Urban-rural interests squabble over water

By Cindy Snyder, Ag Weekly correspondent
Friday, October 24, 2008 2:02 PM CDT

BOISE, Idaho — Neighbors across the West have squabbled over water and who gets to use it since the first irrigation ditches were dug. While many of those decades-old disagreements continue, more and more farmers and ranchers find themselves arguing with urban neighbors.

At the height of the development boom, three or four years ago, 1,800 acres a year of prime agricultural land was being converted to urban uses in the Treasure Valley. The Magic Valley and eastern Idaho also saw urban growth. A few irrigation districts in Idaho, including the Post Falls Irrigation District in North Idaho, have become totally urbanized and have either dissolved or changed focus.

According to the Bureau of Reclamation, 109 canals throughout the Pacific Northwest are defined as urbanized. Of those, 42 deliver 200 cubic-feet-per-second or more, 23 deliver between 100 and 199 cfs and 44 deliver less than 100 cfs.

That creates plenty of potential for conflict, as participants in a summit on agricultural-urban water issues learned. The summit was held in Boise in mid-October.

“Our biggest challenge is unauthorized discharge of storm water into our canal system,” said Nathan Draper, manager of the Settler’s Irrigation District in the Nampa area. The irrigation district owns 26 miles of canal and 95 miles of laterals to service approximately 13,100 acres. But the district also now has over 80 storm-water outfalls discharging into the system ranging in size from 12 to 48 inches.

Canals were designed to be larger at the beginning of the system and to become smaller at the tail end as water deliveries are made and less water needs to be transported. That works well as long as irrigators are taking their water, but if irrigators shut down or lose power to operate sprinkler irrigation systems during a storm, canals can quickly over top.

Add to that storm water running off paved surfaces and, suddenly, an area could be flooded.

Draper points out that storm water is also a problem during the winter if a rain storm melts snow quickly. Culverts filled with debris and ice in the off season can quickly jam and send storm water to flood areas.

It’s not just the sudden surge in water quantity that causes problems, but also water quality.

“The water has everything from chemical to debris,” he said.

In eastern Idaho, flooding is an issue for an entirely different reason. A high ground-water table — 3 feet t o 4 feet — in the Rigby area means many homes have flooded basements starting around the 4th of July and lasting through the rest of the irrigation year.

The city of Rigby has built a pump station to pipe subwater from areas within city limits to a pond outside of town. H. Roger Warner, a hydrologist from Rigby, questions the wisdom of a state law that encourages the use of surface water over ground water to irrigate subdivisions.

The law makes sense in areas where ground-water tables are dropping and drinking water supplies are threatened, he said.

“But it’s hard to prove to us that there is a shortage of water,” he added.

It’s those kind of inconsistencies that annoy developers, especially if the inconsistency leads to increased costs. Ron Bath, a developer in the Treasure Valley, was also critical of the state law requiring surface-water shares stay with developed land.

He believes subdivisions would use less water than agricultural lands did, but irrigation entities often continue to deliver the same water as when the land was farmed. Suburban land owners can’t put all that water to use, so it is wasted, he said.

Cooperation is key

While there was plenty of points of contention, Kris Polly believes cooperation is the key to finding solutions. He represented the Bureau of Reclamation on a panel discussion during the summit and told a story about an irrigation district in Oregon that planned to pipe a canal. Homeowners who had property along the canal protested the pipe project because they viewed the canal as a water feature.

The irrigation district offered a compromise and built the homeowners a water feature of their choice to replace what was lost when the canal was piped.

“Engineers are always cheaper than lawyers,” Polly said. “I think you will find that farmers really wrap their minds around an engineering solution. Farmers are adaptive.”

The Bureau of Reclamation spends $1 million annually to map canal systems across the West and is about half done. Part of that effort is to identify those in urban areas.

“The better information we have, the better decisions can be made,” Polly said.

The Truckee-Carson Canal breach last January is a good example of what can happen when good information is available. Although 490 homes were flooded, causing $60 million worth of damage, automated gates shut the canal system down 45 minutes earlier than a manual system would have allowed.

The canal was carrying 900 cfs of water. One cfs is about the size of a basketball, Polly said. Shutting that amount of water off 45 minutes earlier prevented even more damage from occurring.

But when BuRec officials looked back at their maps, they found those 490 homes weren’t along the canal system seven years ago. As a result of that canal breach, an irrigation district in Washington lost its insurance.

“A good relationship is built on good communication,” Polly said. “Good communication is based on underlying assumptions. If the assumption is we can’t get along, you will fight. If the underlying assumption is that we can work together, you will be more successful.”

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