Back the work
Grand Coulee under construction, 1936 · U.S. Bureau of Reclamation
A 501(c)(4) civic organization of the working landscape

We stay with it
until it stands.

A working landscape runs on things somebody has to keep — rivers and forests, canals and wires, fields and fleets, mills and districts and the habit of governing yourself. Voices stewards big things, in public.

Read the platform Cases we are carrying →
Live Finish the Columbia Basin Project. In 1943 the nation authorized a million acres of eastern Washington and three canals to water them. Two were built; the third was left on paper, and the 330,000 acres above it have run on a failing aquifer ever since. What is arriving now — demand for firm, clean power and the water that stores it, both of which this basin holds — is what can finally pay to dig it. Read the case → Live Solar that leaves nothing behind. The panels going up across the country will come down, many of them sooner than planned. Most are buried or shredded and shipped abroad today, because no rule says what recycling means. Named in the rules and funded when a project closes, recovery brings their materials home. Read the case →
I Platform

The platform — the positions Voices holds

What we are for

The freedom to work your ground and the health of the country around it are won together.

The systems everything else depends on — watersheds and forests, energy and irrigation, land use and development, and the civic capacity to govern any of it — are visibly failing, and the instruments that exist for doing something about them no longer deliver. The gift is made, the association joined, the campaign funded, the board seat taken, and the needle does not move.

Underneath it is one conflict, not many: each party protecting its own stake and independence, the community needing shared systems that actually work, and, holding the two apart, a settled resignation that nothing can really be done — so the sane move is to look after your own. That is the core conflict of the working landscape. What follows is what this body holds against it.

I The wild, kept by a people who know it Headwaters to tidewater · Forest and fire · Fish and wildlife Read → II Freedom to build is freedom to steward Working lands · Timber and minerals · Energy Read → III What we share, we finish Water, power and lines · Roads, rail and fiber · Main street and settlement Read → IV Tradition renews in the wild Self-government · Conservation and recreation · Teaching and succession Read →
I

The wild, kept by a people who know it

Headwaters to tidewater · Forest and fire · Fish and wildlife

The wild is kept by the people whose lives run through it — who read the snowpack because their season depends on it, who know the stand because they cut and planted it, who know the river because they fish it. Stewardship is a practice before it is a designation, and policy for the wild succeeds by enlarging that practice.

A headwater stream at first light, alpenglow on the peaks.PLATE 01
01
Headwaters to tidewater

One water, one ledger.

Snowpack, aquifer, reservoir, river and estuary are a single system, and we account them on the same books — supply and storage, quality and flow, and the energy carried in water's elevation, together. The region's true reservoir is the snowpack, and it is shrinking as storage; its aquifers were drawn down as bridges that time made permanent; its surface storage holds energy value the books have never counted. Water managed venue by venue — a rate case here, an adjudication there, a cleanup program at the far end — is water managed against itself.

The test is the whole ledger. Any proposal that touches water answers for the entire system it moves through: what it does to the aquifer beneath, the reservoir behind, the reach below, and the estuary at the end. The waters we send to tidewater arrive as clean as the argument we make for them.

Carried inColumbia Basin Project—Read the case in full
Low prescribed fire creeping through pine understory at blue dusk.PLATE 02
02
Forest and fire

Fire is a condition of the forest.

A century of exclusion and a generation of declining harvest loaded the stands, and fire behavior follows stand condition as surely as runoff follows the hydrograph. The forest above the diversion sets the water below it: fuel load and stream flow are one problem, however many agencies it wears.

Manage the stand and you manage the fire. Treat density and fuels at watershed scale, on schedules set by the condition of the land. Carry post-fire recovery at the speed the burned ground requires. And the cost of fire belongs where it originates, on the condition of the land — the ratepayer's bill is for power.

A wild Chinook salmon holding over clean gravel in low last sun.PLATE 03
03
Fish and wildlife

Recovery is led from the river.

A generation of recovery run through the courts has rationed farms, barging and power while the returns stay contested — the same fight renewed every year while the fish wait on the docket. The recoveries that hold are done in the water instead: spawning habitat rebuilt reach by reach, tributaries opened and screened, hatcheries run to purpose, predation and harvest managed honestly, and fish carried back above the old blockages by the people of the river themselves, as the upper river's own effort is now proving. That work earns a peace litigation never has, and it is done by people whose living the same river carries.

The same principle carries to the uplands. Big game, sage grouse and the connectivity between them are habitat questions, and habitat is built by the landowners, sportsmen and range managers who hold the ground.

II

Freedom to build is freedom to steward

Working lands · Timber and minerals · Energy

The steward and the operator are the same person. The farm, the mill, the mine and the generator are how the landscape is held — by someone with a reason to hold it well.

Wheat stubble and a cedar fence line in muted last light.PLATE 04
04
Working lands

Set the outcome, and leave the practice to the operator.

