In the midst of Idaho’s banner water year, another irrigation war is brewing | Opinion
This is a good water year — an exceptionally good one by recent standards.
Snowpacks are well above normal around the state, and a cold spring has delayed the melt. According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, most of Idaho is officially out of drought conditions, and the areas that remain under drought are in the least severe category.
But, according to an order issued Friday by the Idaho Department of Water Resources, about 700,000 acres of eastern Idaho farmland — about one of every five irrigated acres in the state — could have its water cut off this year, if not for a series of mitigation plans.
“That’s the frustration to everybody,” said Steve Taggart, an attorney for the Bonneville-Jefferson Groundwater District in eastern Idaho. “We have areas in our state that are 300 and 200 percent of normal. Everywhere is substantially above normal.”
If there is such a severe pinch on irrigation water this year, what will things look like when the drought returns?
Old water fight returns
The underlying issue is the connection between the vast East Snake Plain Aquifer and the Snake River. Surface water users in the Magic Valley around Twin Falls have some of the most senior water rights in the state. Upstream in eastern Idaho, most farms rely on groundwater from the aquifer.
Eastern Idaho farmers used to — and to some extent still do — rely on a large system of canals to divert surface water from the Snake River to irrigate fields by flooding them. Years of doing this artificially enlarged the aquifer, which reached peak levels in the early 1950s. When groundwater pumps became widely available, many of these farms converted to more water-efficient center-pivot sprinkler systems, and pumping groundwater began in earnest.
The aquifer began to shrink.
That decline has meant less water leaking back from the aquifer into the Snake River (referred to as “reach gains”) which has meant less water for surface water irrigators and fish farms in the Magic Valley. In the early 2000s, the Surface Water Coalition, which represents downstream surface water irrigators, issued a delivery call that required upstream irrigators to deliver them more water.
In 2015, after a protracted series of court cases and negotiations, then-House Speaker Scott Bedke negotiated an agreement between eastern Idaho and the Magic Valley. Eastern Idaho agreed to take a series of steps, including purchasing water in reservoirs and leaving some ground dry, in exchange for the assurance that they would be safe from curtailment orders.
But last year, that agreement came under stress as there was disagreement about whether eastern Idaho had fulfilled its obligations under the mitigation plan. And now a new methodology for calculating how much water eastern Idaho owes has deepened the controversy.
The issue will come to a head in early June when both sides will be able to make arguments to the Idaho Department of Water Resources about how the water debt calculation should be handled.
The new method
The Idaho Department of Water Resources announced last week that it will change the way it calculates the amount of water eastern Idaho owes the Magic Valley. The old version of the model calculated it using a “steady state” system, meaning that if the senior water user was owed 5,000 acre-feet, it was enough for 5,000 acre-feet of water to be freed up somewhere upstream, even if it might take years for that water to reach the Magic Valley. The new version is time sensitive, so the senior water user has to be assured they’ll get the water they’re due this year.
Under this new methodology, the so-called “priority date” (water rights issued after this date are at risk of being curtailed) will be Dec. 30, 1953. Relatively few groundwater rights in eastern Idaho were issued before that, including not only farmers but most cities.
That has eastern Idaho irrigators, who feel the Magic Valley has avoided measures that would let them farm with better water efficiency, in an uproar.
It’s easy to see how unfair the system is, Taggart said, when you look at what would happen if no mitigation plans were in place. The injury of 75,200 acre-feet — about one-seventh the total capacity of Anderson Ranch Reservoir — is enough to fill Magic Valley surface water rights for less than two weeks. Providing that water, under the new methodology, would require shutting down most irrigated agriculture in eastern Idaho.
IDWR Deputy Director Mat Weaver emphasized that this is only what would happen in the absence of mitigation plans, which cover all but about 900 water users. The actual curtailment, when and if it comes, will affect a much smaller amount of ground, he said.
Weaver emphasized that, though this is a good water year, its full impact isn’t yet been felt in the water system.
“We’re still feeling the memory or the impacts of that drought,” he said.
Taggart countered that it’s been proving harder and harder to meet the terms of these mitigation plans. Agreements usually involve some combination of purchasing excess water in reservoirs (which is increasingly scarce) and reducing irrigated acreage (which means less crop production).
Currently, seven of the 10 mitigation plans in the state have been found to be in violation, Taggart said.
“I don’t think those (mitigation agreements) are a safe harbor,” he said.
Short- and long-term solutions
Aquifer recharge has long been seen as an important part of the way out of this continuous fight over water. Recharge projects redirect heavy water flows, as are expected this year, to locations at strategic points where the water can sink into the ground to replenish the aquifer.
When it turns warm in eastern Idaho, the melt will release large amounts of water. If it could be diverted into the aquifer in good years like this one, it would be there to help in bad years when drought returns. But at present, there isn’t enough recharge infrastructure to capture the amount of excess water that’s expected.
Both Taggart and Weaver agreed that recharge will be enormously valuable in the long term. And earlier this month, the Idaho Water Resources Board approved $1.7 million for a new project near Idaho Falls.
The problem is that those recharge projects don’t do anything in the short term. Dump excess water into the aquifer now, and it might return to the Snake River in months, years or decades.
Farmers in eastern Idaho are sweating about the near-term viability of their farms, not what might be possible a decade or two from now.
And this is just the beginning of a problem that will likely worsen over time. The climate is changing, which is expected to increase the severity of droughts. The long-run viability of Idaho’s enormous agricultural sector depends on responding to this problem.
In my view, it is highly unlikely that the “first in time, first in right” system of water rights, which treats water as private property rather than a publicly managed resource and was originally created to deal with water for primitive mining operations, will be capable of responding to this challenge.