'This is all about water'
Development league holds annual conference
MOSES LAKE — The importance of water was omnipresent Wednesday afternoon and evening.
It came up several times during a half-hour long presentation on the history of the Columbia Basin Project.
Mick Qualls said it several times during his presentation: "This is all about water."
Qualls, president of Ephrata-based Qualls Agriculture Laboratory Inc., presented an outline of the history of the Columbia Basin Irrigation Project to the audience during the Columbia Basin Development League's annual conference Wednesday at the ATEC Building at Big Bend Community College.
His presentation spread from the early history of a land so dry nobody wanted it and included politicians famous both regionally and world-wide, including both President Roosevelts, Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy, and outlined all the events that led to the formation of Grand Coulee Dam, which led to the Manhattan Project, aluminum yards, shipyards, Boeing aircraft, winning World War II and the project. At one point, Qualls joked about cramming an hour of material into 30 minutes.
Other than Qualls, conference attendees heard from Ray Wright, president of the Rio Grand Water Conservation District in Monte Vista, Colo., about their own aquifer depletion situation.
Wright said later he wanted to convey the concept of community support being the only successful way to move forward with any initiative. While difficult to do, it's impossible anymore to accomplish anything without compromise, he added.
The area being irrigated out of Odessa appears to have hope for salvation, Wright noted, while other areas of the country do not have the same chances.
"It's probably a unique opportunity by having surface waters at least available to attempt to solve this problem," he said. "That's a luxury that not a lot of other areas in the West have at this point."
League Executive Secretary Alice Parker said attendance numbers were down slightly from last year's conference, but comparable to previous conferences in the past three years. She postulated that a number of meetings held prior to the event to catch residents up on the latest may have left them feeling sufficiently informed.
"Things are moving and they're moving faster than we ever anticipated," she said. "(People) just need to stay involved and stay engaged with what's happening."
Bureau of Reclamation Study Manager Ellen Berggren provided the latest update on the feasibility study, which recently identified four water delivery alternatives to the impacted area, including possible construction of an East-High Canal system or expansion of the existing East-Low Canal.
Berggren said the study enters an appraisal-level analysis, currently in progress. A feasibility-level analysis begins October 2007 and then the study begins environmental and regulatory compliance activities, evaluating environmental and social impacts of the alternatives, consulting with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Fisheries, Native American tribes and the Department of Fish and Wildlife. Berggren anticipates everything completed by 2010.
Panels addressed the impact of the Odessa Aquifer's depletion on area stakeholders, including farmers, municipalities, utilities and the Department of Ecology, and the impact of the situation today upon processors, irrigation districts, counties and legislators.
East-Columbia Basin Irrigation District Manager and panelist Dick Erickson reported that getting the water out of the Columbia River in any of 11 identified options is going to be as big a hurdle as getting money to build anything, there are environmental regulations the irrigation district must satisfy. Erickson said a combination of three or four of those 11 options might be possible. Those options are presently under analysis.
He also noted work is still under way to get some water in the very near future to the second half of the project, and studies of supplemental feed routes into Potholes Reservoir also set the stage for the Odessa Sub-Area.
"There's some actual, real work going on that's going to hopefully within the time frame of 2008, 2009, actually happen," Erickson said following his speech.
Panelist Rep. Bill Hinkle, R-Cle Elum, said ongoing support in Olympia, Republican or Democrat, is important to helping the process of getting people to understand the importance of agriculture.
"These last couple years, I think we've had west side legislators start to understand our perspective," he said. "They need us to fix their transportation infrastructure, and we need them to understand the importance of water. Transportation in the Puget Sound corridor is what water is to us here. It's our life. We simply cannot function without it."
League chair Roger Thieme stressed the value of the level of the state's commitment for the project, but foresaw some slow news days ahead with the study in progress.
"The next real news is going to be when they narrow these alternatives down," he said. The league's goal is to keep the movement alive so people don't lose interest, he added. "The next steps are for us to really take this grassroots effort and to make a significant imprint on the Washington, D.C. area."