Farmers holding back on state offer

TWIN FALLS, Idaho – With the Jan. 7 deadline looming for water rights holders to make sales offers to the state, few farmers in the chronically arid region between Twin Falls and Jackpot, Nev., are in a hurry to make a deal.

A panel of lawmakers charged with reducing the amount of water coming out of the Eastern Snake River Plain Aquifer want to find out how much water is available for the state to purchase.

If they can buy up 60,000-acre feet of surface water from private owners downstream of Thousand Springs, they could use it to meet Endangered Species Act requirements for salmon recovery.

Farmer Dick Kevan said he might be interested in forgoing his crop of peas, beans and grains every year if selling his water rights would be more financially beneficial.

“If you can sell your water and make more on that, then why not?” Kevan said. “They’re doing it all over the West.”

But Kevan, who’s a board member of the canal company for the Salmon Tract, said none of his fellow farmers has made a move yet.

“I think they are waiting for someone to make an offer, and then if the offer is good enough, then we’ll start discussing it,” he said.

But the state can’t make the offer. Lawmakers on the interim committee structured the offer-to-sell deal so that owners of water rights would have to approach the Department of Water Resources, not the other way around.

But Rep. Doug Jones, R-Filer, a partner in a family corporation that owns Salmon Tract water shares, said the Idaho Water Resources Board might wind up facilitating some deals.

“In fact, I’m going to guess that if we get some of this resolved, there will be a variety of sales between private parties,” Jones said.

Meanwhile, the state can’t even discuss what the various rights might be worth, Idaho Department of Water Resources spokesman Mike Keckler said.

“We can’t advise them because we’re not sure of that ourselves,” Keckler said.

So far, interest from farmers appears to be subdued. On average, only about three people per day call the agency to find out about the offer-to-sell deal, he said. No one has actually submitted an offer to sell yet.

That doesn’t surprise Hammett high-lift pumper Bill Ringert. He said he’s interested in the offer, since the cost of electricity to pump water out of the Snake River to his fields has increased eightfold in the past 30 years.

“You have to raise a helluva crop of beans to make a profit,” he said.

But still, the retired water attorney and former state senator said there are too many questions clouding the proposal for him to make any hasty decisions.

Ringert isn’t sure selling rights is the best idea. He asked why the state isn’t offering a mid-term or long-term leasing deal. He’s also pondering the long-range effects of selling some or all of his water rights, such as what to do with his land.

That’s in addition to trying to figure out what water rights are going for, which is based partly on how much water is available, he said.

Another complication involves the irrigation project on which Ringert farms. Each farmer on the project gets his water from the same pumping station. Ringert said if one farmer makes the decision to sell his water rights, it could affect everyone else on the project.

To top it off, the Jan. 7 deadline is awkward, Ringert said.

“This comes at a bad time of year,” he said. “It’s the holidays. And then everyone’s trying to get their end-of-the-year paperwork done.”