Rural Water Projects Keep Getting Flushed

Will Packwood ever get a sewer, after 30+ years of trying?

Packwood is an unincorporated community here in Lewis County that sits 70+ miles to the east of our main population centers. It was founded as a mining and logging town and now serves as the gateway to White Pass on Mt. Rainier.

When founded, it was called Sulphur Springs for its local, natural mineral water that many once considered medicinal. Today, the residents have a completely different reason to sniff their taps before taking a chug.

At any time, any of the hundreds of outdated septic systems installed throughout the town could fail and leak its contents into the highly permeable soil made up of gravel and coarse sand. From there, it would quickly find its way into the natural aquifer that provides residents with drinking water.

Most of the existing septic systems in the downtown core were installed before 1991, well before current public health rules were in place.

Lewis County’s engineering assessments have documented bacteria, virus, and nitrate contaminants already present in the groundwater, though not yet at levels considered immediately dangerous (but still, gross).

To add insult to injury, once a septic system fails, the home or business owner might have no way to replace or repair it without literally purchasing more property to have enough space suitable for the size of a modern drain field.

A solution was needed, so in the early nineties the idea was first born to plan a sewer.

Enter: 30+ years of bureaucracy.

The Packwood Sewer Project has since been a quagmire, sometimes verging on a boondoggle.

And threaded throughout this entire saga is the fact that not everyone in Packwood agrees a sewer system is the right path forward. Some residents have real concerns about rapid growth and what a new system could mean for the character of the community and their pocketbooks.

With that tension as a backdrop, and after a decade and a half of wrangling, it wasn’t until 2009 that the county was even able to legally authorize a sewer, and only after updating its comprehensive plan.

It would be yet another 12 years before State Rep. Peter Abbarno finally secured $8 million in the capital budget through ARPA funds administered by the Department of Commerce.

By early 2023, Lewis County approved a $3.9 million engineering contract with HDR Engineering and a public engagement plan was drawn up with an ambitious timeline: design through 2024, construction starting early 2025, sewer operational by 2026.

Things were movin’! There were open houses, surveys, and even a 35-member community advisory committee.

But in 2024, before the project could get beyond 60% design completion, the Department of Commerce stopped releasing funds.

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The partial appropriation wasn’t enough to cover the full project and no more money was coming down the pike. The delays led to a missed ARPA obligation deadline which meant money that was on the table is now gone for good.

Fast forward just over a year to an October 2025 Legislative Roundtable, and county staff are faced with telling legislators that the total project cost had more than doubled from the original $13 million estimate to $27 million.

Since then, Lewis County has been seeking $3.35 million to at least close the gap on design costs and right-of-way acquisition.

Going into the 2026 session, county officials made the Packwood sewer their single highest priority capital request. Out of multiple project needs, it was the only one they submitted for this specific funding pool.

But during early 2026 county meetings, another structural roadblock emerged: Public Works flagged the project as “un-auditable” for certain state funding sources.

This is because the county doesn't yet own the land, so state lawyers view funding the design as a 'gift of public funds' to private owners. This triggers a constitutional technicality that effectively treats a public health necessity like a private favor.

In other words, in order for the county to own the site, they need the money, which they can’t get until they own the site.

It’s a nesting doll of catch-22s.

Without filling that gap, they can’t bid out the project, even though there is roughly $10 million banked for the construction phase.

The core absurdity is that we have that $10 million on hand, but we need $3.35 million more in order to unlock it. Millions of dollars are effectively frozen while Packwood’s aquifer continues absorbing decades of undertreated sewage and the project’s price tag continues to rise.

This is how government ends up “overspending”—not because projects are unnecessary, but because broken funding structures force delays, and delays double the cost. Even when we “fund” something, it’s apparently not really funded until more funding comes in.

You can see how easily that snowballs into never-ending projects with ever-growing price tags.

This isn’t just Packwood

The same structural trap is catching rural communities all over the state.

In Starbuck, a town of fewer than 200 people along the Tucannon River in Columbia County, the water system relies on tanks built in 1965 and 1986. The interior coatings need to be replaced and the pipes are leaking.

