Never too late for water plan in Northwest

Back in that big drought of the 1990s, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation gave away windshield shades that said, “Don’t let the next drought get you, plan ahead.”

When your livelihood depends on water, that’s good advice.

Farmers, cities, industrial water users and a host of fish and waterfowl have common interest in dependable and clean water supplies. That interest exists in times of plenty and in times of drought. Planning makes it easier to manage when the water becomes scarce.

It’s good that the Oregon Legislature took a forward look in 2007 and appropriated $750,000 for the start-up of the Oregon Water Supply and Conservation Initiative. It’s too bad that it took so long; for all practical purposes Oregon’s streamflow is all spoken for from spring to fall and several groundwater aquifers give indication of periodic pumping in excess of recharge.

Oregon is a latecomer in big picture water planning alongside neighbors California – which got started in the 1950s – and Idaho, which did its first plan in 1976. Both are currently updating existing plans, while Washington is in the third year of creating regional plans for Puget Sound drainages and the Columbia Basin. Oregon has done little interstate water planning, although the Columbia and Snake rivers are significant parts of its northern and eastern boundaries. It’s not that Oregon is without water planning until now. The sometimes-controversial basin planning program of decades past gathered data on expected water production and use, giving a legal vehicle for policy-making as it related to a specific basin.

However, those basin plans are limited to describing water supply and use, setting out some basin-wide management policy and establishing protocols for considering applications for additional water right applications. Interbasin transfers are little more than footnotes in selected plans.

Between the federal Clean Water Act and Endangered Species Act, new fields of environmental water planning emerged over the past three decades. A body of forestry research that began in the Five Rivers Basin of Oregon’s Coast Range provided direct links between upslope timber management, water discharge rates and water quality. In Eastern Oregon, influence of spreading juniper forests was tied to declining water production.

Read full article

Source: Capital Press

For more information on water conservation, visit our LEARN section