1 Sep 2017
Conservationists warn that they will sue to block the Icicle-Peshastin Irrigation District from proceeding with plans to build a dam within the Alpine Lakes Wilderness at Eightmile Lake.
Karl Forsgaard, president of Alpine Lakes Protection Society, delivered this warning at a July 27 meeting of the Icicle Work Group. It came during a discussion about Eightmile Lake as part of the work group’s strategy.
The debate started with Forsgaard’s complaint that the work group was ignoring wilderness values. He pointed to a 24-slide presentation on construction of a new dam at Eightmile Lake, which never mentioned that the work would occur inside a designated wilderness.
Tony Jantzer, responding for the irrigation district, declared that the irrigation district’s water rights at Eightmile Lake existed before the Wilderness Act or designation of the Alpine Lakes Wilderness. Forsgaard did not dispute this, but argued instead that the irrigation district had relinquished most of its rights at the lake “long ago.”
Whether and how much the irrigation district had relinquished its rights appeared to be at the center of this argument. Jantzer said that Eightmile Lake currently holds more the 2500 acre feet of water so the irrigation district is able to access that water via pumps if needed. Forsgaard responded that the irrigation district was currently taking all the water it needs from a pipe beneath pieces of the old dam. “We’re not talking about that pipe,” he said, as if to suggest that the irrigation district still had the right to use as much water as it had been using.
Jantzer insisted that the irrigation district also had the right to maintain and upgrade its infrastructure. Without conceding if he agreed, Forsgaard replied that the proposed Eightmile dam is not a project to “repair” a dam. Only fragments of that dam remain, Forsgaard claimed, and they “have not held water in decades.”
The debate then turned to who would decide the relinquishment dispute. Jantzer argued that it was not a federal question, but a state water law issue. Without saying what kind of court might resolve it, Forsgaard warned that any effort to proceed with dam construction at Eightmile Lake “would result in litigation . . . so the decision on the relinquishment issue would be made by a judge.”