The water quality, the soil, the habitat measure: say what has to be achieved, then let the person carrying the risk find the way there. Operators improve on outcome standards, because their ground is their capital; a practice written into rule is frozen at the moment of its drafting.

Certainty in water rights and land tenure is the precondition of every investment stewardship requires — sure of the right, the operator builds; and a rule that can make a felon of a paperwork error is survived, at best.

Decked sawlogs at a forest landing at first light.PLATE 05
05
Timber and minerals

A standing mill is forest policy.

The region's materials — cut, mined and recovered — are one supply, and the capacity to work them close to the ground is what makes stewardship affordable. Restoration runs on harvest economics: the mill pays for the thinning, and the mill radius is the treatment radius. What the mill is to the forest, the processor is to the ore. The build-out ahead is made of materials sought on ground people already hold dear, and the region that hosts the extraction should host the processing and the recovery, counted as supply alongside the ore. A solar panel coming off a Western field is ore of the same kind, and the plant that recovers it whole is its mill.

Extraction earns its ground by how it leaves it — reclamation is the standard that earns the next permit, and the operator who meets it should find the permit faster for having met it. The forest health the first commitment requires is purchased here, in the second.

Open the positionClose the position
The full position

Recovered material is supply. Silver, copper and silicon recovered from panels at home are counted wherever federal programs buy, stockpile or allocate critical minerals, and a recovery plant is permitted and taxed as the processor it is. The region that hosts the build-out keeps the capacity to take it apart.

Carried inSolar end-of-life—Read the case in full
A transmission tower crossing a basalt river canyon at deep dusk.PLATE 06
06
Energy

Energy is a yield of the working landscape.

Generation belongs with the working lands — on their structures, along their alignments, in their margins — designed with agriculture, so that the acre yields twice and the operator is a partner from the first drawing. The existing hydropower system is the region's inheritance and its cheapest new capacity: optimized, modernized, and counted at its full value before a single greenfield is claimed.

And the bill lands where the value lands. Rural ratepayers carry no more than the value they receive; every other cost travels home to the policy, the land, or the load that caused it. Large new demand is welcome on one condition met in full: it brings its own supply and pays for the capacity it takes. Generation on the working landscape is approved with its end-of-life arranged and funded, a certified destination named and the fee on the books at close, so the acre is handed back clean.

Open the positionClose the position
The full position

Every rule that says recycling names what recycling is: the whole panel recovered at home, no part landfilled, burned off or smelted abroad, and every shipment recorded to its final destination. The decommissioning estimate, the bond and the reserve are sized to that route. A project that names a certified destination and funds recovery of older panels in its county may elect a faster path, and the ordinary path stays open.

Carried inColumbia Basin Project·Solar end-of-life
III

What we share, we finish

Water, power and lines · Roads, rail and fiber · Main street and settlement

The country is full of systems the nation started and set down half-built — canals authorized and never dug, corridors planned and never wired, towns settled on promises that stopped at the survey stake. Finishing is cheaper than starting, and more honest than abandoning. Priced correctly, the demand arriving on the working landscape right now — for power, for capacity, for ground — is the means of finishing it.

An irrigation canal running full toward dry foothills at last sun.PLATE 07
07
Water, power and lines

Water conveyance is energy storage.

Water held at elevation is charged energy; the reservoirs and canals built to irrigate are also the grid's balance sheet, storing surplus when power is cheap and returning it firm when it is scarce. Storage, generation and transmission are planned as one asset, and the system already half-built is the first place the West looks before it builds new.

The Columbia Basin Project is the standing case. The nation authorized a million acres in 1943, built two-thirds of the system, and left the third canal on paper — 330,000 authorized acres waiting above a failing aquifer for eighty years. The value that finishes it is already inside it: the storage the system holds, counted at last as the energy it is, priced to the demand that needs it, with the premium building the canal. Completion asks no new appropriation. It asks that what was authorized be finished by the wealth the system already stores — and every half-built system in the West is a candidate for the same accounting.

Carried inColumbia Basin Project—Read the case in full
A single rail line through sagebrush basin at dawn.PLATE 08
08
Roads, rail and fiber

Freight cost is a farm cost.

The region's goods move on the mode that fits the distance — short-line rail, river barge and highway run as one system — and its signal moves on fiber built to the same standard at the last mile as the first, because everything now runs on it: the farm's markets, the clinic's records, the school's classroom, the town's chance to keep its children.

Preserve the short lines before they are torn out, maintain the river system that moves a train's load on a fraction of the fuel, build the intermodal points where the modes hand off — and where the market will not carry the trunk, the region's ports and public bodies build it and lease it open, a model this region has already proven and now needs at scale. Connection is infrastructure now, and the wire and the rail are the same promise: distance stops deciding who gets to compete.

A brick main street at dusk, a grain elevator closing its end.PLATE 09
09
Main street and settlement

Build where the systems already reach.

