Yakima Basin Integrated Water Plan

There has been a lot of talk this year about how to conserve and protect precious water resources across the state and especially on the eastern side of the state. There have also been a lot of plans put into place including the Yakima Basin Integrated Water Resource Management Plan. Urban Eberhart is the manager of the Kittitas Reclamation District and says this plan is a model for other plans nationwide.

EBERHART: We are the first basin in the United States to get to the level that we have gotten to in this process. The problem in the Yakima is we have one million acre feet of storage and we're trying to meet two and a half million acre feet of demand and we keep having droughts which we have to do something about which we are doing. Our goal in the integrated plan is to make it so that everybody gets 70% proratable supply in those years including those back-to-back years

He says the summer we just went through was an exact example of where they believe we will be based on multiple climate change models 25-30 years from now.

EBERHART: We started working on this in 1979. The State of Washington really gave us a boost about 2 years ago when the state passed the Yakima Basin Resources Management Act and really what that did was to kick start us with the Teanaway purchase, also the State of Washington committed up to 50% of the project costs in the Yakima Basin.

More on this tomorrow.

And that's Washington Ag Today. I'm Greg Martin, thanks for listening on the Ag Information Network of the West.