Wenatchee World - Nov. 8, 2017
by K.C. Mehaffey
LEAVENWORTH — When the Icicle Work Group sat down five years ago, its purpose was to resolve lawsuits surrounding water in the upper Wenatchee Valley, and develop a plan to provide enough water for fish, agriculture and people.
But if reaction to a relatively small project in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness is any indication, the group may have a rough road ahead.
Last month, 25 environmental groups — including one that’s a member of the Icicle Work Group — officially objected to a federal proposal to replace a valve on Snow Lake in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness. The lake, and others in the wilderness, have served as reservoirs to supply water to the Leavenworth National Fish Hatchery and irrigation districts since the 1940s. The project can be seen as a small piece of the much larger set of projects to come in the work group’s draft environmental impact statement (EIS), to be released early next year.
“As soon as I saw this come out, I thought, ‘This is the first shot across the bow of what is probably going to be years of litigation’” over the work group’s efforts to conduct any projects in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness, said Mike Kaputa, Chelan County’s natural resources director.
Kaputa said the environmental groups are singularly focused on impacts to the wilderness, and not the bigger picture, which would leave significantly more water in Icicle Creek, and ultimately the Wenatchee River — benefiting fish and the environment.
Some of the groups, he said, have already said they’d like to see the dams and other man-made structures in the wilderness removed, a proposal that isn’t being considered by the work group.
But Karl Forsgaard, president of the Alpine Lakes Protection Society, which is leading the charge, said their concerns about the valve replacement are both significant and valid. He said they sat down with officials to talk about the valve replacement, and were never told that the new valve would be 60 percent larger than the existing valve. That raises questions about the impacts of having significantly less water in Snow Lake, and more water in streams. It also raises issues about the work group’s credibility and transparency, he said.
“The whole big picture is undermined by what they did here,” Forsgaard said. “It begs the question, ‘What else is wrong with what they’ve been telling us?”
The valve issue
Officials say the temporary valve installed more than 10 years ago is worn out, and too small, and will need to be replaced soon — before the work group can complete an EIS to resolve the other water issues.
Kaputa said it’s a relatively minor project, and no one even commented when the valve was replaced 10 years ago.
He noted that the irrigation districts and Leavenworth National Fish Hatchery have had rights to the water, and to use the lakes as reservoirs, long before Alpine Lakes became part of a wilderness area. The hatchery is also legally required to produce fish to mitigate for the loss of fish habitat when Grand Coulee Dam was built.
Jim Brown, regional director of the state Department of Fish and Wildlife and chairman of the work group’s steering committee, said increasing the size of the valve is just a capacity issue. “It’s only to improve the infrastructure — to let them take their water in a safe and sustainable way,” he said, adding, “This isn’t about creating water storage for other uses. It’s already there.”
The comment letter from environmentalists raises several issues, and concludes by calling for a more lengthy, costly and time-consuming EIS to conduct the work.
The groups signing on include large organizations like The Wilderness Society and the Washington State Chapter of the Sierra Club, and one group — the Icicle Creek Watershed Council — which sits on the work group.
Sharon Lunz, president of the watershed council, said they believe the project is more than routine maintenance. “The EA only looks at the impacts of the construction activities to physically replace the valve,” she wrote in an email. An EA, or Environmental Assessment, is prepared to determine the significance of impacts in a proposal. “It does not evaluate the impacts to the ecology of the stream of a 60 percent increase in the amount of super cold, low oxygen water from the bottom of the lake flowing into Snow Creek,” she wrote.
Trout Unlimited — also a member of the Icicle Work Group — did not sign the letter. Lisa Pelly, director of Trout Unlimited’s Washington Water Project, said she fully supports the collaborative effort, but she also thinks agencies did a “pretty poor job” of explaining the valve, and wants more information before knowing whether she’d support the replacement. She was also not happy about the short 15-day period for commenting.
Wilderness water or stream flows?
The soon-to-be-released draft EIS for resolving water issues in Icicle Creek holds many promises for Icicle Creek flows, which dropped to just 15 cubic feet per second (cfs) during the 2015 drought. Flows in an average drought year are 20 cfs, and in a non-drought year are 63 cfs.
The work group wants to add 77 cfs in non-drought years, and 47 cfs drought years.
Brown said that would be a significant win for fish.
He said the reservoirs allow them to put water in streams at times when it’s most important for fish. That’s often in late summer, when flows drop and — even more deadly to salmon and steelhead — water temperatures rise. And with climate change — which include forecasts for less snowpack — it will become even more important to be able to store and release colder water during times of low flows, he said.
Forsgaard said environmental groups do understand the bigger picture — including the potential benefits to Icicle Creek and the fish that use the system. “But you shouldn’t be trying to benefit one environmental attribute by damaging another,” he said, adding, “They have all these plans to increase the human footprint in the wilderness to solve some problems outside the wilderness.”
He said the work group has no alternatives proposing aggressive conservation. “In Seattle, they actually managed to decrease water consumption while the population was increasing,” he said. “Why aren’t they willing to propose something like that?”
The work group plans to release its draft EIS in early 2018, with a range of alternatives from no action to several potential projects for improving water flows. The group has not chosen a preferred alternative. “We wanted to encourage public participation. We know it’s a big deal — a 10-year, $90 million effort,” Kaputa said.
He said that, over time — with or without a solution from the work group — the infrastructure in the wilderness lakes will be replaced and upgraded. The irrigators and hatchery clearly have the legal right to maintain their facilities, he said.
“The question, though, is, can they be upgraded in a way that will help improve instream flow?”