SWL Community Events-

Town Hall Meeting Notes -from September 19th, 2026

The SWL Communications Committee hosted their first Town Hall meeting for our community on Saturday, September 19th at 10am-12pm at the Clubhouse. The topic was our Water System and HOA Budget/Quarterly Dues

We heard from Deborah Chorlton, our new Water Committee Leader and Brian Elliott, leader of the Budget Committee. Here are some notes and pictures from their briefings. We had 22 in attendance and answered questions from our community. We will be hosting more of these to come and our hope is to have more of our community in attendance. As a reminder, the Communications Committee serves the HOA and acts as advisors to the Board- which means we can answer most questions and any requests made to the Board will be submitted for consideration.

WATER COMMITTEE BRIEFING-

Committee Members were introduced: Deb Chorlton (Leader) Donna Flint (Board oversight) Pete Cutler, Dawn Cutler, Bruce Medlock, Sherry Elliott

Briefing of our Water System – we have 2 working wells (well number 5 and 2) that are located by the firehouse off 80th that our system runs off of. We recently purchased 2 new pumps for our wells so that we can operate from them more efficiently. We have 2 Reservoirs that are located at the top of the hill on Incline. Every house has a water meter that is used to create a water usage efficiency report (WUE) from Northwest Water Systems. Each street has shut off valves in the event work needs to be done on a water line. Some of these shut off valves need to be identified or replaced. Each street has blow off valves, however, it was recently discovered that Thurston County paved over some of these when they serviced our neighborhood. Deborah will be working with the County to see how we can resolve this issue with them. In the meantime, we used the meters at the end of each street to perform the recent system flush.

Management and Lifecycle of our Water System–

Northwest Water Systems manages our water and comes out once a month to switch what well we draw from so as to not put too much strain on one particular pump. They also perform routine maintenance to keep our system running as well as perform routine inspections required from Dept. of Health to include testing for copper, lead as well as testing for contaminants. They provide us with our annual Consumer Confidence Report that you should receive with your June statements. You can also find a copy of these reports as well as our permit on our website under the Water tab from our main page. Overall our water quality is good, however there has been concern for the Manganese levels which are considered a secondary contaminant at this time but may be required to be within the limit set by DOH in the future. To read more about Manganese, you can go to the Water tab from our website. Because our system is older, it is critical that we keep enough money in our reserves for the replacement of expensive equipment. We track this by our annual Reserves Study, which provides a lifecycle report to guide us when we would most likely need to replace a fixed asset/equipment. We also need to be sure we are collecting enough water assessments to cover the maintenance of our system. Between our reserves and water assessments, this is what pays for keeping us on a private well system.

What has been done/What is still needed-

In August we had a professional diving company clean our 2 reservoirs which removed 3 inches of sediment (DOH standard is .5) Needless to say this was maintenance well overdue. We then had Northwest perform a flush of all of our water lines using the meters from our streets. Pictures on the slide presentation link below show water pumping out the sediment until clear. Several things were observed from the flush which will be addressed in the future to include adding additional blow off valves at the end of each street. This will allow for a better flush. Homeowners can help by keeping areas around your water meter clean of debris and dirt.

BUDGET COMMITTE BRIEFING-

Lead Brian Elliott briefed and his notes are included with the slide presentation link below

Slide Presentation-PDF