The town doesn’t have the staff or the budget to navigate the grant applications that would pay for the fix.

Around the state, lots of small communities are struggling to afford these basic services.

In Palouse, population roughly 1,000, a comprehensive wastewater system replacement is estimated at $23 million. In White Salmon (pop. 2,500) and Bingen (pop. 1,000) water and sewer lines need replacing alongside stormwater and salmon habitat issues.

In Wiley City, a city of just 435 people, they’re trying to develop a wastewater system from scratch.

The Washington Department of Ecology received nearly 200 applications for clean water funding this cycle, representing $658 million in infrastructure needs. The department has roughly $303 million to distribute meaning the demand is more than double the supply.

And just as these communities struggle to piece together funding, the federal safety net is fraying.

FEMA’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, which had 27 open projects in Washington totaling $182 million, was abruptly terminated.

USDA Rural Development is operating in an environment of constant uncertainty about whether grants will actually be disbursed.

The Department of Commerce’s Community Development Block Grant program, one of the critical funding tools for rural infrastructure, is fighting for survival as the Trump administration proposes eliminating it.

Making up for any of that at the state level is extremely difficult in this era of massive budget gaps and skyrocketing costs.

The system is the problem

The fact that a nonprofit had to be invented to help rural towns navigate this mess tells you everything.

Partners for Rural Washington is the state’s federally designated Rural Development Council, a small nonprofit based in Garfield, in Whitman County.

What PRWA does is straightforward and, in a functioning system, wouldn’t need to exist. But their executive director, Jody Opheim, describes the work as “doing the impossible.”

They provide free project management, grant writing, and technical assistance to communities that don’t have the staff capacity to chase funding on their own.

Their latest initiative, the PRISTINE Water Initiative, was co-hosted with the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco last November. The premise is that traditional government funding can’t cover the scale of rural water infrastructure needs in Washington, so PRWA is trying to bring in private and philanthropic capital through banks, CDFIs, credit unions, and foundations.

This is an excellent organization filling real gaps in rural infrastructure funding. And, by the way, if Lewis County hasn’t looked into partnering with them, we should really get on that.

But their mere existence shows just how skewed our priorities are.

It’s a big problem when the best minds working on rural water infrastructure in the state have turned to courting private investment to fill the gap that government has left gaping for so long.

Most Americans assume basic infrastructure like water and sewer exists where it needs to and not at the whims of a budget shortfall. These are two of the foundational basics of a modern functioning society.

They’re more important than things like light rail, new ferries, or a fancy roundabout and equally important as things like flood management, access to high speed internet, and emergency services.

Where our wastewater goes and what goes into the water we drink shouldn’t be points of negotiation in the capital budget or subject to fierce competition with other cities.

Because even the money the government does throw our way runs deep with structural bias. Granting agencies want big bang for their buck, so they’ll skip the rural project that serves 500 in favor of the urban system serving 50,000.

That leaves the rest of us to piece together funding from five or six different state and federal sources, each with its own application process, its own deadlines, its own reporting requirements, and its own political vulnerabilities.

When, and if, any single piece falls out, the entire project goes with it, a la the Packwood Sewer Project.

What it comes down to

With state solutions exhausted, the county is now pivoting to federal avenues. They’ve submitted a request through U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell’s office for $20 million of Congressionally Directed Spending and are pursuing EPA Community Grants to try to keep the project viable.

Whether those materialize in the current federal environment is anyone’s guess.

The lesson we need to heed—or will soon learn—is that the cost of prevention is always less than the cost of disaster. Building a sewer system will always be less than the cost of a contaminated aquifer, a public health emergency, or another decade of rising construction costs.

Packwood is a community that was literally named for the quality of its water. It’s a community that showed up to every open house and every advisory committee meeting for thirty years and did their part to try and move this important project forward, even if they didn’t all agree on every detail of the plan.

And then the same bureaucratic limbo that’s affecting so many other communities across Washington took hold.

That’s a tragedy. Because the money exists and the need is clear. And until fixing basic infrastructure becomes a non-negotiable priority that doesn’t require a multi-decade slog through bureaucratic hell, communities like Packwood will keep paying the price.

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