Junior water rights users in Southeastern Idaho have come to a mitigation agreement for the 2024 farming season, but farmers are calling on serious water reform legislation to prevent future disputes from arising.
Idaho Gov. Brad Little (R) signed an executive order on June 26 in response to the conflict between senior and junior water rights holders being settled for this season.
The Protecting Idaho Water Sovereignty Act will "chart a path forward on a new long-term agreement between water users that works for all farmers while providing for a healthy aquifer," according to Little. Measures within the executive order include calls on state agencies to make improvements to the Aquifer, a portion of rock that contains groundwater, and water management, as well as to ensure that groundwater users and surface water users agree upon an improved mitigation plan.
Farmer Jake Stander remained unimpressed with Little’s executive order.
“I don't understand how groundwater users "negotiate" with an entity that has everything in their favor, including the appearance of captured state funded departments like the IDWR and the IDWRB,” Stander said in a message to the Washington Examiner. “The state officials' favorite line is "our hands are tied." It's time we get them some scissors and figure out who keeps supplying them with rope.”
For weeks, Stander, along with his neighbor and farmer Brian Murdock, grew wary as the curtailment order issued by the Idaho Department of Water Resources threatened to dry up 500,000 acres of farmland.
“We’ve been made second class citizens by this water call,” Stander said. “It’s a take from our government because they are taking our land and absolutely devaluing it.”
Calls for water curtailment on junior groundwater rights users of the Eastern Snake River Plain Aquifer began in May when the IDWR the senior water right holder, Twin Falls Canal Company, would see a 74,100-acre-foot shortfall of surface. Senior water right holders have first priority to the water supply.
Twin Falls noticed that their springs hadn't been as full as previously, likely due to a drop in the Aquifer reserves. The total amount of water in the aquifer is unknown, but the IDRW used a model to calculate how much of a shortfall senior right water users were losing, thus calling on junior right users like Murdock and Stander to decrease their usage through with mitigation measures from a 2016 agreement.
Murdock had grievances with the methodology the state used to calculate the shortfall and said it didn’t make sense how there could be a dwindling water supply when the reservoirs were full.
“And for Idaho to have a full reservoir starting July 4 weekend, that's not something that happens very often,” Murdock said.
Murdock recounts how he laughed while watching the news at a story about the curtailment being lifted followed by a story warning people of dangerously high river levels.
“Somehow this canal down there's claiming that they don't have enough water and so they have to curtail all of us and yet the very next story is about the flooding and the river being so high,” Murdock said.
But according to Jay Barlogi, general manager of Twin Falls Water Company, surface water right users rely on the Eastern Snake River Plain Aquifer for 80% of its water needs and only 20% from the reservoirs.
“So there's a really common misunderstanding and we hear a lot that we had a good winter, we had a good snowpack, the reservoir systems fall, in fact, there's water flowing past and out of the state,” Barlogi said. “And here's the truth we rely on water that comes out of the Eastern snake plant aquifer.”
Barlogi points to the groundwater users being responsible for “deteriorating” the health of the Aquifer; while Murdock states that the canal company is failing to be most efficient with its watering practices.
“It’s like we're driving a Prius,” Murdock said. “This is how our sprinklers are. You could compare them to a Prius hybrid car that’s getting 60 to 70 miles a gallon. These canals down south, they're still because they're so old, because they're still you using this old method of watering. Basically horse and buggy.”
But Barlogi fights back on the accusations that the canal company fails to be efficient with its water use. A 2023 report by Twin Falls Soil and Water Conservation District revealed improvements made over the past decade have improved efficiency from around 50% to nearly 70%.
“Even though the conversion to sprinklers and the decision to pipe laterals in the last few years has improved the overall system efficiency, prolonged drought makes it difficult to run the SRCC system effectively,” the report read.
Idaho’s water supply is governed by prior appropriations doctrine, which attorney TJ Budge with the Surface Water Coalition calls as first in time, first in right.
While senior water right users have always taken priority over junior water right users, consistent disputes over the supply didn’t arise until the 1990s when the state decided that groundwater and surface water would be conjunctively managed.
“When you try to regulate surface water, which is rivers, and aquifers as an integrated resource, conjunctive management is really difficult because aquifers behave much differently than rivers,” Budge said.
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The surface water system will reset every winter; whereas aquifers water levels change over the course of years, making it difficult to manage the two entities as one, according to Budge.
“Idaho is on the leading edge of conjunctive management so we're learning a lot of these lessons the hard way,” Budge said. “A lot of other western states have just tried to avoid conjunctive management, because it's really, thorny and difficult and problematic … This is something that other western states and probably Midwestern states are looking at and watching and trying to learn their lessons from.”
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