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Posts published in “Day: January 5, 2007”

Tuthill to water

The announcement that Karl Dreher, who has run Idaho's water resource department for a decade, will not last into the Butch Otter administration, sent a shock and a chill around much of Idaho's water community. Dreher had done a sound job and was broadly respected; at a time when so many key water decisions are hanging, who could say what would happen now?

Dave Tuthill
Dave Tuthill

With the announcement by Otter of Dave Tuthill as interim - and maybe permanent - director, a good many of those concerns should be set to rest.

We say that with some confidence because, over most of the last decade, we've watched Tuthill at close range. Among our publications is the Snake River Basin Adjudication Digest, and Tuthill for most of the last decade - until his promotion a year or so ago - was the water department administrator most directly responsible for overseeing its work in moving the adjudication forward.

And has done so remarkably. Not just him, certainly (Dreher was doubtless more than a small factor). But a department of water resources that had previously butted heads repeatedly with the courts turned closely cooperative. Thousands of tangled battles over water right claims, and differences between state analyses and local expectations, were worked out smoothly under Tuthill's watch. More than a hundred thousand water right claims in a state prickly about water have been moved most of the way through the system, and only rarely with a flareup.

Tuthill is a skilled organizer and a diplomat as well. Monthly, for a good many years, he delivered update reports on the status of the SRBA to the court and other interested watchers (often including us). These presentations (the PowerPoints are available on line at the IDWR site) were often delivered in travelling road shows, sometimes before skeptical locals uneasy about what the state bureaucrats from Boise were going to do to their water. Tuthill made sure they were listened to.

The Otter announcement noted this about Tuthill: "Tuthill currently is administrator of the Idaho Department of Water Resources’ Water Management Division. He also has been chief of the agency’s Adjudication Bureau, and manager of its Western Region office. With a Ph.D. in civil engineering from the University of Idaho, Tuthill retired in 2004 as a colonel from the U.S. Army Reserve Corps of Engineers after 30 years of military service." All useful and relevant; but his most pertinent skills aren't the kind that translate so easily on paper.

The appointment is interim, and a search for a permanent director is expected to get underway soon. But Otter may find, in the weeks ahead, he already has who he needs.

Standoff at Chelan

Chelan downtown

Two weeks from Monday, another new Wal-Mart, this one in Chelan, Washington, was set to open. Was, until December 29, when a Washington district judge ruled that the business didn't have a proper building permit. That might have seemed almost beside the point by then, since the building was already constructed - it was even being stocked with merchandise. But as matters stand, there's a real chance it may not open at all.

It may be the first time a Wal-Mart store has actually been built, only to be stopped from opening. There is even a chance it will be torn down (which is more than a lot of empty Wal-Marts have been) - its critics say they will be seeking as much.

The basis for the stoppage sounds more picky than it is. The project started not a a Wal-Mart development (apparently at least) but as something called the Apple Blossom Center, for which the city signed off on a "planned development district" with specific terms. Those terms included a variety of commercial developments, with a maximum size limit of 50,000 square feet on any one. That limit, as the judge notes, was never changed by the city, which last fall stood by and watched Wal-Mart and its developer, Pacland, build a stand-issue 162,000-sqaure-foot Wal-Mart store.

"Here," Judge Lesley Allan concluded, "this court is left with the definite and firm conviction that the city erred in granting the two permits at issue." That meant the court voided the city's building and grading permits.

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Sali web

The Bill Sali congressional web site is up. There's not much on it yet - it went live as more or less a blank slate - but until it is, it gives you a look at what a vanilla congressional web site looks like before efforts are made to personalize it.