Rural/urban water summit sees high interest

By Nate Poppino, Times-News
Friday, September 12, 2008 4:33 PM CDT

BOISE, Idaho - There’s no question whether the Idaho Water Users Association will hold its proposed rural-urban issues summit on Oct. 8, members announced last week.

Now, they’ll move on to the next question - how to make room for everyone who wants to attend the event at the Holiday Inn Boise Airport.

The summit, requested by a Treasure Valley-area irrigation district involved in a lawsuit against Caldwell, has become so popular that more than a dozen organizations, companies and agencies are either sponsoring or co-hosting it now. A mayor and a highway district commissioner will be among the members of two discussion panels, and U.S. Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, will provide the keynote address, IWUA Executive Director Norm Semanko said on Tuesday.

According to the program for the event - mailed out on Monday - guests will include Jerome Mayor Charles Correll, Blaine County Commissioner Larry Schoen and David Bernhardt, solicitor for the U.S. Department of the Interior. Keith Allred, founder of the non-partisan citizen’s group The Common Interest, also runs a consulting and mediation business.

and will act as facilitator for the one-day event.

The summit is meant to help address issues that occur where rural and urban areas collide, specifically when canals and other bodies of water are involved.

Some of the expected guests have found success with such issues, Semanko said. Others have run into problems. Either way, he said, their experiences are valuable.

“There’s good and bad, and you can learn from both,” Semanko said.

The federal government is primarily involved because of easements it owns along many canal systems, though few are in the Magic Valley, Semanko said.

“It’s kind of like when you’re dealing with a landlord in the rental situation,” he said.

Crapo, a former water lawyer, will likely address Congress’ role in irrigation projects and how urban encroachment will affect canals and the federal easements around many of them, spokesman Lindsay Nothern said. He could also speak about two bills that, though unlikely to pass, could lead to canals being regulated under the Clean Water Act, Nothern said.

“We haven’t really laid it out,” Nothern said.

Semanko said he’d have to wait for registrations to come in to have an idea of how many people might attend the summit. But getting them there isn’t the problem, he said.

“It’s not a hard sell to get people together to talk about these problems,” Semanko said.

The hard part, he said, comes in turning such a meeting into results, whether those come as legislation, an ongoing issues committee or in other forms. And though it’s impossible to tell what those results might be right now, Semanko seemed to relish the idea of finding out.

“I have no idea (what might come of it),” he said.

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