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State Seeks Input on Columbia River Plan

Posted on: Monday, 8 May 2006, 09:09 CDT

By Chris Mulick, Tri-City Herald, Kennewick, Wash.

May 8--OLYMPIA -- The state Department of Ecology, charged by the Legislature to develop a new Columbia River management plan, hits the road this month to begin sweating the details.

This year the Legislature crafted a new plan that generally includes a $200 million down payment to help pay for new reservoir and conservation projects that would ultimately boost water supplies for people and fish.

But for all the hemming and hawing that went on, each word being all but dusted for prints, the final bill was only 12 pages long. That left Ecology with a lot of blanks to fill in.

And that's where you come in.

The department is planning a series of four hearings this month to start shaping a programwide environmental study to streamline processes for developing an array of projects that ultimately will spring forth up and down the Columbia Basin.

That way the state will be ready to move should federal money suddenly appear to help pay for construction.

"We have to build this program right now," Ecology Director Jay Manning told the Herald earlier this spring.

Hearings are scheduled at the Moses Lake Fire Department on May 22 and the Three Rivers Convention Center in Kennewick on May 23, both starting at 4 p.m. Earlier hearings are scheduled for Colville and Wenatchee.

The Legislature provided the agency with plenty of direction and money to begin hiring staff and preparing studies.

But the department wanted to get advice from locals "before we got too far down the road," said Ecology spokeswoman Joye Redfield-Wilder. "This is all groundwork."

The initial broad environmental study won't negate the need for further studies on individual storage and conservation projects that will emerge but is designed to bring a sense of cohesion to them.

"We don't want to get caught doing this thing piecemeal because they're all supposed to be inter-related," Redfield-Wilder said.

Likely topics at the hearings include how voluntary regional agreements -- generally designed to move water by relying on new conservation projects to offset new water withdrawals -- would get set up.

Developing plans to boost the declining Odessa subaquifer, which supplies water to growers in Adams, Franklin, Grant and Lincoln counties who hold irrigation water rights for unfinished portions of the Columbia Basin Project, also will be discussed.

The aquifer is in decline and some 475 affected permit holders with 1,000 wells have had to dig deeper to tap it.

Other topics could include a proposed drawdown of Lake Roosevelt and an alternate route for delivering water from Pinto Dam to the Potholes Reservoir.

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Copyright (c) 2006, Tri-City Herald, Kennewick, Wash.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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Source: Tri-City Herald

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