Batt May Have To Shift Money To Water Programs Idaho Must Start Cleaning 962 Rivers, Streams In Five Years, Judge Rules

A judge’s ruling that Idaho must clean up its polluted rivers could require the Batt administration to shuffle resources from other agencies to waterquality programs.

Gov. Phil Batt has ordered state resource agencies to shift all available staff and money to cleaning up 962 Idaho rivers and streams in five years.

That is the deadline U.S. District Judge James Dwyer set in September in response to a lawsuit by the Idaho Conservation League and the Idaho Sporting Congress.

“What we’re looking at now are the resources we currently have on the ground before we think about adding additional dollars,” said Mike Brassey, Division of Financial Management administrator.

If the agencies cannot pool enough to carry out Dwyer’s ruling, then Batt may have to reach into the already tight budgets of other agencies.

“It’s a massive task,” said Jim Yost, Batt’s natural-resources assistant.

The cleanup will require farmers, loggers, miners and others to reduce the pollution they dump into rivers.

While some voluntary efforts already are under way, Dwyer’s decision could mandate a more regulatory approach.

“In some cases, they’ll feel it’s more restrictive; in other cases, they’ll think it’s not so restrictive,” said Larry Koenig, Division of Environmental Quality assistant administrator. No massive reorganization of personnel has been proposed, Yost said.

The federal Clean Water Act requires states to calculate the amount of pollution the streams can absorb and still be clean enough for their intended uses.

That “total maximum daily load” is used to develop a cleanup strategy. The Legislature passed a law in 1995 that set up boards in each river basin and watershed to determine loads for more than 16,000 miles of streams identified in the lawsuit.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Idaho’s Division of Water Quality had pledged to write cleanup plans for 41 of Idaho’s most polluted waterways by 1999 and a dozen additional plans every two years.

But Dwyer ruled that was not enough because it would take at least 25 years to complete a job Congress wanted done years ago.

Batt said the state’s site-by-site process is not “economically feasible” under Dwyer’s ruling.

He is opting for what he calls a “boilerplate” approach, a generic process that can be used in a variety of similar watersheds.

The state’s monitoring to date has shown half of the 962 streams are meeting federal standards, said Joe Hinson, executive vice president of the Intermountain Forest Industry Association.