Governor Otter on Snake River Plain Aquifer

Are you encouraged by this wet year, it looks like we’re making some gains with the Snake River Plains Aquifer. David, as you know, we didn’t go into conjunctive management, that is managing the Snake River flows with the aquifer much later than we should have. That’s kind of a phenomenon that we started within the last 30 years. We simply didn’t realize that the two were connected. When we built the Palisades Dam years ago, we underwent a policy we called the winter water savings. We used to leave water in all the canals for watering the cattle through the winter. We didn’t know it at the time but a lot of that was percolating down into the aquifer, annually re-charging the aquifer. When we took the water out of the canals, when we lined the canals so that they could no longer percolate, and we continued to pump aggressively out of the aquifer, we finally recognized our problem. With the aquifer studies with the conjunctive management with many of the other programs that we’re all working on, that was one of the things I brought up at the Western Governor’s Conference, I said I don’t have to build a dam, I’ve got a reservoir larger than Lake Erie but what I need is help from the BLM and the federal land ownership in order to build infrastructure on some of their land so that when we have excess water in a good water year, we can re-charge that aquifer on an annual basis.