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CapitalPress.com
August 19, 2016
Senators optimistic about wildire funding bill
By JOHN O’CONNELL
Capital Press
BOISE — Sponsors of a
bill irst introduced three years
ago to fund suppression of cat-
astrophic wildires the same as
other natural disasters, thereby
freeing resources for wildire
prevention, believe the timing
is now ideal to pass the legis-
lation.
Sens. Mike Crapo and Jim
Risch, both R-Idaho, and Ron
Wyden, D-Ore., say federal
land managers must often di-
vert funding from wildire pre-
vention and other programs to
ight big wildires.
Their Wildire Disaster
Funding Act, S. 235, would
authorize Federal Emergency
Management Agency disaster
funding for ires costing more
than 70 percent of the 10-year
average, leaving the U.S. For-
est Service and Bureau of Land
Management to continue fund-
ing responses to more typical
ires.
“These are the catastrophic
ires,” Crapo said. “They are
disasters just as much as a hur-
ricane, a lood or a tidal wave,
and we should deal with them
with the funding Congress has
already allocated for dealing
with natural disasters.”
The senators said during
an Aug. 15 press conference
the bill should impose no new
inancial burden on taxpayers,
as adequate investment in pre-
vention should reduce the prev-
alence of the largest wildires.
“When prevention gets
short shrift, and that is today’s
reality, you’re always going to
play catch-up ball in the rural
West,” Wyden said.
The bill passed the Senate
and failed in the House, but a
joint conference committee,
which includes both Wyden
and Risch was formed anyway,
with plans of attaching the lan-
guage to an energy and natural
resources authorization bill or
some other appropriations bill.
Action on the bill is likely in
November, according to Cra-
po’s ofice.
Wyden said more than 250
organizations and several key
lawmakers now support the
concept, including Sen. Chuck
Schumer, D-N.Y., who has
grown increasingly concerned
about wildire impacts on his
state’s baseball bat industry.
“I think after years of bitter
debate on this issue we may just
Courtesy of inciweb.nwcg.gov
A smoke column rises Aug. 12 from the Pioneer Fire in the Boise
National Forest.
may have found a sweet spot to
inally get this resolved — to
ix this broken, dysfunctional
mess of a budget system and do
it in a bipartisan way,” Wyden
said.
According to the senators,
the Forest Service spent $1.7
billion ighting ires in 2015,
and the top 1 percent of ires
represented 30 percent of the
total cost.
Risch believes the Pioneer
Fire, currently burning about
77,000 acres north of Idaho
City in the Boise National For-
est, demonstrates the impor-
tance of active forest manage-
Irrigation water should low
in SW Idaho until October
By SEAN ELLIS
Capital Press
CALDWELL, Idaho —
Water is expected to contin-
ue to low in most irrigation
ditches in southwestern Idaho
until the irst part of October.
That’s about normal for
most water delivery entities
in this part of the state, where
farmers are heavily dependent
on water stored in reservoirs.
“We’re going to sail right
through and go the whole sea-
son; there’s no doubt in my
mind,” said Alan Newbill, a
farmer and member of the Pio-
neer Irrigation District’s board
of directors.
Newbill said the district will
likely shut the system down
during the irst or second week
of October and would also like
to end the season with some
carryover water for the 2017
water season.
“If it’s really dry and peo-
ple need some water, we could
run a little bit longer but if they
don’t need it, there’s no sense
in wasting it,” he said.
The amount of storage wa-
ter Pioneer still has available
in Boise River reservoirs is
about two weeks better than
last year, said manager Mark
Zirschky.
Pioneer’s 5,800 patrons can
expect their irrigation water
to low until the irst or second
week of October in an aver-
Sean Ellis/Capital Press
A peppermint ield is irrigated Aug. 16 near Nampa, Idaho. Water is ex-
pected to low in irrigation ditches in southwestern Idaho until the irst
part of October, the normal water delivery shutoff date for this region.
age year. Zirschky agreed with
Newbill that the system should
meet that goal this year.
“We should certainly make
a full season,” he said. “We
should have some carryover wa-
ter but we’re not sure how much
yet. It just depends on what the
weather does.”
The Boise Project Board of
Control, which provides water
to 167,000 acres and ive irri-
gation districts in southwestern
Idaho, is also looking at operat-
ing for a full season, said man-
ager Tim Page.
“The decision hasn’t been
made yet, but I suspect we’ll
go into October before we shut
irrigation off,” he said. “We’re
in pretty good shape and we’re
going to have a fairly good sea-
son.”
Page said water use this year
hasn’t been as high as in some
past years, which he assumes is
due to different cropping rota-
tions and irrigation practices in
the valley, including many farm-
ers’ switch to drip irrigation.
Farmers who get irrigation
water from the Weiser River
system are having a much better
water year than they did in 2015,
when the system was shut down
in mid-August, two months
ahead of normal.
The system is getting low,
but farmers who depend on it
are also down to the last few
weeks of their main irrigation
needs. Demand should fall off
signiicantly in September, said
Weiser River watermaster Bran-
di Horton.
“It’s crunch time but we’re
still looking pretty good,” she
said. “Last year was rough.
This year has been pretty good
to us.”
ment. The timber industry had
planned to harvest 15 million
board-feet of timber from the
ire area, which burned before
the harvest could take place.
Risch believes the Pioneer Fire,
which was half contained as of
Aug. 16, wouldn’t have grown
so big had thinning been con-
ducted more expeditiously.
