8001

• UCREFRP Catalog Number: 8001
• Author: Western Regional Instream Flow Conference.
• Title: Proceedings, Western Regional Instream Flow Conference.
• USFW Year: 1992.
• USFW - Doc Type: Oct. 2-3, 1992.
• Copyright Material: NO

consumptive uses in this economy disproportionately. The air
shed in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles metropolitan area, which is
a consumptive use-it consumes that resource, but it is multiple,
multiple users who do so. Equally, when it comes to water, one of
the things we've discovered in all our work is that a lot of users
use water in a lot of different ways, including a number of those
provided on your chart, which by implication on the chart are
better because they use less water. We've discovered for example
our ability to move water down the Columbia River is
enormously constrained by recreation a clean, non-consumptive
use. Well, it's not non-consumptive at all if you build a storage
reservoir like Dorshak, and people build houses and docks and
marinas around it, and suddenly you discover that water is no
longer available for fish. Equally, lumber and building materials
become the timber industry. And we've got streams in Oregon
where no water is taken out at all directly, but the timber
industry by their forest practices, and, you know, destroying that
watershed effectively as if agriculture had pulled water out of it.
So, I wasn't going to give a speech, but of course I gave a speech.
Sorry about that. I guess I'd be interested in your comments or
your reactions to those thoughts.
A-(John Young) Thank you. I'd be happy to. I think your
observations are mostly correct. 1 think that this kind of
approach laying out what I think are fairly clear statements
of fact obviously cause a lot of concern. It caused concern
when we did it in the task force with the agricultural
community. We knew it would, and yet I'm convinced that
the only way to get people to sit down and reason with
each other is, number one, to force them to have many task
force meetings, which we did, so that they had time to get
over it. But more importantly is to sit down and realistically
evaluate this kind of data. You can't ignore it. I mean, that's
the fact. Eighty-one percent of the surface water is being
dedicated to a very small segment of the economy. I'm not
saying nor would I ever say that agriculture is not a very
important part of the economy of Utah and every other
western state. Clearly it is, there's no question about that.
What 1 am suggesting, and 1 think is one of the themes of
this conference, is that not only do you need to realistically
evaluate the economic data so you are dealing with real
facts, but from that start making management decisions
that more efficiently utilizes the resource so that there is a
sharing of that resource between these segments of the
economy that so clearly deserve it. I believe that you can go
through, and I've seen it in my work, in my business,
having represented some members of the agricultural
community in various cases. There are irrigation systems in
the state of Utah that from the point of diversion to the
point of delivery have a net loss of water in excess of 50%
because of the inefficient means of transporting the water.
That happens all over the West. We need a more efficient
approach to irrigation, as well as management of the
resource, and I think that approach would solve most of
the problems. That's why we're all here.
Q-By Charles Pace, Economist, Northwestern Band of
Shoshoni Nation:
I had a question two questions actually. The first one is for the
attorneys. Mr. Appel mentioned the state is often is a plaintiff in
general stream adjudications. I wonder at what point what is the
status of those filings by, say, the state engineer? Are those mere
pleadings? or at what point do those have some presumption?
The second question, and it's addressed to all the panelists,
something we're seeing on the Snake River, Salmon River, and
that's the use of Wild and Scenic River designation to elevate
state law by pre-empting FERC licensing. Have any of you seen
that approach or is that something new in the West?
A-(Jeff Appel) With respect to general adjudications, the
process normally the state engineer would go out you file a
water user claim, and they notify everyone along a water
course that they need to file that claim or they may lose
their water right. They file that and the state engineer and a
team, not the state engineer himself, but a team goes out
and attempts to field-verify those. They make a map, and it
has the acres that are irrigated in the case of irrigation, it has
the location of homes. And they assemble a document
known as proposed determination. And from that book,
protests are filed and it moves through to an actual trial.
And once the decree is issued, invariably it's appealed to
the supreme court, and then you do have a final document.
Unfortunately the process takes so much time that the final
document you end up with invariably somewhat inaccu-
rate. I'm involved in one right now on a relatively small
stream that's been going on for 40 years, and every time I
go into the courtroom the judge jokes that it's older than he
is, so the wheels of justice grind more slowly. One sugges-
tion to alleviate that is to give the state engineer enough
money and people to do this correctly, and that probably
means more attorneys. They have a couple of attorneys and
they have to handle in the State of Utah anyhow, and they
have to handle everything for the state engineer, and maybe
what he needs is a bunch of paralegals. But it is a problem,
and it's one that needs to be remedied if we're going to be
able to allocate water resources better in the West.
A-(Charles Gauvin) We're talking about a federal Wild
and Scenic designation?
Comment-(Charles Gauvin) Generally, the federal Wild
and Scenic designation is a very effective tool to prevent
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