Water Attorney: Fisheries Sale Does Not Solve Water Rights Issue For Upper Snake Valley

A historic deal last week saw a group of water districts moving to purchase 3 Hagerman-area hatcheries. Before the deal, the hatcheries controlled water rights to the Eastern Snake River Plain Aquifer.

The purchase relieves a lot of tension between ground water users in a large region, and the surface water users like the hatcheries. Downstream rights-holders were there first, which means they could cut water to upstream users at any time.

That could have potentially dried hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland, according to former Idaho Water Resources Board chairman, Jerry Rigby.

But, Rigby said the problem is far from over in the Upper Snake River Valley region. He said, the purchase of the hatcheries resolved the issue for a smaller group, but it wouldn’t be possible to translate that to the large Idaho Falls and Pocatello region.

“As opposed to going down and buying one company or two companies out, there’s no way this group can go down and buy all that acreage down there,” said Rigby.

Rigby said until a mechanism is developed here, hundreds of thousands of acres of farm land is potentially at the mercy of canal companies down south.

“So what’s their answer?” he said. “Their answer right now is to mitigate.”

He said it means purchasing water from willing ground water sellers to give back to canal companies with surface water rights, to offset the effects of water pumped out of the ground. That way, everything is close to even at the end of the day, and there’s no reason for those who hold the rights to threaten a shut-off.

“It’s working,” he said. “Is it the best thing we’ll ever end up with? Who knows. Everyone’s trying to think out of the box.”

Until that out-of-box idea comes, Rigby said the mitigation system is probably the best option.

On a smaller scale, the purchase of those fish hatcheries did solve the problem in a more concentrated area. The agreement was finalized at the end of February.