Housing cost is an infrastructure problem before it is a housing problem: served ground is buildable ground, and the region's towns have water, power and road already run to lots that only regulation holds empty. Settlement follows the systems — infill first, the spine extended next — or it pays honestly to extend them.

And because the region hosts the works — the dams, the lines, the corridors, the campuses — the tax base, jobs and civic investment those works generate belong first to the towns that carry them. The same holds for the plants that recover what the build-out leaves behind, and the town that hosts one should know it as a plant that buries nothing. What the region builds should show on its main streets — in the school bond that passes, the hospital wing that opens, the storefront that lights. That return is what makes a host a partner.

Carried inColumbia Basin Project·Solar end-of-life
IV

Tradition renews in the wild

Self-government · Conservation and recreation · Teaching and succession

Tradition on the working landscape is the first chair on a powder morning and the first cast of opening day; the elk camp pitched where the grandfather pitched it; the derby weigh-in, the branding, the ribbon at the county fair. It is one of the country's great economies — the ski hills and marinas, the outfitters and guides, the fly shops and bird festivals that turn the keeping of the country into a living. And it is the country's true school, because nobody ever learned a river from a book. The fourth commitment is the handing-forward, and it renews where the handing has always happened: in the field, in season, in company.

A clapboard community hall at dusk, doors open to warm light.PLATE 10
10
Self-government

The body that holds the asset should answer for it.

This is the American experiment, still running. The region's quiet governments — irrigation and conservation districts, ditch companies, school and fair and hospital boards, compacts, commissions, land and water trusts — are self-government in its original form: neighbors elected at a grange-hall annual meeting, taxing themselves for an asset they can see, delivering every spring.

And it governs well when its reach matches its asset: a watershed crossed by six jurisdictions needs one table, and where systems cross sovereignties, standing arrangements between the governments that hold them — durable, mutual, built to outlast the signers. Strengthen these bodies' authority, their revenue and their bench — because when they hollow out, the asset follows, and the habit of self-government follows the asset.

A pack trail climbing an open hillside in last amber sun.PLATE 11
11
Conservation and recreation

A country is kept by the people who use it.

Public land stays open. Manage it for use, secure easements and river access, and carry hunting and fishing forward as both management tools and inheritance. The people on the trail, the river and the ridgeline are the conservation constituency, and closure teaches only absence. Around that practice stands a working economy the size of any in the region, and a membership layer that does the work no agency reaches: the duck club floods the marsh the flyway depends on; the rod club rebuilds the spawning channel; the trail association clears a hundred miles by hand; the ski patrol trains its candidates on the hill it keeps safe; the birding festival fills the motels the week the cranes come through.

Membership is where stewardship is practiced — obligation chosen, dues paid, the work done in company — and it is worth defending: from the drift that turns working bodies into advocacy shops, from the liability and permitting burdens that price volunteers out of the field, and for its seat as co-author of the decisions its members will carry out by hand. A region is conserved by its members.

An old fence line carried forward on new posts across sagebrush range at dawn.PLATE 12
12
Teaching and succession

Every institution is one turnover from losing what it knows.

The ditch rider who can hear a headgate going wrong before the gauge shows it; the forester who reads a stand at windshield speed; the district manager who carries a water right's whole history in her head — this knowledge is alive. It rides in the truck at daylight, wades the river, walks the burn.

And it is handed forward the way it has always been handed: a kid on the tailgate learning the rotation, a first deer dressed under an uncle's eye, a candidate season on patrol, a 4-H barn, an FFA chapter, two years in the passenger seat before the retirement. Put succession inside every standing body before the vacancy announces it, and put the classroom on the ground it describes. The region that teaches its keeping keeps; the one that assumes it will be remembered is already forgetting.

II Method
How the work is done

Every stuck thing holds two legitimate needs in tension.

A canal that was never dug, a bill that dies every session, a permit six years into review — the block is almost never engineering or money. Two parties each need something real, every road open to them makes one need cost the other, and everyone has settled into the trade. Nobody in that arrangement is wrong. That is what makes it hold.

Our work is to state both needs precisely enough that a third way becomes visible, then carry that way through the offices, sessions and seasons it takes to build. One case at a time.

The Civic Cycle

A person discerns, a community deliberates, a society proves, a culture remembers.

One person carries an idea far enough to make it a project. A community takes the project up and makes it an enterprise; a society, an institution; a culture, a tradition — and tradition is the ground the next idea rises from. Every turn is an elevation. Wider ground, and something handed up at each one.

Those four turns have names — vision, development, integration, renewal — and each runs on three kinds of work done by people who can be named: twelve functions, every one of them somebody's actual job. A case takes up the ones its ground requires and enters wherever it actually stands; a stuck project is stuck at a particular elevation, and the work starts there. Each of the four seats its own table once a year, placed by role and by invitation, and between the tables the case work never stops.

