The Endless Water War

H2O Deficit Strikes Again

By Joan McCarter, 9-26-07

Water again.

That signature two word phrase uttered by private detective Jake Gittes in Polanski’s masterpiece Chinatown initiated one of the the complicated and intertwined mysteries of the film, a plotline loosely based on the early 20th century scandal of the Owens Valley land grab. Not just land of course, but water--water diverted by a huge aqueduct running more than two hundred miles to bring water to Los Angeles and also to the San Fernando valley, the valley where William Mulholland, the unscrupulous water engineer for the city of LA, and his cronies had bought up most of the land.

Boise in 2007 is hardly Los Angeles, and thus far there haven’t been any accusations of chicanery in the latest water wars of Southern Idaho, but the stage is being set for another round in the centuries old conflict over the region’s most precious resource. Last week, the Idaho Statesman reported on the latest developers’ scheme:

At the same time water shortages are threatening to dry up hundreds of thousands of acres of Idaho farmland, developers are pondering a 50-mile pipeline to carry water from the Snake River to future subdivisions in the desert south and east of Boise....

The 20 landowners who recently banded together to put up the $1.5 million to study the pipeline proposal are betting they will be able to sell the water for homes and businesses in the desert south of Boise for far more. Their concept calls for building one or two pipelines, 30 to 50 miles long and 3 to 5 feet in diameter at a cost of $400 million.

The pipes would carry 60 million to 120 million gallons out of the Snake River each day. As a comparison, United Water pumped 78 million gallons on July 1 to service 83,000 connections — about 250,000 people — in the Boise area.

Millions of gallons out of the Snake River each day, when an official with the state water resources board says “we’re in a veritable crisis mode on the Eastern Snake Aquifer,” where Idaho’s Magic Valley gets much of its water.

The news also follows on the heels of a tense few months for more than 600 Magic Valley farmers whose water rights were nearly curtailed by Idaho’s water department this sprint. Two “senior” users, Blue Lakes Trout Farm and Clear Springs Food’s Snake River Farm, demanded, and were owed, more water. That crisis was narrowly diverted early this month when two grounwater groups, Idaho Ground Water Appropriators and the Idaho Dairymen’s Association, stepped in to provide the water.

That’s a stop gap for the current growing season, but the same competing demands will be back at the water resources board next spring, and they might be joined by those Boise developers. It’s pretty clear where the state water resources director David Tuthill is going to come down on future decisions, according to the Statesman.

Tuthill said the pipeline proposal fits into the state’s vision for changing water use. Cities such as Los Angeles, Denver and Las Vegas have reached out beyond their watersheds to tap into agricultural water supplies. It was just a matter of time before the idea came to Idaho, Tuthill said. “This is exactly the kind of thing I expect we’ll see in other areas as well,” he said.

Idaho certainly isn’t alone among parched interior western states facing this critical resource allocation question. But Idaho does have two the most critical watersheds in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem, and one of them is the upper Snake River--the same Snake river that the farmers, the fish farmers, the developers all have their eyes on. And Idaho’s per capita water consumption is second in the nation to California.

It’d be nice to hope that all these competing interests, under the guiding hand of the state, could come to some kind of equitabe arrangement, but that’s not how it generally works in water wars, is it? As the late Marc Reisner, in his 1986 classic, Cadillac Desert, posited “Water runs uphill toward money,”

And the money has a new friend in Washington, and old friend from Idaho days, in the form of Mark Limbaugh. Former Idahoan and watermaster of the Payette River Basin, Limbaugh is just the latest example of Dirk Kempthorne’s, shall we say ethically challenged, Interior Department, which seems to have turned into little more than a training ground for future lobbyists. Limbaugh just left his position as assistant Interior secretary for water and science to become a lobbyist on, guess what? Yup, water. Again.

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