[7] Enviro Groups Pick New Water Fight
Several environmental groups say they intend to sue the Bureau of Reclamation to keep the agency from building a new siphon in the Odessa irrigation area of eastern Washington with $50 million in federal stimulus funding. They say it will allow too much water to be taken out of the Columbia River.
"The latest climate change studies in the Columbia River Basin show that the Columbia River is already too warm for fish like salmon and steelhead and water availability is a major limiting factor." said Brett VandenHeuvel, director of Columbia Riverkeeper. "Given the Northwest's investment in recovering salmon and steelhead, the Bureau's de facto decision to expand the Columbia Basin Project makes no sense."
The groups have already sued the Bureau over a new management process called the Columbia River Initiative that would draw down Lake Roosevelt behind Coulee Dam one foot each summer to provide more water for fish flows, municipal, and agricultural uses, including 30,000 acre-feet a year to the Odessa area to reduce groundwater pumping by farmers, where aquifer levels continue to decline. The Initiative is also designed to help junior water-rights holders in drought years when their water supply might be curtailed otherwise.
A study conducted by Washington State University concluded that aquifer decline could cost Adams, Franklin, Grant, and Lincoln counties as much as $630 million dollars annually in regional sales, a loss of 3,600 jobs, and a loss of $211 million in regional income.
The Bureau says the new siphon would be needed before any more water can be delivered to the Odessa region. A tunnel had already been completed years ago under the I-90 highway to facilitate future construction.
The groups proposing to sue, the Spokane-based Center for Environmental Law & Policy, the Sierra Club and Columbia Riverkeeper, say it's illegal to spend the stimulus money on projects that haven't undergone NEPA review.
The Bureau had earlier conducted an environmental analysis of the Columbia River Initiative and concluded that it had negligible impacts to ESA-listed fish stocks, after a consultation with NOAA Fisheries.
The Bureau, in a June response to the groups' earlier complaints about using stimulus funding for the Weber Siphons, said the capacity of the siphons would exceed that needed to deliver the water from the drawdown agreement because they would be built to meet the capacity of the pipes coming into each siphon on each end.
The environmental groups had argued that the siphon expansion would allow for delivery of 202,000 acre-feet of water to the Odessa subarea, that would serve 57,000 acres, about half of the acreage that is now watered by deep wells.
A study is underway to look at alternatives to groundwater pumping in the Odessa subarea. BuRec is looking at other sources of water, including modifying operations at Banks Lake, through additional drawdown of a two-foot operational raise, and construction of a new 127,000 acre-foot reservoir in Rocky Coulee. They say several water supply options may be necessary to provide a sufficient replacement water supply.
The Bureau told the environmental groups last June that construction of the Weber Siphons was not part of the Odessa Subarea Special Study. Odessa groundwater mining was allowed, in part, because of the early belief that the Columbia Basin Project would expand into the Odessa subarea and replace groundwater use.
In the 1980s, it was decided that expanding the CBR was not economically feasible. The project currently supplies irrigation water to about 670,000 acres of agricultural lands between Grand Coulee and the Quad Cities. The original plan called for distributing water to more than a million acres. -B. R.
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