to the Black Diamond City Council during an Oct. 16 meeting.
In short, the group claims that the Covington Water District takes water from Lake Sawyer when it pumps from its 222nd Street wells during the summer months. This causes the lake level to dramatically fall, preventing salmon runs from migrating into the lake as well as recreational lake use.
“… [T]heir actions at 222nd Street are harming not only residents but the city and the entire environment,” Grifan Cayce, a Lake Sawyer resident and member of the committee, told the council.
According to the advocacy group, Lake Sawyer residents noticed water levels began dropping dramatically about a decade ago.
What changed, the group claims, was that the Covington Water District (CWD) entered into an agreement with the Lake Meridian Water District to sell them up to 1.25 million gallons a day during the summer months in 2015.
This allegedly caused lake levels to start dropping sooner and more severely than in the past — June, rather than August — and recover slower. The group said the lake dropped more than 39 inches in 2015, with similar results over the next decade.
Last year, the lake level dropped 43.4 inches, and it didn’t fully recover until December during a flooding event. This also caused the salmon-bearing Covington Creek to be dry for six months, during which there was supposed to be a winter salmon run.
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There are numerous reasons the city should be concerned about the lake levels, Cayce said.
She admitted there are concerns about lake residents’ property values — she said she was aware of two home sales that fell through because of the dry lake bed — and the city’s tax base, which is highly dependent on property taxes.
But there are safety issues as well, including emergency access via the public boat launch during an emergency.
“…There is going to be an event in the coming years of a catastrophic medical event where there is an injury and we have to get lifeboats… in on that boat ramp,” Cayce said. “I have a cousin who was struck by a negligent boater. He lost his leg while in Lake Tapps and had to be removed by double slings between two boats before an airlift for a three-month stay in Harborview. If the lake levels were too low to access that ramp, what would have happened to his life? That’s what I worry about in Lake Sawyer.”
And finally, there are the ecological issues.
“We want to make sure we are sound stewards… of the entire ecosystem that Lake Sawyer creates,” Cayce said.
The Covington Water District has denied that its actions have affected lake levels.
In response to the advocacy’s allegations, CWD published a paper claiming that “extensive research over several decades has found no direct correlation between the production at the 222nd Wellfield and lake levels at Lake Sawyer,” citing several water studies.
General Manager Tom Keown also said in a recent interview that the CWD recently met with the Department of Ecology, and was told their water rights remain “in good standing.”
But residents are worried not just that these issues with the lake will only get worse, as the CWD has extended its agreement with Meridian Lake Water District to sell even more water to them to the tune of 150 million gallons of water from June 1 through Sept. 31.
For comparison, less than 100 million gallons of water was pumped in 2024.
SEARCHING FOR PROOF
The Lake Sawyer Advocacy Group may be new, but lake residents have been gathering data about the lake and the Covington Water District for years, and claim they’ve finally found proof that Lake Sawyer and the 222nd Street well are connected underground, and drawing water from the well during low-precipitation months will lower lake levels.
Expanded water rights in the area were given to the CWD based on a 1990 scientific study called the Hart Crowser report. This report claimed the deepest part of Lake Sawyer was only 25 feet deep, and doesn’t touch the underground well water another 18 feet lower, below an impermeable layer of dense soil.
But the Lake Sawyer Advocacy Group says that study was flawed, and the lake is actually 50 or more feet deep, extending into the well water.
The Hart Crowser report itself leaves open the possibility that the lake and well could be connected.
“[The Department of] Ecology, in their ongoing review of water rights in the area, has considered a possible direct hydraulic connection between the lake and the production wells,” the report reads, noting that “some tests indicate” the two bodies of water are connected. “To date, however, the information is inconclusive.”
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The Lake Sawyer Advocacy Group also presented the city council data that appears to correlate the lake’s water level to CWD’s summer water pumping — “instantaneous effects,” Lauren Landis, another member of the advocacy group, said at the meeting.
She added that the data also shows that when the CWD pumps stopped at some points over the summer of 2024, the lake was able to recharge — before water levels once again dropped when the pumps restarted.
OTHER CAUSES?
The CWD holds that there is no connection between Lake Sawyer water levels and their pumping of the 222nd Street well, and points to several older studies as proof.
In addition to the Hart Crowser report, which “a confined aquifer beneath the lake with limited flow between the two,” another two-year groundwater study conducted in 1971-1973 found “no relation between aquifer being tapped and level of Lake Sawyer.”
More recently, CWD claims that radiocarbon age dating performed in 2023 shows the water in the aquifer is “much older” than the surface water, meaning the two do not mix.
LSAG dismisses this argument, suggesting this claim reflects a poor understanding of radiocarbon testing and the difference between surface water and well water at the bottom of the lake.
