Idaho water director details Eastern Snake Plain settlement, staffing needs and IT recovery

Idaho Department of Water Resources Director Matthew Weaver told the Idaho House Resources Committee on the agency’s work to stabilize the Eastern Snake Plain aquifer, pursue pending adjudications and recover from a catastrophic records-system failure.

Weaver told the committee the department adopted a settlement as a mitigation plan on Jan. 3 and said he supports it "in full." He also described recent federal court rulings affecting state procedures for show-cause orders, a multi-year effort to rebuild the department’s online document repository after an October 2023 crash, and budget requests that include five new positions to form a water administration bureau.

The mitigation plan and curtailment timeline

Weaver outlined the delivery-call history on the Eastern Snake Plain and the curtailment order the department issued in late May 2024 after finding many junior groundwater users had not fully complied with mitigation requirements. He said parties reached a temporary settlement that stayed curtailment through the 2024 irrigation season, and a more comprehensive settlement was finalized in November 2024. "I’m in full support of it," Weaver said of the settlement; he said he issued an order on Jan. 3 adopting that agreement as a mitigation plan and that one narrow point — whether to report water use on a calendar or water year — remained under reconsideration.

Weaver described several features of the adopted mitigation plan: required pumping reductions and qualifying recharge activities; a four-year averaging period for pumping allotments so participants can smooth year-to-year variability; in-season measurement and reporting of groundwater diversions; and language that…