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May 8, 2015
CapitalPress.com
5
Water
Oregon water fund rules proposed
Regulations will lay out operations
By MATEUSZ PERKOWSKI
Capital Press
Dan Wheat/Capital Press
The Yakima River fl ows along state Highway 225 north of Benton
City, Wash., after fl owing through the Yakima Valley and about 20
miles from its confl uence with the Columbia River. This was March
26 when it was fairly full. Irrigation districts are curtailing water
deliveries in an effort to preserve their water supplies.
Irrigation district shuts down
temporarily to save water
By DAN WHEAT
Capital Press
SUNNYSIDE, Wash. —
With a shrinking water fore-
cast and millions of dollars
in crops at stake, one of the
largest irrigation districts in
Washington’s Yakima Valley
will stop water deliveries to
farmers for at least two weeks
and buy water from a neigh-
boring district that has senior
water rights.
The 72,000-
acre Roza Irri-
gation District
will stop deliv-
ering water to
its 1,700 cus-
tomers for 14
Revell
days, and possi-
bly longer, in an
effort to save water for later in
the growing season.
At the same time, the
neighboring Sunnyside Valley
Irrigation District has agreed
to lease 5,000 acre-feet of
water to the Roza district this
summer. Sunnyside farmers
will receive $500 for every
acre they don’t irrigate.
The districts’ boards took
the actions May 5, one day af-
ter the U.S. Bureau of Recla-
mation reduced its estimate of
summer water supply for ju-
nior water right holders in the
Yakima Basin to 47 percent of
normal due to drought.
Most farmers in the Ya-
kima Valley will be impact-
ed by the drought to varying
degrees, the district manag-
ers said. Loss of production
and costs of coping with the
drought will be in the “tens of
millions of dollars and maybe
into the hundreds,” said Scott
Revell, manager of the Roza
Irrigation District in Sunny-
side.
“Low elevation snow in
the mountains is gone and the
47 percent scenario is based
on 100 percent of average
precipitation for the rest of the
season,” Revell said.
But precipitation is below
average so the water forecast
will keep dropping, he said.
“Right now we are using
38 percent of normal as our
planning basis,” Revell said.
In the drought of 2005, the
USBR Yakima Basin forecast
dropped to 34 percent of nor-
mal and the district shut down
early for 23 days, he said. It
had similar shutdowns during
droughts in 2001 and 1994.
The Roza, a junior water
right district, serves the ex-
panse of farmland from Se-
lah to Benton City. Normally,
it’s entitled to 375,000 acre-
feet of water and uses about
300,000 in a season. This
year, farmers are hoping for
half that.
There are about 110 emer-
gency drought wells in the
Yakima Basin with 90 percent
of them in the Roza, Revell
said. The state Department of
Ecology is awaiting legisla-
tive funding to authorize their
use, he said, adding he does
not know the total acreage
they serve.
The district cut its usage to
25 percent of normal on April
20. It will stop diverting wa-
ter from Yakima River above
Selah at 7 a.m. May 11. It will
take about four days for irri-
gators to use all the water in
the district’s 95 miles of main-
stem canal and 350 miles of
laterals.
To the extent possible,
gravity lines and pump tubes
from laterals to farms are to
remain full to speed restart.
The canals leak too much
to hold water during the shut-
down so they will be dewa-
tered and river water won’t
be diverted again until May
25 or perhaps June 1, Rev-
ell said. The board will meet
May 22 to determine when the
system will be reactivated. It
largely depends on how hot
the weather gets and if there is
rain, he said.
Some cherry growers and
blueberry, hay, mint and corn
growers want the shutdown
minimized while hop, grape,
apple and pear growers pre-
fer a longer shutdown to save
more water for July through
September, Revell said.
“Some of the larger blue-
berry growers grow other
things like hops, grapes and
tree fruit. They want water
later for those,” he said.
Many apple growers have
ponds they can use for a par-
tial irrigation in the middle of
the shutdown and “in a per-
fect world we will get a rain
or two. It always seems to
rain around cherry harvest,”
he said.
Chances of rain are better
in May and June than in July
and August.
“Hay guys are asking
for one good cutting. Some
of them are selling water to
hop and apple growers with-
in the district and will forgo
fi rst-cutting,” he said.
The Roza began deliv-
ering water to growers in
mid-March and reduced allo-
cations from 7.1 gallons per
minute to 1.8 on April 20 in
hopes of saving water for lat-
er.
Every day the system is
shut down about 800 acre-feet
of water is saved, Revell said.
Customers favor the shut-
down 2 to 1, he said.
The shutdown also shuts
off water to Terrace Heights
Irrigation District, which
serves about 200 acres east of
Yakima.
The goal is to have water
available as far into Septem-
ber as possible.
