Groups uniting to aid Odessa aquifer

Reclamation hosts info meeting Wednesday evening

COLUMBIA BASIN — Aquifer-minded organizations are coming together to coordinate efforts to preserve the Odessa Sub-Area Aquifer.

Such groups as the Columbia Basin Development League, Odessa Aquifer Replenishment Coalition, Washington State Potato Commission and Northwest Food Processors Association are part of the Odessa Aquifer Coordination Team, or OACT.

The team is a group working on projects to maintain irrigated agriculture in the Odessa Ground Water Management Sub-Area of Central Washington, including those replacing ground water with surface water and those reducing water withdrawals from the aquifer.

Dennis Conley, facilitator between the groups, declined to comment.

"I think really the potato industry has the most to lose," said the commission's executive director, Chris Voigt. "If the aquifer were to ever go dry, it would mean we would lose processors, which means we would lose acreage, which means we would lose growers."

Pat Boss, consultant for the replenishment coalition, said the goal at a pending meeting is to finalize some of the items under discussion in the past few months, and ensure it's "harmonized" with the latest draft of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation's latest draft study, which discusses four water distribution alternatives to the Odessa area.

"I think we're going to try to look at those four alternatives and sort of harmonize those into the coordination team's plan," Boss said.

Roger Thieme, chair of the development league, said the group came together to make certain different activities that solve the aquifer can be separated, and make certain the community at large understand there is no disagreement with all the interested parties. The team makes certain those groups get together, perhaps on a quarterly basis, and their efforts are coordinated in an open forum for discussion, he continued.

Creation of the team follows comments made by state Department of Ecology Director Jay Manning, who spoke before the League last year at their annual conference in November. At the time, Manning advised that one voice be presented to the department in their efforts.

Voigt said the commission got involved because there was not much unity in December about the fix to the aquifer's declining levels. The commission stepped in as an objective third party of sorts, he noted, to facilitate bringing people together and to develop a plan.

"It's not that everybody was that far away from each other," he said. "Actually, we had so much in common, it was just a matter of getting into a room together, everybody there, all these interested parties, and figuring out what's going to be best for the aquifer and how we're going to help the situation."

"Early on, there were a lot of ideas, and many of them were very, very good; some of them maybe weren't quite so good and others fell in between," Thieme said.

Thieme said the next step is for a more comprehensive report from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which released its study results last week identifying options for replacing groundwater use within the Odessa Ground Water Management Subarea with surface water from the Columbia Basin Project.

The options include proposals to construct variations of an East-High Canal system that Reclamation previously examined in the late 1980s. Other proposals include relying on the existing East Low Canal by expanding the canal capacity and constructing an extension to the canal or revising Project operations to obtain additional capacity so that existing East-Low Canal infrastructure could be used.

The study ends in 2010, Thieme said, at which point the bureau knows the most practical distribution system, taking into account river withdrawals and cost to growers and landowners. Efforts to start delivering the water follow a decision on how to do it.

The bureau hosts an information meeting Wednesday at 7 p.m. at Big Bend Community College's ATEC Building. Reclamation staff and partners are making formal presentations, answering questions, and explaining the next phase of the study.