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Water rights transfer deal in Washington stirs up concerns in rural communities

Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on June 22, 2008 at 4:40 pm

From the Associated Press:

Ray Colbert wanted out after five decades of growing apples, but his son didn’t want the farm in northern Washington. No one else did either. So, Colbert sold the last big piece of his operation, an 80-acre parcel, to a buyer far downstate who wanted what came with the land: water from the Okanogan River.

State regulators signed off on the buyer’s request to transfer the rights to the water and let it flow hundreds of miles down river, figuring the deal was good for fish and wouldn’t hurt anyone else’s water supply. Local officials, however, fear such deals will dry out their rural farming community. “If this were to snowball and keep up, Okanogan County would literally dry up. It would dry up its economy, its agricultural production and everything else,” said state Sen. Bob Morton, a Republican whose rural district sprawls across remote northern Washington.

Moving water around the West is nothing new — it’s what enabled apples to sprout in this area in the first place. In Northern California, river water is diverted south to irrigate most of the country’s winter vegetables and keep faucets flowing in the Los Angeles area. Officials in northwest Montana are negotiating a water compact with the Blackfeet Indian Reservation that would allow the tribe to sell water from the headwaters of the Missouri River to any place in the vast swath of the state that lies in the river’s basin.

“There’s no constraint where they can market that water to — hundreds and hundreds of miles,” said John Tubbs, administrator of the Montana Department of Natural Resources water resources division.

Such moves don’t come without dispute. Ranchers and conservationists are fighting a plan to pump billions of gallons of water from rural Nevada and send it to Las Vegas. More fights are likely as farmers find they get a bigger payoff from selling their water than by growing crops, since Western water law allows water rights to be separated from land.

For Colbert, the decision wasn’t difficult. “The Okanogan Valley’s a great place to live. I love it, but it’s a tough place to make a living,” Colbert said. “I’m so relieved to basically be out of these big orchards.”

He shares the concerns of local officials but also says his water right is his to do with as he pleases. “It’s a property, like a truck or a cow, and you should have the right to do as you wish with it,” he said.

Read more from the Associated Press by clicking here.

June 22, 2008 · Filed Under Oceans and Beaches (all), Water Rights, Water Transfers