Article published Feb 1, 2008

Water users told that irrigators are taking major share of rivers

By MICHAEL BABCOCK

Tribune Outdoor Editor

CASCADE — Don't blame the weather for rivers that go dry, said Steve Kelly of the Lower Teton Water Users Association.

Kelly said it is consumptive use, mostly in the form of sprinkler irrigation, that is sucking Montana's rivers dry.

"We have become water junkies," Kelly told members of the Missouri River Conservation Districts Council on Thursday in Cascade. "There is not even close to enough water for everybody."

Kelly said his group is working to set up a program in which water-rights holders voluntarily put a percentage of their rights back into the Missouri Rivers so it doesn't go dry.

Kelly described the Lower Teton River Users as "a bunch of old Montana guys who want to see the streams flowing."

"This is about landowners, traditional Montanans who want to see water back in the stream," he said. "We have had our fill of dewatered streams. They are not very pretty."

The Missouri River Conservation Districts Council, which comprises the 15 conservation districts along the Missouri River, holds quarterly meetings around the state.

At Thursday's meeting, representatives from Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks and the state Department of Natural Resources made informational presentations and answered questions about the complicated world of water rights in the Missouri River Basin.

Jim Beck of Townsend, the chairman of the council, said the aim of the meeting was to inform council members, or in the case of the Teton River, to offer them an innovative idea to take back to their district.

"Sometimes there are good ideas that will work somewhere else," he said.

Kelly said the Lower Teton Water Users Association invested about 1,000 hours in investigating the historical use and inflows in the Teton River. He said the river dries up frequently because more people are using more water from the river.

"Last year the river went dry in June, the earliest it ever went dry," Kelly said. "Right now, the river is stuck 15 to 20 miles up from its confluence with the Marias."

Andy Brummond, a water rights stream-flow specialist with FWP, said there is a downward trend for inflows into the Canyon Ferry Reservoir since about 1970.

Canyon Ferry is the major storage reservoir on the Missouri between its headwaters of the Missouri and Fort Peck Reservoir.

"We have not been seeing the water we have come to expect," Brummond said. "There has been no successful paddlefish spawn in the past 10 years."

Kelly equated the trend to when landowners changed from flood irrigation to pivot irrigation. He noted that while flood irrigation puts water back into the stream through run-off, sprinkler irrigation loses a lot of water through evaporation.

Even though sprinkler irrigation is more efficient, flood irrigation is kinder to the river, he said.

"What do we, as Montanans, do about this? We send a message to the courts and our legislators," Kelly said.