News & Events - Archived News

[ Up ]

BOISE -- An eleventh hour agreement reached between surface and ground water users offers hope and challenges for irrigators over the next two years.       Tim Deeg, president of a groundwater appropriator's association in American Falls, said both sides need to use the two-year period stipulated in the agreement to develop a vision for managing both ground and surface water.       "The worst thing in the world would be, in two years, to be at the same place we are today," Deeg said.       The agreement is an interim deal to cover the 2002 and 2003 irrigation seasons. While ground water pumpers are providing additional water to the senior surface water right holders, the Department of Water Resources will finish fine-tuning a ground water model for the Eastern Snake Plain Aquifer. Modelers hope to have a tool in place that can help answer questions about what impacts are felt from pumping and how long it takes for those impacts to be felt.       Deeg is not convinced the modeling efforts will be completed by the Dec. 31, 2003, deadline, but he hopes that won't stop negotiations.       "We've got to be prepared to move on and learn from future studies," he said. "I think ground water users want to resolve differences."       Karl Dreher, director of IDWR, said he agreed to the deal because it offered to replace the amount of water that would have been gained through proposed curtailment orders and the agreement seems to be equitable.       Pumpers in the American Falls reach have agreed to rent 28,500 acre-feet of water from the water bank each of the next two years, and pumpers in the Thousand Springs reach will rent 40,000 acre-feet. If that water cannot be obtained from the rental pool because of continuing drought conditions, then pumpers in the American Falls reach will cut pumping across their ground water districts by 15 percent and those in the Thousand Springs reach will cut pumping by 10 percent.       "It's not a perfect document," admitted Mike Faulkner, a Gooding farmer and president of the North Snake Ground Water District. But he, and Deeg, agree that the plan is a good-faith attempt to begin the process of finding a workable solution that will keep both surface and ground water pumpers in business.       Chuck Coiner, a farmer from Twin Falls County and a member of the Twin Falls Canal Company board of directors, also sees hope from this eleventh hour agreement. He said it has been very frustrating for both Twin Falls Canal Co. and North Side Canal Co. to work on this issue over the last 15 years. He blames shortsightedness on state and local officials for allowing the issue of how to manage ground water in conjunction with surface water for getting so far out of hand.       "I think the state, in its blind march to full economic development, has done a great disservice to all water users," Coiner said.       From his perspective on the tail end of the ditch for the last 29 years, Larry Cope agrees. As president of Clear Springs Foods in Buhl, he has watched spring flows at Thousand Springs dry up. Beginning in May, Clear Springs Foods recorded the lowest spring flow in history. Spring flows have remained at historic lows all season, and Cope is bracing for an even worse water supply last year.       That's because of the time delay felt at Thousand Springs. Historic data shows that flows at Thousand Springs are the lowest the year after a drought officially ends, Dreher said. Decreased spring flow is directly related to North Side Canal Company's irrigation supply. In years when NSCC has ample water, spring flows increase; when NSCC has a tight supply, spring flows decrease.       "For the first time," Cope said, "we have all parties sitting together and working toward sustainable solutions."       At the same time the parties are working together, the Department of Water Resources is also proposing changes to how it can deal with this issue. Developing rules through a water district is the preferred method for dealing with any future curtailments, but water districts can only be formed when the water rights in an area are completely adjudicated by the Snake River Basin Adjudication Court. Unfortunately, most of the 25,000 claims left to be adjudicated are located in the Eastern Snake Plain Aquifer.       That left IDWR with just one option, declaring ground water management areas and critical ground water management areas; which it did on Aug. 3. Now that an agreement has been reached, the Department has backed away from ground water management areas and will petition the SRBA court to establish interim water districts to administer the agreement, Dreher said.