Idaho’s water crisis can be fixed. But are lawmakers still capable of fixing it? | Opinion

Last week, a curtailment order that had cut off groundwater irrigation throughout much of central and eastern Idaho was lifted. The order had been in place for only a short time, so the Gem State is unlikely to experience widespread crop failures this year.

But the crisis is just waiting to rear its head again next year.

The temporary deal forestalled the conflict between surface water irrigators in the Magic Valley and groundwater irrigators from Twin Falls to Ashton for yet another year — one in a series of last-minute developments that have kept the conflict from becoming a crisis — but without making any visible progress toward solving it.

But the lack of a lasting solution itself has a cost: consistent uncertainty. And for an industry that’s highly dependent on credit to finance yearly operations, uncertainty translates to higher cost and lower productivity.

“I think (the temporary deal is) great for this year, but we’ve got to figure out how to stop this uncertainty from year to year,” said Rep. Stephanie Mickelsen, R-Idaho Falls, who chairs the Bonneville-Jefferson Groundwater District.

“We have done some good work,” said Lt. Gov. Scott Bedke, who led 2015 negotiations that produced the existing water deal, at a press conference in Pocatello last week.

“The stakes are so high,” he said.

In the balance is something like one-sixth of the irrigated ground in Idaho, a vital piece of an industry that, Gov. Brad Little noted at the press conference, makes up about a third of the state’s economy.

Little signed an executive order that could, if followed up with action from the Legislature, make serious progress toward a lasting solution. It calls for greater scientific study of the aquifer, directs the Idaho Water Resource Board to prioritize projects aimed at stabilizing the aquifer, and asks the two sides of the water war to begin meeting to work out a new deal within months.

But the order and a private deal between the parties aren’t likely to be sufficient to solve this dilemma on their own. Serious infrastructure projects to shore up the aquifer are the only way forward that doesn’t end in major economic disruption. Doing that will require action from the Idaho Legislature, if it is still capable of solving complex, non-ideological problems.

(Some of the weirder segments of the far-right have latched on to the debate, alleging this whole dispute has something to do with cobalt mining — yet another demonstration that the far-right can’t solve real problems because it is forever charging into battle against its own delusions.)

Understanding why big recharge programs could be our solution requires understanding the massive aquifer, which runs all across the southern half of the state, and its history.

The usual metaphor is that the East Snake Plain Aquifer works like a “leaky bathtub.” Fill it up high, and water pours out of the leaks — most visibly in the beautiful Thousand Springs area. Stop filling it up as fast, let it drain to a lower level, and less water pours out of the holes.

That means less water, especially later in the year, for surface water irrigators in the Magic Valley.

The state’s implicit water policy, the policy it has adopted though its system of water rights, is to keep the aquifer artificially enlarged.

We know the aquifer today contains about 3 million more acre-feet of water than it did in 1912, when the first estimates were available. But the aquifer was already expanding quickly at that time and continued to do so for decades.

Canal systems had already been built and extensive flood irrigation had taken place for decades, so the earliest measurements in all likelihood show a water level that’s far higher than the aquifer’s natural settling point.

And from those initial measurements, the aquifer continued to balloon.

The amount of extra water added to the reservoir between the early 1900s and the 1950s is staggering, somewhere around 17 million acre-feet. That’s about as much water as it would take to fill Anderson Ranch Reservoir from dry to full — 35 times. It’s about the total volume of Flathead Lake in Montana, almost three times the total volume of Bear Lake straddling the Idaho-Utah border, or a bit more than a third of the total volume of Lake Pend Oreille.

Since the transition away from flood irrigation to more efficient sprinkler systems and the adoption of widespread groundwater pumping in the upstream portion of the valley, the aquifer has dropped by something like 14 million acre-feet. But as much as it’s dropped, it’s still probably millions of acre-feet above its natural level.

So a long-term solution will require answering some big questions:

Does it make sense to keep the aquifer at its current level? Or should we be seeking a steady state near the natural, pre-irrigation level of the aquifer? How can we figure out what that level is?

If the state’s de-facto policy is to maintain an artificially enlarged aquifer, the state should take a much stronger hand in — and dedicate a lot more funding to — building the infrastructure to make it happen. It needs to build infrastructure to replace the flood irrigation that built the artificially enlarged aquifer, not to expect that farmers with junior water rights will solve the problem. They almost certainly can’t while remaining solvent.

Doing so could pay real dividends for the state.

The most vexing thing about this year’s massive curtailment was that if you live in eastern Idaho, you see water everywhere you look. There’s still snow in the mountains. The canals all look full. The Snake River is as high as I’ve ever seen it. All the reservoirs upstream are full. How can we be in a water crisis with all this water everywhere?

Little of that water is making its way down into the aquifer. Recharge projects, which divert some of the Snake River during times of high water out into areas like Egin Lakes, where it can sink down into the aquifer, have been developed in eastern Idaho, but they come nowhere near to replacing the recharge that came from widespread flood irrigation in the early 20th Century.

The promise of aquifer recharge is that it can act like a water savings account, saving up extra water in wet years so it will be available in dry ones. It’s the kind of infrastructure we need more of to make ourselves more resilient to climate change.

But is an increasingly ideological Legislature still capable of dealing with nuts-and-bolts issues like these?

Let’s hope so. Because if we’re in a crisis now, with water all around, what’s going to happen in the next drought?

Bryan Clark is an opinion writer for the Idaho Statesman.