Fight for Columbia water heats up

BREWSTER, Wash. – Surrounded by cherry and apple trees on a slope overlooking the swollen Columbia River, Bob Brammer gazed downhill and laughed wryly at his personal source of exasperation.

Irrigation from the river has helped to create a steady business for Brammer, but he can’t expand without additional water, and despite his prime location on the banks of one of the nation’s largest rivers, Brammer may not see more water any time soon.

Washington state has been sitting on his application for a new water right – and hundreds more – for more than a decade as it struggles to balance the needs of fish with utilities, irrigators and cities seeking water. The stalemate has prompted lawsuits and left those seeking water in limbo.

“I have land, I have equipment, I have the willingness. I need water,” Brammer said. “The future of this community is tree fruit, and it takes water to do that. Nothing can happen in Brewster without water.”

Anyone getting in line now may have an even longer wait. In late December, the Bureau of Reclamation quietly notified the state that it was staking a claim to all unappropriated water in the Columbia and its tributaries that may be needed to fill a proposed reservoir.

It was a move that once might have invoked fury in the West, home of the adage that whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting over. Sweeping claims to natural resources by the federal government have historically met stiff resistance and scorn.

Just four years ago, federal marshals were called in to guard irrigation gates during a revolt by farmers’ supporters in Klamath Falls, Ore., after the government shut off irrigation to ensure water for protected fish during a drought.

However, the government’s more recent claim went largely unnoticed. Nobody is sure if the residents of Eastern Washington simply didn’t hear about it, don’t believe the reservoir will ever be built, or just don’t care after years of frustration.

“It is a puzzle to us that it’s not being looked at more closely,” said Shirley Nixon, attorney for the Center for Environmental Law and Policy. “Everyone who has seen it has said, ‘Wow, this could have the potential to create some unpleasant repercussions.’ “

States govern water rights in the West under an old premise: first in time, first in right. During dry years, it means those with older or “senior” water rights have priority over those with newer, “junior” rights.

Everyone assumed there would always be enough water to go around, Nixon said, which made the system possible. Today, demands on water from the river for cities, irrigation, power and fish survival are simply outpacing supply, she said.

Oregon already clamped down on new water rights in the Columbia, as did Idaho on the Snake River, the Columbia’s largest tributary. In Washington state, though, irrigators and others continue to seek more water, with 3,300 outstanding applications for new surface and groundwater rights in the Columbia watershed.

State officials haven’t abandoned all hope at easing the gridlock. Before leaving office, former Gov. Gary Locke proposed the so-called Columbia River Initiative, which would allow junior water users to have access to water without interruption. It also would grant new water rights for the roughly 300 pending applications on the mainstem, all while putting additional water in the river for salmon.

The move would be made possible by drawing down Lake Roosevelt, the reservoir behind Grand Coulee Dam, and buying more water from Canada.

The proposal is being closely watched by other states – in part as a possible resolution to water rights disputes, but also to monitor Washington state’s management of the river.

Reed Benson, a professor of law at the University of Wyoming who reviewed the proposal for the state, said Washington officials deserve credit for looking at the Columbia River long-term.

The state is trying to provide more certainty for junior water users, at the same time it is taking responsibility for making sure the water is there to satisfy those rights, Benson said.

More significantly, the state is looking at charging fees for water use – a fundamental shift in thinking, he said.

“That’s a pretty dramatic departure, and I think one that is overdue because these kinds of creative approaches for resolving water supply disputes cost money,” he said. “It’s money, a lot of times, states don’t have.”

Darryll Olsen of the Columbia-Snake River Irrigators Association, which has filed suit against the state seeking new water rights, called the science behind the initiative “fatally flawed.”

The initiative allows for no net loss of water to the river to protect fish without ever identifying the “tipping point” at which water diversions harm migrating salmon, Olsen said.

“If you can’t measure the impact of something, you can’t say it’s contributing to the cumulative impacts,” he said. “The Columbia River system is not over-appropriated, not by any conventional standard of science.”

Therein lies the biggest disagreement. How much water must remain in the river?

“These are well-educated, well-intentioned people who disagree about that question fundamentally,” said Jay Manning, director of the state Department of Ecology. Manning has been traveling the state to discuss the proposed initiative with stakeholders. “Whatever the details look like, it is preferable to the current stalemate where nobody gets anything.”

The stalemate has nearly broken the residents of Brewster, a small north-central Washington city on the banks of the Columbia, who are awaiting access to an additional 300 acre-feet of water. An acre-foot is enough water to cover an acre of land with one foot of water.

City officials have been turning away businesses hoping to open up shop there since 1994, when they imposed a moratorium on additional municipal water use. It’s a reality that infuriates Mayor Bonnie House, who agonizes over the 11 percent unemployment in a region where nearly three-fourths of residents are poor.

“It’s been a long, uphill, crossing-the-Sahara- without-any-water battle,” House said. “We’ve talked, we’ve pleaded, we’ve begged, we’ve shown science, we’ve shown common sense. We’ve done everything we can think of to no avail.”

Brammer, who lives outside Brewster’s city limits, echoes that frustration. He has planted new apple varieties to diversify his orchard – young Jazz, Pacific Rose and Honeycrisp apple trees are just beginning to bud – and built a cold-storage warehouse to hold his fruit.

But he still must harvest the older apple trees until the new orchards are producing, which means he needs more water for irrigation.

“Without the ability to be entrepreneurial and dynamic in our business approach, the town of Brewster withers and dies,” Brammer said.

It’s a refrain heard around a region that has come to rely on permanent agricultural crops.

In central Washington’s Yakima Valley, gripped by the worst drought conditions in the region this year, farmers are throwing their support behind the proposed Black Rock reservoir, which would divert up to 1.3 million acre-feet of water from the Columbia River initially and cost up to $4 billion to build.

The Bureau of Reclamation already notified the state it may need the water if the reservoir is built, though the project is still under study with several other proposals.

The reservoir might solve problems for farmers in the Yakima Valley, but at the expense of farmers along the mainstem Columbia who have already filed suit seeking water, Nixon said.

And none of the proposed solutions addresses the problem of groundwater rights, which have been allowed under a loophole in state law even though they may draw water from the same aquifer.

Manning, of the state’s Ecology Department, conceded the initiative – and the state – has a long way to go.

“If key players don’t buy in – tribes, ag groups, conservation groups, they can challenge it – we’ll just be where we’ve been for the last 20 years,” Manning said.