State, power company fight over Snake River
BOISE – Idaho is fighting another Snake River water war.
This time, it pits the state’s largest utility, the Idaho Power Co., against lawmakers who represent farmers, manufacturers and cities that pump the valuable – and scarce – resource in a state located on the parched northern rim of the Great Basin Desert.
Members of the House Resources and Conservation Committee on Wednesday approved a bill for further debate that would let the state take water that Idaho Power now uses to produce power and send it down irrigation canals where it could seep back into the Lake Erie-sized Eastern Snake River Plain Aquifer.
The aquifer has been drained by decades of pump irrigation and six years of drought, and many in Idaho want to replenish it.
Idaho Power says if the state tries to take its water, its 470,000 ratepayers could face millions more in costs.
This is just the latest water conflict in a state famous for them: Last year, Idaho settled a decades-old dispute with the Nez Perce Indians over rights to water in the Snake River. In 2001, it fought – and lost – a pitched battle with the Coeur d’Alene Indians over rightful ownership of the lower third of Lake Coeur d’Alene.
“It does not, as some would portend, take water rights” from Idaho Power, said the plan’s sponsor, House Speaker Bruce Newcomb, R-Burley.
He cited a March 9 opinion from state Attorney General Lawrence Wasden that a 22-year-old pact between Idaho and Idaho Power gives the state, not the utility, rights to the water.
Meanwhile, Idaho Power officials say they’ve got first dibs on the water. They say the 1984 agreement doesn’t allow the state to redirect water they now send through turbines at the utility’s 17 dams.
What’s more, the Boise-based utility says, a separate law passed by the 1994 Legislature guaranteed it protection from just such an attack.
“It’s not correct to consider that 1994 legislation was a mistake,” said Jim Tucker, the company’s top lawyer. “It was approved by the (state) Department of Water Resources. It made Idaho Power’s rights senior to recharging the aquifer.”
A year ago, companies including the Twin Falls Canal Co., which controls 110 miles of irrigation canals in south-central Idaho, sued farmers who get their water from the aquifer, arguing they were pumping more than their fair share.
Groundwater pumpers see this as a matter of economic life or death.
“We have to make adjustments to make sure we can continue in the future,” said Tim Deeg, president of the Idaho Ground Water Appropriators, whose members include eight southeastern Idaho cities as well as farming groups. “We rely on (the aquifer) to get us through droughts. And yet, we don’t take care of it. We don’t ever put water back into it.”
Idaho Power and the canal companies favor an approach backed by Gov. Dirk Kempthorne that would divert water into two canals in April, allowing water to seep into the aquifer.
Under that plan, Idaho Power would be paid $1.6 million by the state to compensate the utility for the hydropower it would lose.