State water laws allow Ecology to require metering of water use. Metering is currently required for all new water rights and all new changes to water rights. Ecology was recently sued by a number of environmental and fisheries protection groups for not aggressively using metering to measure water use. A judge agreed to this assertion and as a result, Ecology committed to set up a metering program which measures 80% of water use in 16 watersheds where fish were threatened and water was sometimes scarce. The Quilcene-Snow Watershed was one of the 16. Ecology is currently working with a number of water users in the area to install these meters.
Additional metering of water, above what is described above for the Quilcene-Snow Watershed is not immediately anticipated. Water management discussions to date related to the instream flow rule and/or watershed planning have begun to explore the possibility of additional metering, either as a voluntary approach or a regulatory requirement. No new decisions have been made...