The Civic Cycle, told in full.
01

Vision

Individual · an idea becomes a project

Someone sees the thing that should exist — usually somebody already working the ground it would sit on — and starts saying it out loud before anyone has reason to listen. The work of this phase is to find that person, put a design under the idea so it can survive contact with the ground, and find the means to begin. It ends when the idea has a drawing, a number and somebody willing to sign.

Seated at the Headwaters Council, spring →

From the Civic Cycle film — Vision: salmon eggs glowing in winter water below snow-covered peaks at dusk.
02

Development

Community · a project becomes an enterprise

The project earns the standing to proceed. Consent is gathered where it is owed — from the neighbors, the districts, and the governments whose ground and water it touches — then argued in the open until the region knows what is being asked, and written into an authorization with somebody's name on it. Most good projects die in this phase, and they die quietly, because nobody would spend standing on them early.

Seated at the Cascade Assembly, summer →

From the Civic Cycle film — Development: young salmon beside a snowmelt stream, fry to smolt.
03

Integration

Society · an enterprise becomes an institution

The work gets built, and then it gets kept running. Permits and easements, contracts and crews, a budget line carried session after session, the first delivery and then the second. This is where most of the years go and where most bodies leave — which is why a case is read again here at five years and at ten, against what was promised.

Seated at the Confluence Table, autumn →

From the Civic Cycle film — Integration: adult salmon at sea, carved stone beside a summer river.
04

Renewal

Culture · an institution becomes a tradition

A proof decays if nobody re-wins it. The people who built a thing know why every decision inside it was made; the ones who inherit it get the thing and not the reasons, and begin trading them away without knowing the price. Renewal hands the reasons forward with the asset — in the telling, in the apprenticeship, in the season spent riding along — so the next turnover inherits both.

Seated at the Tides Retreat, winter →

From the Civic Cycle film — Renewal: spawning salmon returned to the autumn river, eggs laid in the gravel.
III Convenings
Four a year

Each of the four turns seats its own table once a year.

Placed by role and by invitation, and between the tables the case work never stops. What leaves each room is a short list with a name against every line, and the proceedings go to the seats.

Headwaters in spring, Cascade in summer, Confluence in autumn, Tides in winter — each reads the cases at the elevation its turn of the cycle holds, and each keeps the record of what it held.

Spring · Water

Headwaters Council

Spring 2026 · Washington, D.C.

A private meeting of the founders — held closed, and reported to the seats rather than the page.

Open the convening → Summer · Working lands

Cascade Assembly

Summer 2026 · Edmonton, Alberta

This season's table was PNWER's — the 35th Annual Summit of the Pacific NorthWest Economic Region, 19–23 July, where Mary Dye spoke among delegates from ten states, provinces and territories. PNWER has convened this region across the border for thirty-five years, and its Legislative Energy Horizon Institute is where Mary studied the continental grid.

Open the convening → Autumn · Built systems

Confluence Table

Autumn 2026

Not seated in 2026.

Open the convening → Winter · Civic capacity

Tides Retreat

Winter · Not yet set

Placed when the year turns.

Open the convening →
IV Cases
What we carry

Every case is a promise somebody can check.

A case is one specific thing this body takes up in public: a public work that stopped, a bill, an approval, a settlement, a project that needs somebody behind it. Each sits under the position it tests. We read each again at five years and at ten, and nothing leaves the list.

A case is in scope wherever a shared system runs, and anyone stewarding one can be seated. A case is taken up whole and carried until it stands, because that is the only way anything gets finished.

A standing concrete canal headgate alone in sagebrush steppe at first light, no channel dug beyond it.
Grand Coulee Dam under construction, 1936. Live Columbia Basin Project The East High Canal and its 330,000 acres, authorized in 1943 and never dug, above an aquifer that has been standing in for the water ever since. Authorized1943Columbia Basin Project Act — 1,029,000 acres, three canals BuiltTwo of threeAbout 670,000 acres watered; the East High left on paper Waiting on it330,000 acresCarried since on deep wells into a failing aquifer Committed to date$237M+State, federal, USDA and landowner bonds, reach by reach Open the caseClose the case
Live

Two of three canals were built.

Under the Columbia Basin Project Act of 1943 the nation set out to water just over a million acres of eastern Washington — 1,029,000 — with three canals off the Columbia, and to pay for the whole system by selling Grand Coulee's electricity. Grand Coulee was built to power it.

Two of the three canals were built. Grand Coulee, Banks Lake, and the West and East Low canals water about 670,000 acres today, roughly two-thirds of the plan. The third canal, the East High, was never built. Its 330,000 acres in the Odessa country remain authorized and classified irrigable, and they have waited for water ever since.

The power revenue meant to build it was long ago committed to other obligations. That is why finishing has always meant finding the money, and why every completion effort since has asked the federal power system for money it no longer has.

