Water rights talks moving forward

POLSON — The measured steps of the Flathead Reservation water rights negotiations continued last week, as teams met to update each other on the legal, technical and administrative sides of the issue.

While the technical side again dominated the meeting’s floor time, state officials said the work on the stitching together of the Unitary Management Proposal could get a boost from the revision of several Department of Natural Resources and Conservation water rights laws passed by this year’s Legislature.

DNRC head legal counsel Candace West said legislation passed this session will clarify and streamline several DNRC water rights processes. West said the legislation will not only help people better understand water laws, but the changes in the state-based process will help all interested water stakeholders.

House Bill 40, which was signed by the governor on April 17, will revise the water rights permitting process. A draft of the new law should be ready by July, West said.

Most importantly to the negotiation teams, the new clarifications and updates in the state-based laws will help to more efficiently work through “tough issues” faced on the road to a workable compact, West said. 

“We look forward to jumping into this,” she said.

As members of state, tribal and federal technical teams continue the time consuming ground work, team heads met on Tuesday to discuss the latest findings in-depth. A portion of these discussions were presented on Wednesday, and plans were made to set meetings in May that will further explain this aspect of the negotiations.

Department of Interior representative Duane Mecham said the Bureau of Reclamations is also now reviewing an alternate water source scenario where the Flathead Reservoir is used as a supplemental water source in compact, with Hungry Horse Reservoir as a backup. 

Tribal hydrologist and technical team spokesperson Seth Makepeace gave a report at last month’s meeting on the modeling and mapping of the Hungry Horse Reservoir, and how it could be used as a crucial source of existing and provisional water. Crew have been working to determine how the substantial storage reservoir will play into the compact. 

The acceptable amount of supplemental water, how much is “drafted” for continued multipurpose water use in the final compact, must be agreed upon. Mecham said the plans were discussed at Tuesday’s meeting. Contractors and crews are preparing a report on both scenarios and sub plans for May’s meeting, he said.

In an effort to keep the negotiation team up-to-date with the technical teams’ multi-pronged groundwork effort, Makepeace gave a presentation of the reservations ground water and how mapping and tracking it will play into the compact.

“Ground water is a resource that is highly complex because of the geology of the land,” Makepeace said. “It changes step to step.”

Each valley within the reservation represents a unique ground water situation. Depending on the land’s elevation, geological makeup and dozens of other factors can effect the aquifers and how they refill.

There are many “very unusual” groundwater patterns have been found across the reservation, Makepeace said.

The groundwater teams take the frameworks of factors like these and simplifies it to create flow models that are packaged and analyzed for better geological understanding. All this information is used to conceptualize things like water budgets and track water uses, which has important implications into the other parts of the compact, Makepeace said.

Compact commission project manager Susan Cottingham followed Makepeace, reporting that the 2009 Montana Legislative session that finished last Tuesday was overall positive for the interested parties’ bills. The National Bison Range Compact was passed into law, along with the Flathead compact commission extension.

Cottingham did note that the commission will have to deal with budget cuts in the coming months. The 7 percent cuts will mean that , among other things, no more work can be contracted out.

“We’re pleased we have more time, but we are going to have to do some cutting,” Cottingham said.

The next meeting will be held on May 27, with technical team public meetings being tentatively set for June 3.