Water Crisis

The Idaho Department of Water Resources or IDWR has been in something of a water war with ag producers who get their irrigation water from the Boise River system reservoirs. IDWR Wants to count flood control releases against stored water rights and lots of farmers are up in arms about it. I talked with Matt Weaver, deputy director of the Idaho Dept. of Water Resources. "Briefly the position of the department on this is that there are current administrative and accounting practices that we use to determine the satisfaction of water rights in the Boise Basin, both natural flow rates and storage water rights. That accounting is executed with a series of sophisticated computer programs that the department runs and those computer programs have been in place and unchanged since 1986. We are concluding the third decade of administration and accounting with these tools and procedures that are in place. Some of the criticism that I would like to address is the fact that the department is proposing some new, you hear terms like schemes or theory for accounting and that is factually not true. We have not changed anything in three decades. We don't think the current accounting practices lead to some of the catastrophic predictions that people are stating out there that we are going to lose water in June and that it will lead to large economic impacts on the agricultural industry and the reason that is not the case is because we have been accounting this way for 30 years and there is no evidence to support those dire predictions.