Additionally, CWD has presented data that shows it has been pumping far less water from the 222nd Street well between 2010 and 2022 than in previous years. For example, the district was pumping between 1 and 1.25 billions of gallons of water from 222nd Street from 1994 to 2000. That dropped to between half a billion to 1 billion between 2001 – 2013, and then no more than half a billion gallons between 2013 to 2022.
CWD General Manager Keown said that if the lake and the aquifer were connected, there would have been issues with the lake level back in the 1990s.
“If the district used to take two-plus times more water out of the lake, how come we didn’t drain the lake in 1995 or 2010?” Kweon said. “… According to that logic, we would have.”
Presently, the vast majority of water in recent years has been pumped from the Regional Water Supply System (RWSS), owned by Tacoma Water and used by Tacoma Water, the Covington Water District, the City of Kent, and the Lakehaven Water and Sewer District. Presently, more than 1.5 billions of gallons of water comes from this source.
And in regard to the CWD’s agreement with the Lake Meridian Water District, the CWD prioritizes water pumped from the Green River, not the 222nd Street well.
The CWD has said precipitation levels correlate best with lake levels, and has presented data showing that lake levels are highest during or shortly after high rainfall periods, and drop during low periods.
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The Lake Sawyer Advocacy Group says precipitation cannot be the only reason, as seven-plus years of data show that Lake Sawyer’s water level drops significantly more than other lakes in the area during low-precipitation months.
Other causes, the CWD claims, could be drought — “we’ve had a lot of droughts, intensive droughts, over 10-plus years,” Kweon said — other barriers that could cause water levels to drop, like beaver dams or culvert elevation at Lake Sawyer Regional Park, or illegal irrigation; the water district has said 55% of residents on the lake use pumps “without water claims or permits.”
The Lake Sawyer Advocacy Group says the amount of water consumed if all 300-plus Lake Sawyer residents were using illegal irrigation systems 24/7 during the summer months would pale in comparison to the amount pumped by CWD out of the 222nd Street well.
“We know that many factors influence the lake level, and we want to conserve as much water as possible, but in the order of magnitude we know that well draws are the biggest influence of the declining lake level, not irrigation,” Landis said.
NEXT STEPS
The Lake Sawyer Advocacy Group has already moved forward with its next step — securing a grant from the King County Flood Control District to fund a new water study to further prove a connection between the lake and the CWD well.
The study will look at the factors affecting water levels, seasonal flooding, and summer low-water conditions. The study will also evaluate hydrologic processes that control water levels throughout the watershed and pay particular attention to groundwater and surface-water interactions.
Proving a connection could have some major effects.
First, the advocacy group hopes proving this correlation would get the attention of the Department of Ecology and have it re-examine CWD’s water rights.
But proving this connection may potentially change how the CWD treats its water for consumption, Cayce said, because that would mean the ground water extracted by the well is mixed with surface water.
“We don’t have to prove it’s a 50/50 mix. We don’t have to prove anything significant with regard to the mix. We have to prove… one drop of water of connectivity,” Cayce said. “We think it’s going to be a breeze.”
Kweon said there’s no evidence of the water mixing.
“The district was just the recent award winner of the Municipal Water Works Association for the tri-state area,” he said. “… [I]n order to be qualified, your drinking water supply has to have no violations in water quality, as regulated by the Department of Health.”
He added that the groundwater is acidic, and the water district has to add a base to increase the pH levels. However, the lake water tests basic.
The water district has also recommended a new study, but on a larger scale.
“… [W]e have written letters to the city of Black Diamond, King County, the Department of Ecology, [and] the U.S. Geological Survey in the interest of doing a wholistic area study of the… Soos Creek basin, which our well field and the lake reside,” Kweon said.
Cayce said that she hopes her group’s study will help convince CWD to alter its pumping practices and stop using the 222nd pumps in the summer, but said the group is prepared to file a lawsuit if necessary.
“If they don’t come to the table, we will be forced to litigate the issue,” she said. “We don’t want to challenge a water right — that’s protracted litigation. It’s costly, it’s messy, it’s a gnarly business for us… we don’t want to have to do that, but we will.”
Ultimately, Cayce asserted in her comments that this all comes back to a single question: Covington Water District and its Commissioners claim to be committed to stewardship and partnership, but to date their actions are falling short on serving as good stewards to the Lake Sawyer ecosystem.
“When can we expect to see CWD act in good faith as a sound steward to the fragile lake environment and stop pumping at the 222nd Street Wells during the Summer months when they source this water elsewhere?” she said.
DOES THIS EVEN MATTER?
Beyond proving that Lake Sawyer and the aquifer are connected, the Lake Sawyer Advocacy group have another major hurtle to deal with — their findings may not matter.
According to the CWD, state code “does not establish a ‘source limitation’ or ‘minimum level’ for Lake Sawyer,” nor does the “[t]he Department of Ecology… have enforcement authority to restrict District groundwater pumping in order to protect lake levels.”
In short, this means that the water district’s right to pump water is not connected to whether or not the water pumps affect Lake Sawyer, Kweon confirmed.
