POCATELLO, Idaho — Idaho Department of Water Resources Director Mat Weaver came to Pocatello for the second meeting of the Eastern Snake Plain Aquifer advisory committee to present his ideas on a possible roadmap and a timeline for a long-term ground water management plan.

The advisory committee is tackling one of the department’s more difficult issues: finding a solution to meet the pumping demands placed on the aquifer by ground water users without impacting the senior water rights of surface water users downstream.

“I’m hopeful that we can solve our problems in Idaho because we do have that shared interest of wanting to preserve these resources,” Weaver said in his opening remarks to the advisory committee.

“We have seen the aquifer declining for 50 years now, continuously. I think we’re past that point of the supplies being sufficient to meet the then existing water needs,” he said.

The IDWR set up the voluntary advisory committee of 13 Idaho water users, a diverse group of ground and surface water users, two municipalities and Idaho Power in an effort to find a resolution to meet the annual demands on a declining aquifer.

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According to Weaver, part of the difficulty in creation of a ground water management plan is the necessity for the plan to address both ground water users and surface water users.

“The Snake River and the ESPA are hydrologically connected,” he said. “There are places where the Snake River takes water from the aquifer and where it gives it to recharge the aquifer and so I think this plan needs to be addressing both of those components of the combined systems, surface and groundwater.”

He said the one thing the department seeks to avoid is making policy, preferring to apply current Idaho statutes when possible.

No policy

“We don’t like to make policy,” said Weaver. “If we are making policy it’s because there’s no clear law and rules for us to follow. We have to do it sometimes but when we can we take our direction from the law.”

Weaver cited the Big Wood River Ground Water Management Plan as a template from which the advisory committee might find possible applications in their efforts to reach consensus on a plan for the ESPA.

While conceding that the Big Wood River is a much smaller basin than the Eastern Snake Plain Aquifer, Weaver suggested that the plan has merit.

“Obviously, it will take some work to scale a plan like that to the Eastern Snake Plain but I do think perhaps it’s the closest management plan that we have in place now to the conditions that exist on the ESP. There’s that really close connectivity between the surface water and the ground water that’s a piece of that,” he said.

“Not to say it’s a carbon copy solution, I think each of these plans are unique but I do think it’s a good one to be familiar with,” he concluded.

A new deadline

Weaver would like to have the committee submit a plan for his evaluation by December, 2024. It won’t be an easy timeline to meet, he acknowledged.

“I know that a lot of you are tied up with farming work and agricultural work,” he said. “It gets hard to find times for everyone to come together during the irrigation season, which I think suggests you need to have made a lot of progress perhaps by the start of the irrigation season next year. Maybe at that point you’ve got quite a bit of meat on the bones of the plan and we can start evaluating in this group if there’s gaps between those positions and how we’re going to bridge those gaps.”

IDWR Eastern Regional manager James Cefalo is overseeing the meetings. He said that after the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays the group would try to meet at least twice a month, if not three times a month.

Cefalo said the non-irrigation season will be a period when he anticipates making the most progress by maintaining “a pretty aggressive schedule,” from January through April.

“Getting as many meetings in as we can and then evaluating where we’re at, at the beginning of spring and having a discussion of what we would need to do from that point forward to stay on track,” he said.

Cefalo found the second meeting to be one in which the committee members were more specific in the goals they would like to see in the management plan.

“A lot of what was discussed in the initial meeting was very high level and in this meeting the committee members did a better job a being more specific in what their vision is and even what some of their concerns are,” he said.

‘A great start’

Committee member Stephanie Mickelsen’s family farms in the Upper Valley. She also is a first-year legislator and the chairman of the Bonneville-Jefferson Ground Water District.

Mickelsen described the second meeting as “a great start, having people talk about what their two or three top priorities are was informative and productive.”

Mickelsen said there were items from ground water management plans around the state that could be applied to the ESPA but none of the aquifers are as large as the Eastern Snake Plain Aquifer.