Idaho water officials ask for staff, outline $30 million ongoing request and recharge needs for Eastern Snake Plain Aquifer

Janet Jessup, a budget and policy analyst with legislative services, opened the Department of Water Resources briefing to the Joint Committee, noting agency materials are on SharePoint and identifying the presentation location in the legislative budget book.

Director Matt Weaver, director of the Idaho Department of Water Resources, told the committee the department is asking for five new full‑time positions to create a Water Administration Bureau and to better support water‑district creation and administration across the state. Weaver said the five positions would be paired with about 11 existing staff to form the new bureau and that the new positions include a bureau chief, resource agency liaisons and a technical records specialist.

“The expectation [from the Eastern Snake Plain settlement] is that we are building out our water districts in those basins tributary to the Eastern Snake Plain,” Weaver said, describing demand for district creation in basins that do not have administrative districts today.

Weaver and Jeff Raybould, chairman of the Idaho Water Resource Board, described a mix of ongoing and one‑time funding in the department’s base. Jessup highlighted a governor’s recommendation to add $30 million ongoing from the general fund into the agency’s Water Management Fund; Weaver said those monies would be added to the agency base to support water projects and would be transferred annually into the continuously appropriated fund. Jessup also noted the agency received ARPA state fiscal recovery funds in recent years that materially increased expenditures in fiscal 2023 and 2024.

Raybould gave examples of projects funded or partially funded from the Water Management Fund and related sources: the Mountain Home Air Force Base water supply pipeline, partial funding for the Anderson Ranch dam raise, a pipeline from Dworsha Dam to fish hatcheries, increased allowance for carryover storage in Bear Lake, Priest Lake water management work, loans and grants for canal conversions and groundwater‑to‑surface‑water conversion projects, and regional projects such as the Raft River pipeline and Treasure Valley water supply assessment.

On account balances, Weaver told the committee the Water Management Fund had an ending cash balance of about $293 million at the end of fiscal 2024, roughly $38 million in revenue through Dec. 31, and about $11.2 million in expenditures posted through that date. He said the board had committed roughly $290 million of the fund balance, leaving an uncommitted balance of about $29 million.

Committee members pressed on recharge for the Eastern Snake Plain Aquifer (ESPA). Weaver and Raybould said Idaho has pursued both state‑sponsored recharge and private recharge by groundwater districts and others. Weaver said state‑sponsored recharge averaged roughly 268,000 acre‑feet per year between 2016 and 2024, private recharge averaged about 116,000 acre‑feet, and private pumping reductions were about 212,000 acre‑feet—an aggregate of roughly 600,000 acre‑feet of aquifer management activities during that period.

Raybould noted an objective to increase managed recharge in the ESPA and said additional instantaneous recharge capacity — an estimated up to 1,000 cubic feet per second in the Upper Valley — may be needed to reach a higher average recharge goal. Director Weaver described the policy trade‑offs between recharge and required pumping reductions: “The more water we can put in that aquifer through recharge means the less water we need to require people to reduce in their pumping,” he said.

Other budget items Weaver described: a request to fund a public information officer (partly by repurposing an unfilled FTE), a one‑time Laserfiche (document management) conversion that should be recorded as one‑time rather than ongoing, and $58,500 in ongoing funds for additional ArcGIS licenses after vendor licensing changes.

On financing, Raybould said the board deliberately uses a mix of loans and grants and evaluates projects case‑by‑case. He said the board has directed loans of roughly $23 million (revolving development account estimate) and about $20 million from the Water Management Fund currently out as loans. The board uses criteria to decide grants—e.g., the aging infrastructure grant can cover up to one‑third of a project cost with a $2 million cap.

The session included several committee questions on timeline and project delivery. Raybould and Weaver described long design and engineering phases for large capital projects, the board’s practice of disbursing funds as work progresses, and coordination with federal partners such as the Bureau of Reclamation on projects that include federal cost‑share. Weaver closed by highlighting the workload the agency faces under the settlement and administration requirements and thanked the committee for considering the department’s enhancement requests.

The committee did not take a formal vote on any water‑budget requests during the hearing.

(Topics in this article draw on the Department of Water Resources presentation and subsequent Q&A during the legislative budget session.)