To start with, it’s not a bad deal. It’s just that it’s a temporary stopgap, if that.
Last month, the state of Idaho and users of water from ground and surface sources cut a deal about groundwater use. Absent a deal, thousands of groundwater users, across half a million acres of territory, were in line, because of state orders, to lose their irrigation water this season. Their growing season would have been wiped out. The economic impact, for these people and those connected to them, and even to the state overall, would have been massive.
The hit was directed generally toward groundwater pumpers, because many of them had more junior water rights, while many surface water rights were mostly older and so had a legal priority for water use (“first in time, first in right”). But the issue also pitted ground people against surface people, a not-unusual situation in Idaho water.
Earlier this year, the state Department of Water Resources calculated that the Eastern Idaho Snake River Aquifer was running low - too low. The aquifer has been in decline for about 60 years, a fact that has been carefully measured and hasn’t been ignored. The issue was important in working through the Snake River Basin Adjudication. In 2015 another agreement on water usage was worked out for preserving the aquifer, and the subject has been under regular review since.
The state has been involved in recharging (pumping water back down) and other steps to help, but if too much groundwater is drawn out, the aquifer will drop and eventually dry. You can ask people around the Great Plains’ Ogallala Aquifer about the terrible consequences of that.
Idaho’s water management system, in southern Idaho at least, long has tended to be cooperative, with interested parties usually more willing to talk than insistent on fighting. The state has been the beneficiary of that for decades.
So when the state ordered water shutoffs for thousands of irrigators, which led to - call it concerns or something approaching panic - widespread realization that a search for solutions had to be undertaken. Negotiations got underway (Lieutenant Governor Scott Bedke seems to have been a key figure in them), and finally late last month a deal was struck, included in an agreement signed as an executive order by Governor Brad Little.
It has six main provisions. It proposed to “improve understanding of the aquifer”; convene a legislative commission on water infrastructure; put a priority on funding projects that would help the aquifer; ask stakeholders to meet; get the regional groundwater management advisory council to submit a new plan by September; and commit groundwater users to develop a mitigation plan by October.
None of this is bad, but only the last item (and it’s still in the territory of aspiration) has the sound of something concrete that specifically addresses the question of how to deal with not enough water for everybody. Water mitigation in this case presumably means that groundwater users would have to specify how they will be able to use water, or engage in recharges or something else, without further endangering the aquifer. How exactly they will do this seems less than clear.
The problem may not be insoluble. Water conservation - which some elements of Idaho water law doesn’t always encourage - may be one of the options. Finding other new efficiencies or reuse of runoff water might be considerations. Some good engineers are at work on this.
The core conundrum, though, remains: If everyone uses the water they need for their operations, the aquifer likely would be drawn down, maybe to dangerous levels. That’s why the Department of Water Resources took action in the first place.
There are no evil players here. But unless someone comes up with an unexpected, and brilliant, answer, the problem looks like a diminishing circle: An ongoing game of musical chairs with someone being left out. This year’s negotiation, probably a predecessor to next year’s, leaves that problem unresolved.
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