West & East Low canals — built 670,000 acres watering now EL 47.5 Complete 2021 EL 86.4 Complete 2025 EL 22.1 Funded · building East High Canal — never dug 330,000 acres · 1.1 million acre-feet · authorized 1943
Solid where the water runs; dashed where it was authorized and never built. Delivery systems as reported in the public record.
What the waiting cost

Deep wells were the bridge, and the aquifer is failing.

Those farms did not wait idle. They drilled deep wells into the Odessa aquifer to bridge the years until the canal came — and the aquifer is now failing. Wells deepen. Some have died. Every foot the water table drops is a well deepened, a pump replaced, or a farm ended, and the towns draw from the same aquifer the farms do.

Washington's Department of Ecology estimates that letting it fail would cost the region 3,600 jobs and $211 million a year in regional income. The canal is what averts that.

ground 1980 2000 today drilled deepened deepened again
Section through the Odessa subarea. Each well follows the water table down until the lift stops paying — or the well dies.
Appropriated, and building

$237 million and counting, reach by reach.

The Odessa Groundwater Replacement Program moves the Basin's deep-well farms onto the Project's surface water, reach by reach — the Project doing, piece by piece, what it was authorized to do. It advances only when a capital budget carries it, which is why it has to be carried session after session by people who are already in the room.

2004 –
Washington State capital budgets, cumulativeProgram-wide — canal capacity, laterals, delivery systems
$126M+
2004 –
U.S. Bureau of ReclamationProgram-wide federal share
$45M+
2022 –
USDA — Natural Resources Conservation ServiceWatershed-plan commitments
$49.4M
—
ECBID landowner-funded municipal bondsDelivery facilities
$16.8M
Total
Committed to date
$237M+
Complete · 2021

EL 47.5

The first delivery system built under the program.

Complete · 2025

EL 86.4

5,426 acres converted and 16 wells retired — 5.3 billion gallons left in the aquifer each year.

Funded · building

EL 22.1

34 wells moved to surface water across 17,000+ acres — twelve miles of pipeline and a canal-scale pump station.

The law moves with the money. House Bill 1752, carried from the basin and passed both chambers in 2024 without a dissenting vote, lets Reclamation modify the Project's water rights so that conserved water serves more acres — the statute the replacement reaches run on.

Why it stopped

The numbers of that moment said no.

The last time the question was studied, the answer was the smaller fix. In 2012 Reclamation completed the Odessa Subarea Special Study, an environmental review of how to rescue the failing aquifer with project water. It weighed a partial East High build — a canal from above Billy Clapp Lake to east of Moses Lake, replacing groundwater acre-for-acre on about 102,600 already-irrigated acres, no new land — against a narrower swap through an enlarged East Low Canal.

It chose the swap. The East High's first reach was analyzed and left unbuilt, and the full 330,000-acre build has never had a modern record at all. Economics made the call: on the numbers of that moment, the full build's benefits did not cover its costs.

The record is still open. Its hydrology, soils and surveys carry forward. The water has not changed — what it is worth has.

What changed

The price of power changed the answer.

Data centers, and the artificial intelligence they run, chase two things they cannot make: firm, carbon-free electricity and the water that stores it. This region holds both — along with canals, lines and last miles the nation left half-built eighty years ago.

Priced right, that demand finishes the work. Power contracts can dig the last canal, water 330,000 authorized acres, let the aquifer refill, and land the return on the main streets that host the works. Priced wrong, gray boxes cover farmland and the value leaves the county at the speed of light.

What was started

What it looked like when the country was building.

Grand Coulee Dam under construction in 1936: cofferdams, trestles and conveyor works spanning the Columbia between excavated abutments.
Plate I
1936
Grand Coulee under construction — built to power the project that would water the acres.
U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. A work of the United States government, in the public domain.
Columbia Basin Project canal construction: draglines cutting the prism, a lined reach running to the horizon, trestles and conveyors working over the grade.
Plate II
1940s
Cutting and lining the canal prism — the two canals that were built, dug by dragline and finished by hand.
U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. A work of the United States government, in the public domain.
Irrigation water surging through a wooden farm check structure into a field ditch, 1940.
Plate III
1940
Water, delivered — what the whole apparatus is for, at the only scale that counts.
Russell Lee for the Farm Security Administration. Library of Congress; public domain.
Grand Coulee Dam and forebay from above, large-format survey photograph, 1996.
Plate IV
1996
The standing work, sixty years on. The third canal is still not there.
Library of Congress, HAER WA-139-A-8; photograph by Jet Lowe.
What we are asking for

Finish it on the value the system already holds.

This is the test the whole platform runs on: the operator's freedom and the system's health, protected by the same move. Surface water on the land ends the rationing the farms have been living under, and it lets the aquifer recover under the towns that drink from it. Nothing here asks for a new federal appropriation.