There may be a slight
bump of half a gallon per min-
ute or so for about 10 days at
the restart, otherwise deliver-
ies will resume at 1.8 gallons
per minute, he said.
Jim Trull, manager of Sun-
nyside Valley Irrigation Dis-
trict, said its customers have
until May 18 to sign up to al-
low their water to be leased to
the Roza district for $500 per
acre for the season.
Roza is budgeting $1.2
million for 5,000 acre-feet
with hopes of having half re-
imbursed by the state.
“I’m afraid we may not
have 5,000 acre-feet because
it’s late and the season is ear-
ly. People have already plant-
ed,” Trull said.
Those most likely to lease
out their water are those who
haven’t yet planted corn or
wheat or who can afford not
to water pastures, he said.
SVID has senior water
rights and 11,000 customers
on 94,614 acres from just
below Union Gap about 45
miles to just below Prosser.
SVID began water deliveries
April 1 and has reduced them
from 7.5 gallons per minute to
5.7 gpm to save water.
Farther north in the Yaki-
ma Basin, the Kittitas Recla-
mation District, also a junior
water right district, started
water deliveries April 20 at
1.25 cubic feet per second
per acre per 24 hours instead
of a normal 2.25 cfs. Timothy
growers will get one cutting
instead of two. The KRD is
the largest irrigation district
in the valley, serving 60,000
acres.
Without water runoff from
lower elevation snowpack,
the irrigation districts are us-
ing water from the Yakima
Basin’s fi ve mountain reser-
voirs earlier than normal.
Streamfl ows now are near
what they usually are in June
or early July, said Chuck Gar-
ner, Yakima Project river op-
erations supervisor for USBR
in Yakima.
Oregon’s water supply de-
velopment fund is closer to
becoming functional now that
regulators have proposed rules
for its operation that may be fi -
nalized in mid-June.
Meanwhile, state lawmak-
ers are considering upping the
fund’s size from the already-ap-
proved $10 million to $16 mil-
lion, along with a bevy of other
water proposals.
The fund was created by the
Oregon Legislature in 2013 but
hasn’t yet dispensed any mon-
ey because irrigators, conser-
vationists and others have been
negotiating the environmental
conditions that will apply to
projects.
Storage projects must ded-
icate 25 percent of their water
for in-stream uses under the
law, which is intended to help
fi sh.
They’re also subject to “sea-
sonally varying fl ow” restric-
tions that determine how much
water can be withdrawn outside
the regular irrigation season
without disrupting watershed
function.
Details about “seasonally
varying fl ow” requirements
and other aspects of the fund’s
operation were hammered out
by two task forces in 2014 and
early 2015, with that informa-
tion now being incorporated
into proposed rules written by
the Oregon Water Resources
Department.
Under the rules, projects
will be subject to increased
scrutiny depending on their im-
pact to streams and how much
environmental data is available
about the waterway.
The proposed rules were re-
cently made available for public
comment, with OWRD sched-
uled to hold fi ve rule-making
hearings around the state be-
tween May 18 and May 22. The
Oregon Water Resources Com-
mission is expected to consider
adopting the regulations during
its June 18-19 meeting.
During negotiations, irriga-
tor groups were concerned that
the environmental conditions
associated with funding could
be too onerous for project de-
velopers to apply for funds.
The complexity of the rules
remains a concern for Sen.
Chuck Thomsen, R-Hood Riv-
er, who was involved in passing
Senate Bill 839, which created
the water supply development
fund.
Environmental restrictions
were necessary to get the leg-
islation passed in a Demo-
crat-controlled legislature, but
it remains to be seen if projects
will be able to meet the 25 per-
cent in-stream use requirement
and the “seasonally varying
fl ow” conditions, he said.
“They just take the com-
mon sense out of it,” Thomsen
said.
The conditions placed on
water projects will make them
more expensive to build at a
time when Oregon doesn’t have
enough reservoirs to store water
when it is available, he said.
“We’ve relied on snow pack
for so many years. If it’s not
going to be there, we’ve got to
have a back-up,” Thomsen said.
At this point, it’s important
to simply get the water supply
development fund up and run-
ning to assist projects that can
work under the proposed rules,
said JR Cook, director of the
Northeast Oregon Water Asso-
ciation, who is trying to improve
irrigation systems in the region
and who participated in the ne-
gotiations.
Once the fund is operational
with a track record, lawmakers
can later make “tweaks” to en-
sure it functions better, Cook
said.
“It requires baby steps,” he
said. “We can’t fi x it all at once.”
The Oregon Water Resourc-
es Department is persuading
lawmakers to authorize $50
million in bonds to pay for the
state’s integrated water resource
strategy, which includes an ad-
ditional $6.25 million for the
water supply development fund.
Of that proposal, $30 million
would be allocated for loans and
roughly $14 million for feasibil-
ity studies and other water fund-
ing projects.
