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The five bills would change water laws in force since 1909 The concern, according to Curt Martin, who ranches in
Baker and Union counties and is the legislative
committee chair for the Oregon Cattlemen’s Association,
is that regulation sought by urban lawmakers unfamiliar
with agricultural production could alter state water
laws that ranchers have relied on for 100 years. “It’s a chiseling away of ag water rights,” Martin
said. “Every one of these bills is being pushed by people
who live in an urban setting, and they don’t understand
how we use water or how we measure it,” Martin said. “They need to learn about the potential consequences
of what they are doing before they pass some real
erroneous bills,” Martin said. “If they go too far with restricting or reallocating
our water rights for urban uses, we’d go out of
business. Then who would grow the food people put on the
table?” he said Martin compares the current water rights legislation
to the logging bans and changes in forest regulations
imposed in the 1980s and 1990s, which Martin said left a
legacy of overcrowded, stunted, bug-infested trees that
fuel catastrophic wildfires. He said that without water, crop and pastureland left
to dry up could face a similar fate. To prevent that from happening, the OCA, Water for
Life, Oregon Farm Bureau and other groups are reaching
out to educate urban legislators about what a good job
today’s farmers and ranchers are doing managing water
use, and about the threat posed by bills seeking to
overhaul the state’s agricultural water laws, create
water-use fees and penalties, and setting the stage for
shifting water appropriations from agricultural uses to
urban uses. “Senate Bill 740 is coming out of a committee chaired
by Sen. Jackie Dingfelder. She has a big interest in
water use and is convinced we are overusing it on the
east side of the state,” Martin said. He said SB 740 would set a precedent by imposing a
$100 fee on water rights. “What it basically does is it makes an initial step
toward taxing agricultural water use,” Martin said.
“While that may seem fairly innocuous, it begins the
process of putting a fee on water use for agriculture.
That’s the scary part of it.” He said the concern is that once the government
starts putting fees on agricultural water use, the fees
will pile up over the years whenever the government
needs more money. “If they add water-use fees and start taxing water
rights, along with all the other escalating costs, you
couldn’t afford to do it anymore,” Martin said. Senate Bills 193 and 194 pose a threat because they
initiate a strategic planning process that farmers and
ranchers fear will be used to rewrite water laws to give
higher priority to urban uses, and establish “a huge
regulatory infrastructure” over agricultural water
rights, Martin said. According to the legislative summary of SB 193, it
initiates a process for changing state laws by directing
the Water Resources Department to develop multiple use
as a priority for allocating water resources, as opposed
to the traditional first-in-time agricultural priority
of water law in place since 1909. The bill also requires the WRD to identify the means
and methods of conserving and augmenting water for
future ag and urban needs, and to identify ways to
restore and protect stream flows and watersheds to
sustain Oregon’s ecosystems, economy and quality of
life. It requires WRD to work closely with the
Department of Environmental Quality and consult with
other agencies including agriculture, forestry, economic
development and land-use agencies to develop a long-term
water strategy that takes into account present and
future economic development and growth needs, and to
report to the Legislature by Feb. 1, 2011. “SB 193 would rewrite Oregon water law as we have
known (it) for 100 years,” Martin said. “If we lose
control of our water — we are gone.” The legislative summary of SB 194 says it seeks to
rein in agricultural water uses and sets other
legislative water-management objectives in motion by
requiring the WRD to complete and implement the Oregon
WRD Strategic Measurement Plan. It also requires the
Water Resources Commission to appoint a nine-member
water-use measurement advisory committee to assess the
plan and make recommendations to interim legislative
committees on environment and natural resources by Nov.
1, 2012. The bill also requires WRD to identify
significant water diversions that warrant measurement,
as well as potential sources of public and private
funding to substantially increase Oregon’s network of
water-gauging stations. Martin said instead of having a central water
metering device for an irrigation district or ditch
company, SB 194 seeks to require water users receiving
water from an irrigation district to install meters to
measure their individual water use. “If a ditch company had eight or 10 users (farmers or
ranchers using water for irrigating crops and pastures,
or watering livestock), each user would be required to
have a measuring device,” Martin said. That diverges from the present system where the
overall water diversion is measured by the district,
which in turn tracks how much water is doled out to
individual members of the district. “It would be a major expense for installing
individual water meters and ding all of the tracking and
bookkeeping,” Martin said. “The cost would be
astronomical.” Besides additional costs to farmers and ranchers, who
are already struggling to survive in the face of
sky-high input costs for labor, fuel and petroleum-based
fertilizers and pesticides, Martin said the increased
regulation of individual water users would require a big
bureaucracy. “If these bills (SB 193 and SB 194) pass, it’s
unbelievable the number of people they’d have to hire to
keep up,” Martin said. Also, he said, the WRD already has a huge backlog of
unprocessed water rights applications and other work
because it doesn’t have the staff to keep up with
existing regulatory requirements. House Bill 2156 would expand the definition of
intermittent streams to include streams that run very
little and are used to fill stock watering ponds, Martin
said. He said filling those ponds from streams that are dry
most of the year has been an exempted agricultural use
for decades, but it could become a permitted use,
requiring ranchers to pay fees and apply for permits,
which can take months or years to be processed by WRD,
and in the end might not be approved. House Bill 2859 is also a major concern to farmers
and ranchers because it would limit how much domestic
water could be pulled from domestic wells per day, and a
surcharge would be added for anything more than 15,000
gallons, Martin said. “When you look at all of these bills, what you see
is a throttling of our ability to produce cattle and
crops, and to create the jobs that spin off from that,”
Martin said. He said the motive behind legislation aimed at
restricting water rights is based on a politicized
misconception that farmers and ranchers are damaging the
natural resources they rely on. In reality, he said farmers and ranchers create much
of the wildlife habitat that help deer, elk, fish and
other wildlife thrive and survive through cold winters
and hot, dry summers. If anyone is overusing or misusing water, Martin said
the WRD and state watermasters already have the tools
they need to deal with such problems. To cope with the misinformation about the cattle
industry and how it uses water and other natural
resources, Martin said the OCA has created an
educational program available on DVD. “The OCA produced a DVD to show our urban cousins
what we do, and how that is benefiting what we all want
Oregon to be,” Martin said.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Source:
http://www.bakercityherald.com/Local-News/Ranchers-concerned-with-water-rights-legislation Ranchers concerned with water
rights legislation
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