01 Carry the Odessa record to the reach it already measured. The 2012 study measured that reach and left it unbuilt. Re-price it on the record that still stands; the hydrology and surveys carry forward.
02 Count the storage the Project already holds, and let it build the canal. Banks Lake holds 715,000 acre-feet 280 feet above the river — charged energy, on federal ground, already built. Counted at what firm power is worth to the demand now arriving here, that storage earns a premium, and a premium named inside a power contract builds canal, milestone by milestone, on a schedule the ground can see. What is missing is the entry on the books.
03 Carry the replacement program through every capital budget until the wells are off. The program advances only when a budget carries it. Session by session, with the districts and the federal partners, is how the reaches get built.
04 Build the fleet to leave nothing behind. New solar along the alignment, up to two gigawatts on least-conflict ground, is built with its end-of-life named and funded in the same contract that builds the canal. At published recycling rates that is under one percent of what the solar costs to build, in today's money, and the ground is handed back clean.

On other Western rivers the government now pays farmers to stop farming. On this one, finishing the project asks a fraction of annual abundance — the full East High diversion is roughly half of one percent of what the Columbia carries to the Pacific in an average year — to put authorized land to work.

Water, power and lines →

Where the water comes from

The full diversion is half of one percent of the river.

The Columbia carries close to 200 million acre-feet to the Pacific in an average year. The full East High diversion is about 1.1 million of them, taken in the fall and winter windows the current program already diverts in.

the Columbia, average year · about 200 million acre-feet to the Pacific 1.1 million acre-feet — the full East High diversion
Drawn to scale.
Who carries this case

Michele Kiesz carries this case.

Michele is Executive Director of the Columbia Basin Completion project and chairs the Columbia Basin Development League. She comes from a generational wheat family of the Basin and is based in Moses Lake, and she carries the water-rights, irrigation-governance and federal-program knowledge this case runs on — session by session, with the districts, the state and the federal partners.

Live Columbia Basin Project
Rows of solar panels on steel racks running across sagebrush toward a dry ridge at first light, a fence line and two-track road beside them. Live Solar end-of-life Panels coming off solar fields are buried or shredded and shipped abroad, because no rule says what recycling means. In service279 GWU.S. solar at the end of 2025, with about 44 GW added a year Landfill$69 a tonAverage tipping fee, against $452 to $1,129 a ton to recycle RecyclersAbout 20Three at industrial scale, against more than a thousand landfills Rules naming a standardNoneFour states require recycling at decommissioning, and none says what it means Open the caseClose the case
Live

Every panel that goes up comes down.

About 279 gigawatts of solar were in service across the country at the end of 2025, and about 44 more are added each year. A gigawatt of panels is 50,000 to 70,000 tons of glass, aluminum, copper, silver and silicon, so the fleet already standing runs past 13 million tons.

Much of it is coming down sooner than its owners planned. Federal credits for solar are closing, and the large owners are replacing older fleets while the credit still applies, through 2030. Hail, wind and early module failures add to the volume.

Where each panel goes is its owner's choice, made when the decommissioning contract is let.

Where a panel goes

Four routes, and one keeps the whole panel at home.

A panel can be buried, buried under a hazardous-waste manifest, shredded and shipped abroad, or recycled whole. The two cheapest routes take most panels today.

Landfill about $69 a ton Buried whole the landfill ticket ends the record Hazardous-waste landfill two to five times that Buried whole, in a lined cell destination recorded, nothing recovered Shred and export $400 to $600 a ton Smelted abroad, glass to fill the record can end at the smelter gate Certified whole-panel recycling $452 to $1,129 a ton, 2023 survey Every stream recovered at home a record to final destination
Prices per ton of end-of-life panels: RAND, 2026, for landfill and for recycling from a 2023 survey of recyclers; PedalPoint's published rate for shred and export. A hazardous-waste landfill runs two to five times the solid-waste rate.
What the waiting costs

What leaches stays with the town that took the load.

A landfill that takes panels takes no record of what is in them, and the community that hosts it carries what leaches out after it closes. An intact panel holds its lead in place four to nine times better than a crushed one, and shredding is what crushes it. Lead from crushed panel material has measured nearly twice the federal limit in leach tests. No state in the region bars shredded panel material from a landfill, or from use as fill, road base or cover.

The metals go too. Copper, silver and silicon joined the federal critical-minerals list in November 2025, and solar uses a tenth to a fifth of the world's silver. Panels shredded for export are smelted abroad, and the rest of the panel is burned off to reach the metal.

The cost of a site that leaks does not stop at its gate. Under the federal Superfund law, those who arranged for a hazardous substance to reach a site share the cost of cleaning it up.

Why it stopped

No rule says what recycling means.

A discarded panel counts as hazardous waste only if it fails a federal toxicity test for lead or cadmium, and most pass. In most states that is the only rule. Texas, Maine, North Carolina and New Jersey require recycling when a project comes down and name no standard, so a shredder that ships flake to a smelter abroad satisfies each of them.

A county permits each project on its own. The removal plan names no destination, and the bond is sized to an engineer's estimate that assumes a landfill. An owner books what the rules require, at the price of the cheapest route they allow.