In Eastern Idaho, the Power
Line Fire, which burned 3,106
acres of range land on the Fort
Hall Indian Reservation, was
controlled on Aug. 15. The ire
was ignited Aug. 10 by light-
ning, said BLM spokesman
Lynn Ballard.
Courtesy of Mike McMillan
Black Mountain Hotshot Skyler Penna works a burn operation on
the Pioneer Fire in the Boise National Forest.
Strong Snake Plain water outlook deteriorates
By JOHN O’CONNELL
Capital Press
IDAHO FALLS, Idaho
— A once comfortable wa-
ter outlook has deteriorated
on the Eastern Snake Plain,
where water users now face re-
cord-low stream lows in some
reaches, tightening supplies
and the likelihood of ending
the irrigation season with little
storage carryover.
“Some of the junior priori-
ty water rights have been shut
off, and some of the canals
have run out of water,” said
Lyle Swank, watermaster for
the water district encompass-
ing the Eastern Snake Plain.
“There are some that are still
trying to ind if there’s any
possibility to get water to their
areas.”
Swank said stream lows
in the plain are approaching
historically low levels. For ex-
ample, the Snake River reach
past Jackson Reservoir, at Flag
Ranch in Wyoming, was low-
ing at a record-low 195 cubic
feet per second on Aug. 10,
about half of the median level
for the date.
With natural lows prema-
turely diminished, Swank said,
water users have been rapidly
drafting storage, which has
accounted for 70 percent of
his water district’s recent use.
Reservoirs were 44 percent
full as of Aug. 10, with Ameri-
can Falls Reservoir just a quar-
ter full.
Snake Plain water manag-
ers were planning for a strong
water year in March, but peak
lows arrived early, limiting
storage accumulation, and
the summer has brought little
precipitation and a prolonged
stretch of high temperatures.
Twin Falls Canal Co. gen-
eral manager Brian Olmstead
said he’ll make it through this
John O’Connell/Capital Press
Eastern Snake Plain storage and river low levels have dropped
far below normal. American Falls Reservoir in southeast Idaho has
just a quarter of its capacity, leaving boat docks at Seagull Bay
Marina exposed.
water year without cutting de-
liveries only because of rough-
ly 40,000 acre-feet of water
he’s received from junior
groundwater irrigators under
terms of a Surface Water Co-
alition water call settlement.
Olmstead said users began tap-
ping storage much earlier than
normal.
“I used considerably more
storage in June than during the
last several years,” Olmstead
said.
Steve Howser, gener-
al manager of the Aber-
deen-Springield Canal Co.,
said he received about 15 per-
cent less storage accrual this
season than he anticipated, de-
mand is about 25 percent high-
er than normal for this time of
year and evaporative losses
have been up during a summer
in which temperatures have
topped 90 degrees for 25 days.
“I’ll have no carry-over,”
Howser predicted. “With no
carry-over, I’ll need a bet-
ter-than-average winter.”
Complicating matters for
many water managers, Swank
said 141,340 acre-feet of sur-
face water was leased this sea-
LEGAL
LEGAL
OREGON TECHNICAL
ADVISORY COMMITTEE
MEETING (OTAC)
WHAT: OTAC Meeting
WHEN: September 15, 2016
@12:30pm-4:00pm
WHERE: Oregon Department
of Fish and Wildlife
4034 Fairview Industrial Drive, SE
Salem, OR 97302
The Classroom (Conference
Room) – 1st Floor
For more information, or to
arrange special accommoda-
tions for meeting attendees,
please
contact
Tracy
Robillard, Oregon NRCS
State Office, 503-414-3206.
CHERRY AVENUE STORAGE
2680 Cherry Ave. NE
Salem, OR 97301
(503) 399-7454
Sat., Sept. 3rd• 10 A.M.
• Unit 4
Bryan VanDyke
• Unit 22
Larry Berry
• Unit 138/185
Rachel Choudry/John CanaVan
• Unit 179
John Codner
• Unit 128
Phyllis Perez
Cherry Avenue Storage
reserves the right to refuse
any and all bids
son — mostly to groundwater
districts seeking to inject it into
the aquifer to stabilize ground-
water levels, and help meet
terms of their water call set-
tlement. In addition to forfeit-
ing their water for this season,
entities that leased water will
be the last to have their rights
illed next season.
Surface Water Coalition
attorney John Simpson sees
no net gain to conducting re-
charge when it cuts into stor-
age carryover.
“One of the guiding princi-
ples the surface water people
looked at when negotiating
with the groundwater folks
was a continued reliance on
the storage system to solve this
problem was not addressing
the issue, and the issue was de-
clining spring lows and reach
gains,” Simpson said.
Howser
said
Aber-
deen-Springield leased 20,000
acre-feet to groundwater users
for recharge when the water
outlook appeared strong. He
recently sought to rent water to
help inish this season but dis-
covered “an awful lot of com-
panies rented for recharge in
one way or another” but now
believe they have no water to
spare.
LEGAL
PURSUANT TO ORS CHAPTER 87
Notice is hereby given that the
following vehicle will be sold,
for cash to the highest bidder,
on 8/29/2016. The sale will be
held at 10:00 am by
TRS OREGON INC
1887 ANUNSEN ST NE SALEM, OR
2015 Coachman Trailer
VIN - 5ZT3CH1B1FA310517
Amount due on lien $7,874.37
Reputed owner(s)
SEAN & HEIDI HALVERSON
USAA FEDERAL SAVINGS BANK
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