Senate rejects plan to divert river water
BOISE - The Senate on Thursday defeated a bill that would have allowed Idaho to take water from the Snake River to help recharge an eastern Idaho aquifer that has been depleted over the last 50 years by groundwater pumping and drought.
It was a victory for the Idaho Power Co., the state’s largest utility, which had fought the measure with television ads and letters to its 455,000 customers that claimed the move would take water needed to produce hydropower – and force it to raise rates by millions of dollars.
The 21-14 Senate vote after a 3 1/2-hour session was a defeat for House Speaker Bruce Newcomb, R-Burley, who had characterized the issue as a matter of economic life or death: A dwindling aquifer, down from its historically high levels of the 1940s, could spell ruin for thousands of farmers, businesses and cities that draw water with pumps from the Lake-Erie-size waterway beneath the desert.
Newcomb said the Senate’s decision was just another sign of Idaho’s changing demographics. Judging from the vote, he said, power has shifted to Idaho’s more-populous west and north and away from the agrarian east.
The House passed the bill earlier this month.
“No question, times have changed,” Newcomb said in an interview. “We’re evolving as a state, from rural to urban.”
Idaho is the third-fastest-growing state, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, whose figures show the most-populous regions have grown three times faster than the rest of the state.
Sen. Shawn Keough, R-Sandpoint, was the only North Idaho senator to vote in favor of the bill.
“Agriculture still feeds the economic engines of Idaho, and it’s likely to still do so in the future,” Keough said. “… That aquifer turns the desert into gold quite literally.”
Sen. Dick Compton, R-Coeur d’Alene, spoke out against the bill. He said for all the talk about lobbying pressure, “I’ll tell you where the greatest pressure came from – across the body, holding bills unless we vote. … I resent that. … This should go to the courts to be decided, not here.”
Of the no votes, only two came from rural eastern Idaho: Sen. Tom Gannon, R-Buhl, and Sen. Chuck Coiner, R-Twin Falls.
And just three senators who favored the measure – Sens. Keough, Joe Stegner, R-Lewiston, and Monty Pearce, R-New Plymouth – came from an urban district, northern district or a district west of Boise.
Newcomb based his bill on a legal opinion from Attorney General Lawrence Wasden.
In it, Wasden determined that a 1984 pact between Idaho and Idaho Power gives the state, not the utility, rights to water above guaranteed minimum levels.
Newcomb wanted to send water this year down canals, where it would have seeped into the aquifer to replenish it. Advocates of his plan said anything short of that would be leaving the future of Idaho’s water in the hands of a single, powerful company.
Lawmakers who opposed Newcomb’s plan said they feared intervening would be an encroachment into Idaho Power’s right to the water as guaranteed in a law passed in 1994.