Emergency negotiations aim to avert Idaho curtailment
Snake River water call looms
By JOHN O’CONNELL
Capital Press
BOISE — Water manag-
ers say last-minute negoti-
ations to avert curtailment
of junior wells under the
decade-old Surface Water
Coalition delivery call could
force longterm changes in
farming practices for many
Southern Idaho irrigators.
Groundwater
irrigators
subject to the call spanning
the area from Jerome to Ida-
ho Falls have fallen short in
meeting a May 1 deadline
to acquire 89,000 acre-feet
of mitigation water — owed
this season to Twin Falls Ca-
nal Co. and American Falls
Reservoir District No. 2.
The coalition’s canal
companies say groundwater
pumping has reduced spring
fl ows into the Snake River
from Blackfoot to the Mini-
doka Dam. Most surface
rights predate groundwater
rights and therefore receive
priority under Idaho law.
Idaho Department of Wa-
The Surface Water Coalition’s water call against junior
groundwater users is based on declining spring flows in
the Snake River reach from Blackfoot to Minidoka
Area in
detail
Dam due to well water pumping.
IDAHO
20
Idaho Falls
CRATERS
OF THE MOON
NAT’L MON.
AND RESERVE
20
Snake River
segment subject
to curtailment
15
26
Blackfoot
39
26
93
SN A
KE
SHOSHONE-
BANNOCK
TRIBES
N
PLAI
R
RIVE
American Falls
Reservoir
Pocatello
24
Minidoka Dam
Rupert
Lake
r
Wolcott
ve
Ri
S ak e
American
Falls
30
N
84
15
Burley
30
27
84
20 miles
91
Alan Kenaga/Capital Press
ter Resources staff are evalu-
ating materials submitted by
Idaho Ground Water Appro-
priators, including evidence
of the acquisition of some
mitigation water, though
it’s well below the required
amount, and documents on
past actions to bolster aqui-
fer levels. IDWR Deputy
Director Mat Weaver said
the department will factor in
those documents to determine
a curtailment priority date,
before sending curtailment
notices to agricultural, munic-
ipal and industrial users early
next week.
But groundwater and
surface irrigators have also
commenced emergency meet-
ings, hoping to agree upon a
longterm solution that averts
the looming crisis this season
while stabilizing aquifer lev-
els into the future.
To facilitate a more open
dialogue, both sides have ex-
cluded their attorneys from
discussions. Weaver has as-
sisted in the meetings to offer
IDWR’s technical expertise,
but even IGWA Executive
Director Lynn Tominaga has
been left out.
That’s fi ne with him.
“This is the fi rst time in 10
years that we’ve fi nally got-
ten the attorneys out of the
way and the consultants out
of the way, and we’re actu-
ally sitting down and saying,
‘What can we do?’ instead
of going to court,” Tominaga
said. “We’re fi nally starting to
sit down and talk about solu-
tions, and that’s always what
we wanted to do, but we have
attorneys and other folks get
in the way.”
Calif. regulators approve unprecedented water cutbacks
By FENIT NIRAPPIL
Associated Press
SACRAMENTO,
Ca-
lif. (AP) — California water
regulators adopted sweeping,
unprecedented
restrictions
Tuesday on how people, gov-
ernments and businesses can
use water amid the state’s on-
going drought, hoping to push
reluctant residents to deeper
conservation.
The State Water Resourc-
es Control Board approved
rules that force cities to limit
watering on public property,
encourage homeowners to let
their lawns die and impose
mandatory water-savings tar-
gets for the hundreds of local
agencies and cities that supply
water to California customers.
Gov. Jerry Brown sought
the more stringent regula-
tions, arguing that voluntary
conservation efforts have so
far not yielded the water sav-
ings needed amid a four-year
drought. He ordered water
agencies to cut urban water
use by 25 percent from levels
in 2013, the year before he de-
clared a drought emergency.
“It is better to prepare now
than face much more painful
cuts should it not rain in the
fall,” board Chairwoman Fe-
licia Marcus said Tuesday as
the panel voted 5-0 to approve
the new rules.
Although the rules are
called mandatory, it’s still
unclear what punishment
the state water board and lo-
cal agencies will impose for
those that don’t meet the tar-
gets. Board offi cials said they
expect dramatic water sav-
ings as soon as June and are
willing to add restrictions and
penalties for agencies that lag.
But the board lacks staff to
oversee each of the hundreds
of water agencies, which
range dramatically in size and
scope. Some local agencies
that are tasked with achiev-
ing savings do not have the
resources to issue tickets to
those who waste water, and
many others have chosen not
to do so.
Despite the dire warnings,
it’s also still not clear that Cal-
ifornians have grasped the se-
riousness of the drought or the
need for conservation. Data
released by the board Tuesday
showed that Californians con-
served little water in March,
and local offi cials were not
aggressive in cracking down
on waste.
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