The State of Washington is currently under a statewide drought declaration for the fourth straight year.
The trend has stretched back a decade with seven of those years putting the Evergreen State in drier-than-normal conditions.
On Wednesday, the Washington Department of Ecology announced the first steps in creating the Washington Water Future plan, a series of meetings that will inform policy recommendations for the state legislature in 2027.
While drought is an emerging problem on the westside of the state, Central Washington has been dealing with it for decades, according to Jon DuVaney, the director of the Washington State Tree Farm Association.
“It needs to move faster,” DuVaney said, “We’ve already seen a lot of additional damage just beyond what we would expect from a drought as we see a drying climate.”
DuVaney says the summer drought-winter flood cycle that’s becoming more common has destroyed canals and water delivery infrastructure in the Yakima Valley. In the fall of 2025, drought became so bad it ended the farming season weeks early as Ecology restricted surface water use.
“Those shortfalls have gotten harder and harder to manage as there are more demands on our water resources, but also changing climate conditions,” DuVaney said.
Department of Ecology director Casey Sixkiller says that their models show that by 2080, Washington will receive half its annual snowfall, summer droughts will become more persistent, and winter floods will become more frequent, creating a situation where there is “more water when we can’t store it and less water when we need to support fish, farms and communities.”
“Whether you call it climate change or not doesn’t matter,” Sixkiller said, “You are seeing it whether that’s in historic flooding, drought, wildfire, you name it.”
The announcement will launch a set of meetings across different river basins bringing people from various backgrounds who rely on water—whether agriculture, ranching, industrial use, the tech sector, and communities merely trying to provide drinking water to their residents.
It will explore ideas on managing water more carefully, expanding the capacity of storage at reservoirs, and ways to improve reuse.
The announcement was held at the Brightwater CleanWater Treatment facility in Woodinville, where, in addition to the treated water that goes back into the river, water recycling has brought more than a million gallons of water from sewers, cleaning it to 99 percent purity, and sending it for reuse for agriculture and industrial facilities.
“[That’s] taking less water out of the natural system and using what we already have,” Sixkiller said.
There is a desire for new strategies as well. Historically, snowpack serves as a natural reservoir during the winter, slowly releasing water downstream allowing communities to use it and store it as needed.
With the 2025-26 winter as an example, the warmer, drier winter has been the latest example of the futility of that system.
In response, flooding in late fall and early winter has become more common.
According to Ecology, they’ve invested $4.6 million in a trial in Lynden.
The 17,000-person town was tapped out of surface water, so they turned underground, installing two “managed aquifer recharging” systems that capture flood water and store it in the ground. Lynden Mayor Scott Korthuis says one of those systems has shown promise, and the jury is still out on the other.
“There have been fits and starts of this conversation over the last 20 years in our state,” Sixkiller said.
“The set of conversation we’re launching don’t have a preordained outcome. This is not about the state or government coming in and saying this is the solution for you. It really is about bringing people together and having a conversation about what could work.” he continued.
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