What it costs

Burying a panel costs a fraction of recovering it.

Measured per ton, the landfill wins every bid. The difference is the cost the landfill leaves behind.

RAND: a mandate pays at about $290 Landfill $45 to $138, average $69 Hazardous-waste landfill $138 to $345 Shred and export $400 to $600 Recycling, 2023 survey $452 to $1,129, midpoint $791 $0 $300 $600 $900 $1,200
What an owner pays per ton. RAND, 2026, for landfill, recycling and the mandate threshold, in metric tons; PedalPoint's published rate for shred and export. Ticks mark the landfill average and the recycling midpoint.
What changed

Recovery that keeps the whole panel at home runs now.

On Jan. 31, 2027, every certified electronics recycler that handles panels must meet the certification's solar appendix. Four North American plants are certified for panels alone, and one of them is in Nevada. Lines that recover the whole panel run there now, with the glass, aluminum, copper and silver separated clean and nothing landfilled or burned off.

Priced in at closing, recovery costs a project little and leaves its county nothing to carry. Owners replacing fleets inside the credit window care more about the dates their cranes are booked than about the fee per ton, and a paper trail to final destination is what holds up when the credit is examined.

What we are asking for

Name the standard, and fund it when the project closes.

This is the platform's test again. Solar stays cheap to build and to replace, and the panel's materials come back into use at home. Neither need is traded for the other.

01 Name the standard wherever a rule says recycling. The whole panel recovered at home, no part landfilled, burned off or smelted abroad, and every shipment recorded to its final destination. Held by the recyclers and open to any that meets it, and named in decommissioning rules, owners' bids and the disposition of public panels.
02 Put the leach data in the record. State solid-waste boards see the measurements, and shredded panel material stays out of landfills, fill, road base and cover. Nevada first, with the communities over its landfills heard.
03 Give the faster path to the project that funds recovery. An applicant may elect an expedited path by naming a certified destination for its own panels and funding recovery of older panels in the county. The ordinary path stays open.
04 Count recovered panel metal as domestic supply. Silver, copper and silicon recovered at home qualify as domestic supply wherever federal programs buy, stockpile or allocate critical minerals.

Funded at closing, recovering a 100-megawatt plant's panels at published recycling rates is a few percent of what the plant cost to build, and about one percent in today's money. A plant that pays it hands its ground back clean.

Energy → Timber and minerals →

What we are watching

Six dates set the year ahead.

Each is a rule taking effect, a report coming due or a session opening, and each is a place the standard can be named.

Dec. 1, 2026
Panels barred from unlined landfillsEvery utility-scale owner is already registered with the state
North Carolina
December 2026
Ecology's advisory committee reports on panel take-backThe manufacturers' program is due by 2031
Washington
Jan. 15, 2027
Recyclers' first annual reports to the stateThe first public file of where panels went and what it cost
Texas
Jan. 31, 2027
The solar appendix binds every certified recycler that handles panelsA certificate that no longer tells one route from another
Certification
Feb. 1, 2027
The Legislature convenesCurrent law reaches utility and rooftop systems and leaves independently owned fleets out
Nevada
July 2027
A hazardous-waste analysis before any panel is disposed ofWith a fee on the fleet and a recycling study ahead of rules in 2028
Utah
Live Solar end-of-life
More cases
01

The data-center buildup gets a design standard.

Hyperscale computing has come for the river's power, and in its 2026 session the Washington Legislature began answering the open question — what it looks like, what it leaves behind, who benefits. A bill passed the House 92–2: a state center of excellence to hold the buildup to a design standard — waste heat put to work instead of thrown to the sky, a published water ledger, campuses that bring their own supply and share power with the towns that host them — with its first design challenge named, at the shuttered Tumwater brewery.

It stopped in a Washington Senate committee in March, and it comes back with the 2027 session in January. On the same floor, the session's data-center bill lost its new energy tax by amendment, while the line held that big new load pays for the capacity it takes.

02

A port laid the fiber, and the carriers came.

In 1999 the Port of Whitman, in Washington, asked for the authority to lay telecommunications line; two decades of carriage later the Washington Legislature had extended it to every port in the state, and today more than a dozen carriers ride one open, port-built fiber network — the model the platform names as proven, proven here first.

The same counties hold the state's longest short-line rail system, bought back from abandonment, still moving a fifth of Washington's wheat, and now taking $72.8 million in federal rail funds, matched by $39.2 million state, local and private, to rebuild it end to end. The wire and the rail are one promise kept twice: distance stopped deciding who gets to compete.

03

Local aircraft now fly on a fire in its first hour.

A fire chief in Asotin County, Washington, brought the problem in 2016: when grass fire breaks in rough country, the district that could put an aircraft on it in minutes had to wait on state mobilization while it grew. The bill that fixed it died for seven years.

