Commissioners vote to continue collecting irrigation fees

The Lake County Commissioners voted 2 to 1 Monday to rescind a resolution to quit collecting fees on behalf of the county’s three irrigation districts. If it hadn’t been voted down, the resolution would have taken effect in July of this year.

The public meeting drew about 20 people, mostly irrigators, who spoke in favor of rescinding the resolution. Two, Christopher Chavasse, who described irrigators as a “special-interest group,” and David Passieri, encouraged commissioners to keep it in place.

Commissioner Gale Decker was also in favor of adhering to the resolution. He pointed out that the Flathead Indian Irrigation Project is a federal project, run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which he believes should take the lead in collecting operation and maintenance fees as it does on other reservations across the United States.

He also doesn’t believe there’s a statutory requirement for Lake County to collect fees for a federal agency or the Tribes.

“If we’re going to do this as a courtesy to irrigation districts, we might as well extend this as a courtesy to a lot of other districts in Lake County,” he said, such as fire, sewer and water districts.

He also objects to the county collecting fees from property owners whose lands don’t actually receive irrigation water.

This squabble between the county and irrigators first arose in 2021, when the commissioners tabled their first resolution to quit collecting irrigation fees to give irrigators more time to work out a cooperative management agreement with the Tribes and BIA under the Montana Water Rights Protection Act.

A year later, with no progress in sight, the commissioners passed the resolution 2 to 1 on July 25, and planned to quit collecting fees for the 2022 tax year. A crowd of around 250 disgruntled irrigators met with the commissioners Aug. 30, 2022, in Ronan, and asked them to reconsider the resolution and try to work through issues the county was having with fee collection.

A week later, commissioners agreed to change the effective date to 2023 and try to sort out some of the bookkeeping issues that were problematic for Lake County treasurer Robin Rubel, while seeking an opinion from the Attorney General about who is responsible for fee collection – the county or the BIA. No such opinion has been received by the irrigators or the county.

Since then, State Sen. Dan Salomon of Ronan sponsored Senate Bill 461, which would insist that treasurers in each county, including those located on a federal Indian irrigation project, collect fees for irrigation districts, and if they fail to do so, the county commissioners would be required to “provide for and pay the amount due to the district out of the county treasury.”

The bill has passed the Senate and was scheduled for a hearing in the House Taxation Committee on Tuesday.

At Monday’s hearing, Decker referred to the legislation as “Salomon’s terrible, no good, very bad bill,” and referred to a suggestion that the bill could be dropped if the county rescinded its resolution as “blackmail.”

On a more positive note, Salomon was instrumental in bringing Robin Rude, deputy administrator with the Department of Revenue, to the table. Rude agreed that under state statute, the Department of Revenue, not the county treasurer, is responsible for receiving the fee schedule from the irrigation districts and entering those assessments in the property tax record.

Rubel, who attended Monday’s meeting, said as long as the Department of Revenue resumed those duties (which it had ceased doing in 2015), her involvement in collecting irrigation fees would be minimal.

Wayne Freeman, a local appraiser for the DOR, said the department had asked him to reiterate that “we will be loading those fees” onto the property tax record.

David Lake encouraged the commissioners to rescind the resolution, saying that the Mission Irrigation District “has put a whole lot of effort and expense into trying to resolve the problem and it’s come out of irrigators’ pockets.”

If the county were to step out of fee collection, he predicted irrigation districts could “become null and void. We are a definite voice for the irrigator – we’re a mediator between the groups and we have quite a bit of say with the Tribes and the BIA.”

“If we’re going to change something, let’s go slow,” he advised.

Ronan rancher Jack Horner called the county’s effort to quit collecting irrigation fees “a step backwards” that would force districts to deal with bureaucracies in Portland or Oklahoma “that are not accountable to us.”

“If we work together, there’s a thing called synergy and you go ahead a lot faster when you’re not butting your heads against each other,” he said.

In explaining his vote to rescind the resolution, county commissioner Steve Stanley voiced a similar sentiment.

“There’s change in the wind,” he said. “Who knows where we’re going to end up?”

“We have to figure out how the hell to come together and pick a route that’s going to work for everybody,” he added.

For commissioner Bill Barron, who also voted in favor of rescinding the resolution, it came down to matter of obeying state law, until the county is told otherwise. “If the state does their job, then the county should do theirs.”

Having the county collect irrigation fees “is not a new thing,” he added. “It’s been there since the start of project.”

Both Stanley and Barron also said they felt no pressure from Salomon to rescind the resolution in exchange for tabling his bill. Stanley recalled Salomon saying during a meeting between elected officials “that if the resolution goes away so will the bill.”

“But there was no deal struck,” he added.

The resolution is effective immediately.