State looks at water resources

BOISE – From the health of the Spokane Valley/Rathdrum Prairie Aquifer to the level of Lake Pend Oreille, North Idaho lawmakers are hoping the region’s water issues will be addressed as the Legislature fashions a huge, costly bailout for drought-stricken southern Idaho water-rights holders.

“It gives us some opportunity to get some attention to our needs,” said Rep. George Eskridge, R-Dover.

Said Sen. Gary Schroeder, R-Moscow, “If they’re going to get votes from everyone, they’re going to have to involve everyone.”

Lots of North Idaho legislators are serving on a huge committee that’s trying to work out the water issue. The panel has been meeting monthly and its regional working groups also have been meeting regularly to look at local issues. The focus is on avoiding what southern Idaho lawmakers call “an economic catastrophe” by shutting down water to hundreds of farmers, businesses, cities and others who rely on it.

The problem: Idaho’s “first in time, first in right” water laws say older water rights trump newer ones. With southern Idaho’s drought inching into its seventh year, there’s not enough water to go around, and senior water users are beginning to demand their water at the expense of junior rights holders. That’s a prospect many say threatens the entire economy of southern Idaho.

“How do you encourage industry to locate here in Idaho when they can’t obtain water?” asked Sen. Dean Cameron, R-Rupert. “You can’t do that.”

Cameron said the giant legislative committee – which has 18 voting members and 18 more highly involved “ad hoc” members – is designed to “see if we can prevent an economic catastrophe that would occur in the event we had to shut off hundreds of water users throughout the southern part of the state.”

Among the possibilities: Buying out some users’ water rights with government funds, which could run into millions of dollars; purchasing water to send to users who are going without; cutting off some water rights; using the state’s bonding authority to raise funds; and maybe even keeping all or part of the state’s temporary 1-cent sales tax increase in place to fund a water deal.

“When you look at the economic devastation that could potentially occur, everything’s on the table,” Cameron said.

North Idaho lawmakers have their own issues they want on the table, including:

• Water quality monitoring in the Clark Fork River in advance of the construction of the Rock Creek mine upstream in Montana.

• Statewide backing for the push to protect Lake Pend Oreille’s water level against calls from downstream water users in Washington.

• Protection of the Spokane Valley/Rathdrum Prairie Aquifer, the sole source of drinking water for more than 400,000 people in North Idaho and Spokane County, and of the Palouse Aquifer in the Moscow-Pullman area. Both aquifers originate in Idaho and flow into Washington.

• State funding for the Coeur d’Alene Lake Management Plan, for which the Coeur d’Alene Tribe has pledged $5 million, which it has asked the state and federal governments to match.

• A possible adjudication of water rights in the Coeur d’Alene Basin, to clarify who has rights to how much water, and in which order.

“It’s obvious that our problems and our issues are a little different than the problems we’ve discussed down here,” Sen. Joe Stegner, R-Lewiston, told the large committee at a Boise meeting last week.Sen. Marti Calabretta, D-Osburn, has some reservations about spending scarce state funds to settle the water issue. “I’m respectful of the fact the Legislature has responded to the needs of Shoshone County in funding Bunker Hill (cleanup) so our economy can be strong in the future,” she said. “I understand that there’s some give and take involved.”

However, Calabretta said she wouldn’t support keeping the sales tax increase in place just to fund a water deal. “That puts it in a pool that’s directly competing with education, and it’s not acceptable to me to have it funded in that way for that reason,” she said.

Calabretta said she wants to learn more about the water rights holders’ own responsibility to pay. Last week, committee members learned that water rights holders have long underfunded their own water districts, leading to problems in data collection and pinning down just who is getting how much water.

Though the state has spent $70 million over the past two decades to adjudicate Snake River Basin water rights, “now we’re bailing them out,” Calabretta said.

However, Calabretta said one program lawmakers were briefed on last week – a possible expansion of the federal Conservation Reserve Program that could pay farmers $118 or more an acre to retire their farmland and stop irrigating – may be a good deal for the state. The federal government would pay 80 percent of the cost, and the state would kick in just 20 percent.

That program could dry up as much as 100,000 acres in southern Idaho farm land, reducing water demands.

Sen. Shawn Keough, R-Sandpoint, said the negotiation over a water deal “bears watching for North Idaho in particular.”

She said she’s worried that North Idaho lawmakers were brought in partly so that “when southern interests figured out what they wanted, they would have roped us in and bought our votes to some extent.”

Nevertheless, she’s joined Eskridge in pushing strongly for consideration of their district’s issues, from the Rock Creek mine to lake levels.

Said Eskridge, “It’d be nice to have statewide interest in water levels on Lake Pend Oreille, rather than us fighting with Washington ourself.”

Eskridge is optimistic that North Idaho lawmakers have the pull to get their issues on the table. He noted that he, Keough and Calabretta, along with Rep. Dick Harwood, R-St. Maries, all serve on the Legislature’s joint budget committee, which must approve spending proposals. Stegner is the Senate’s assistant majority leader, and Schroeder chairs the Senate Education Committee.

Longtime Sen. Laird Noh, R-Kimberly, co-chairman of the huge water committee, said, “Hopefully the Legislature and the agencies and the budget committees will be responsive to those things.”

He added, “The key issue in all of this is we’ve got to get down to how we pay for this. A lot of trial balloons are being run out as to what might work and what might not.”

Eskridge said he sees a “large funding need” coming for southern Idaho, and wants North Idaho to get its share. “We’re looking at it from the perspective of, this is a total state water issue,” he said.