‘Water wars have spread to north’
County commissioners from Bonner, Boundary and Shoshone counties spoke forcefully against the proposed North Idaho water rights adjudication, in a Senate committee hearing this afternoon. Boundary County Commissioner Dan Dinning urged lawmakers to put the process on hold.
“We have issues there that I don’t believe were thought about when we began this adjudication,” he said. Among them: The Moyie River runs in and out of Canada in his county. “We’re going to be dealing with a province, a Native American tribe and Canada.”
Bonner County Commissioner Lewis Rich told the Senate Resources Committee, “I would guess 95 percent of the people or higher don’t want an adjudication, primarily because they don’t trust anyone involved with it.” Fellow Bonner Commissioner Joe Young said he was involved in the process early on, but information kept changing, from boundaries to the scope of the project. “I was a part of the process, but I guess I was ignorant, because I didn’t think things would change,” he said. “The lines were changed, the scope of work was changed, and quite frankly, that pissed me off.”
Shoshone County Commissioner Jon Cantamessa told the panel, “Very few citizens in the north are informed, and most believe that they have been lied to.” He asked that the state “take a step back” on adjudicating, or legally sorting out, water rights in North Idaho. “We do have water, we don’t have money, we need information, and there’s no urgency in this process,” he said.
Senate Resources Chairman Gary Schroeder, R-Moscow, said, “We should’ve started from the grass roots up with the local officials. … I think we learned something here today.”
The committee was taking testimony on a series of six bills proposed by Sens. Shawn Keough, R-Sandpoint, and Joyce Broadsword, R-Sagle, to scale back, cancel, modify or slow down the basin-wide adjudication. Keough said her constituents fear the adjudication process is designed to take away their right to draw water from their wells, and some fear the state plans to put meters on all private wells and tax the water, though the state’s never done that. One of the bills specifically forbids that. Keough read a message from one constituent who wrote, “They will be facing a gun if they come to take our water rights.” Keough told the committee, “The water wars seem to have spread to northern Idaho.”