In 2023 it passed both chambers of the Washington Legislature without a dissenting vote and is law — local and tribal departments now fly on a fire in its first hour, and the state reimburses the cost. The saving shows up in the conflagrations that never happened, which is why we read this one again at five years and at ten.

Bring us one

Most cases reach us from somebody who works the ground.

If a shared work you depend on has stopped, or you are carrying something that answers to a position here and needs a body behind it, that is how a case starts. Tell us what it is and where it stopped.

Tell us what is stuck
V Who we are
Who leads it
Mary Dye
Mary DyePomeroy, Washington
Record
TrainedAgronomist — plant science, University of IdahoTwo years a Peace Corps agriculture educator in Thailand
FarmsThree thousand acres of dryland wheat, PomeroyGround her family has worked for three generations
SeatedWashington House, 9th District, since 2015Six counties of wheat, river and range
CarriesRanking Republican, Environment and EnergyOperating and capital budget committees
Moved$126M in state appropriations, session after sessionBraided into $237M committed to the Odessa program
FoundedVoices, 2026Leads it while she serves

Mary Dye.

She has worked the seam between the field and the statute for forty years, and she leads this body from wheat country.

Mary trained as an agronomist — plant science at the University of Idaho — then spent two years as a Peace Corps agriculture educator in Thailand, building wells and water systems for villages that had none, and came home to Pomeroy, where she and her husband Roger run three thousand acres of dryland wheat on ground her family has worked for three generations. The farm doubles as her laboratory: agronomic practice advanced season by season, where snowpack and the cost of moving grain decide the year.

She wrote policy long before she held office, drafting farm-bill provisions from the growers' side of the table in the 1990s. In 2015 she took the 9th District's seat in the Washington House — six counties of wheat, river and range — where she leads Republicans on Environment and Energy, sits on the committees that write the operating and capital budgets, and studied the continental grid end to end through the Legislative Energy Horizon Institute. The seat put her at the junction where the West's systems meet the state's books, and she has worked that junction ever since.

Her signature work moves the money itself. The Odessa groundwater replacement effort had a study and a purpose; it lacked a way to get paid for, year over year, at the scale of canals. She architected that pathway: state capital appropriations carried session after session — $126 million and counting — braided with Reclamation's federal share, USDA watershed commitments, and the districts' own landowner bonds. $237 million committed to date, delivery system by delivery system, first water already on the ground. She also wrote the statute, passed without a dissenting vote, that lets conserved Project water serve more acres.

The rest of her record reads like the platform. Two of the cases just read are hers. She wrote the law that cools the city streets whose runoff warms salmon water, and when the state sited energy projects over its counties' objections, she wrote the amendments that would have given the region a say — vetoed once, and reintroduced since.

Who carries it
Michele KieszExecutive Director, Columbia Basin Completion project · Moses Lake, Washington
Who carries it
A long plank table and benches standing empty under an old cottonwood, sagebrush country beyond the fence line.

One helm, many hands.

A seat can carry a bill; it cannot convene the people a system depends on. Mary founded Voices for the rest of it — the standing body that seats stewards around cases a single office can only point at, and holds the record season after season. She leads it while she serves, and answers for it here.

This body reaches through its seats. Four tables a year, placed by role and by invitation, seat the operators, district managers, irrigation and conservation boards, port commissioners, tribal and county officials, outfitters and elders whose hands already work the systems. The body is seated in the West and argues a case where its rule is written — in Carson City, Harrisburg or Washington — with the bench sized to the venue. The team behind a case is the people who hold it.

Every case is carried by the people who hold it, with Michele Kiesz serving as Executive Director of our flagship case, the Columbia Basin Completion project. A retained bench works each one — researchers, organizers, legislative and media hands sized to the case — running the method of Intermountain, co-founder Taylor Canfield's firm.

Basin-and-range country from height at the end of night, valley lights far below.
VI Ways in
Two doors

Back the work, or bring us something stuck.

Carried by its cases Back the work Each case is resourced by those it serves. Backing starts with a conversation. Start a conversation → How most cases start Tell us what is stuck A canal, a line, a right, a bill that dies every session. Tell us where it stopped. Bring us one →
Carried by its cases

Back the work.

The work is the tables seated, the cases carried, the record kept season after season. Each case is resourced by those it serves, and the body's running cost is carried with its cases.

Backing starts with a conversation. What it holds open is a standing body at work wherever its cases run, on a horizon of five and ten years.

Start a conversation

Contributions to Voices are not tax-deductible.

A newly planted windbreak of young poplars in tree tubes running out across worked ground.
How most cases start

Tell us what is stuck.

A canal, a transmission line, a water right, a land plan, a bill that dies every session, a project that answers to a position here and needs a body behind it. We take them one at a time, and carry them until they stand.

Seats at the tables are placed by role, by invitation. If you steward something here and think your seat is at one of them, say so below.

What is stuck

Survey stakes and flagging running a staked alignment across sagebrush at dusk, nothing built along it.