Public soon will have chance to weigh in on basin water plans
by David Lester
Yakima Herald-Republic, November 16, 2011
YAKIMA, Wash. -- After more than two years of work on a plan to meet future Yakima River Basin water needs, the public is getting a chance to have its say.
The federal Bureau of Reclamation and the state Department of Ecology on Wednesday jointly released a draft environmental impact statement on potential impacts of the entire plan, not its individual elements.
Those elements include new storage, groundwater storage, fish passage at basin dams, habitat and watershed protection, water conservation, operational changes, and marketing of water to meet new needs.
Total cost of all the elements is $5 billion to be sought from federal, state and local sources.
The environmental report looks at implementing the overall plan or taking no action. It does not adopt one or the other as a preferred choice.
Opponents of the plan challenged the document, saying it fails to provide enough alternatives for the public to consider. Release of the document triggers a public comment period that extends into early January. A series of public meetings will be conducted next month in Cle Elum, Ellensburg and Yakima.
A final document will be issued sometime next year that will take the comments into account.
Derek Sandison, head of the state Department of Ecology's Office of the Columbia River and a coordinator for the project, described the document as a procedural step toward a final decision.
"This report tells the decision makers and the public we have all these elements of the plan and this is how we connect the dots," he said.
A stakeholder group representing irrigators, the Yakama Nation, state and federal fishery agencies, the counties, environmental groups, and others devised the plan over two years.
Called the integrated plan, the effort was devised in response to a five-year federal study that concluded none of the storage sites reviewed -- mainly the 1.7 million acre-foot Black Rock reservoir east of Yakima -- provided sufficient benefits to irrigation and fishery resources to justify the cost.
The current plan takes a broader look at solutions to provide farmers a more assured supply as well as protections for fish.
But conservation groups immediately criticized the plan as inadequate. They support additional water conservation and fish passage. They oppose the proposed dams -- the expansion of Bumping Lake and a new Wymer reservoir, north of Yakima in the Yakima River Canyon.
John Osborn of Spokane, coordinator of the Sierra Club Columbia River Future Project, said the report should consider additional alternatives.
"It has cut the heart out of the EIS process," Osborn said in a statement.
He also wants a more extended comment period.