Historic water legislation relieves local irrigation pressures

Still work to be done, area leaders say

COLUMBIA BASIN - Legislation signed by Gov. Chris Gregoire last week for the largest delivery of water to the Columbia Basin area eases local pressures, leaders say.

The new law allows 82,500 acre-feet of water to be withdrawn from Lake Roosevelt behind Grand Coulee Dam beginning this year and up to 132,000 acre-feet of water in drought years.

"What it's going to do is it's going to help us resolve the issue out in the Odessa Aquifer area," said Alice Parker, executive secretary of the Columbia Basin Development League. "It's also going to release water for other people, such as municipalities and also keep water in the Columbia River for in-stream flows."

East Columbia Basin Irrigation District Secretary-Manager Craig Simpson said 30,000 acre-feet are designated for groundwater replacement in the Odessa Subarea.

The legislation is considered historic, Parker explained, because there haven't been any new releases of water for a long time.

"It's been a collaborative effort between the State of Washington, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, state Department of Ecology, irrigation districts and the tribes," she said. "It's been this agreement between those parties that have made this happen. I think that's one of kind of the historical things, that all of those parties were together trying to work out a solution."

East Columbia Basin Irrigation District Secretary-Manager Craig Simpson said a permit still needs to be established with the state.

"The district needs to get a contract with the Bureau of Reclamation and then the district itself needs to come up with how they're going to distribute those contracts to the lands out there," he said. "That's yet to be determined, exactly where the demand is and how we actually deliver the water to them. Our board is already starting to take a look at (that), and that process will take a little while to get determined, on how to get the water there."

"There's a lot of things that have to be done before we are able to utilize that water, like some infrastructure things that have to be done to make additional room for that water flow to come down," Parker said. "But it's a step in the right direction."

Resolving the issue is still quite a ways off, Parker noted, but the new water will relieve some of the pressure on the Odessa area aquifer.

"The question is, how do we get that water to them now?" she said. "That's the big obstacle we've got to address."

Simpson said it's going to be a process to get the water delivered, and the district may need to construct new facilities to deliver the water, depending upon where the demand is located.

"That'd be like pump plants out of the East Low Canal if we need to go out further than what we can get with people being close to the canal," he said.

The bureau has just about completed additional construction to get more water into the Potholes Reservoir, Parker said, which will allow some water to travel through to additional lands east of the East Low Canal.

Many landowners east of the East Low Canal have been looking for a surface water supply, especially with the Odessa Subarea Aquifer on the decline, Simpson said.

"Eventually we'll be able to serve 10,000 acres under production from wells, which will hopefully help move us toward a solution to the declining aquifer," he said. "These lands are all part of the Columbia Basin Project as it was originally designed. We still have quite a few hundreds of thousand acres to complete out in the Odessa Subarea for the completion of the Columbia Basin Project."

"We're just still moving ahead and you know, as they always say, you have to take baby steps to learn to walk, and so I guess that's what we're doing," Parker said.