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 curtails only individual users who fail to meet their proportional obligations rather than automatically curtailing entire groundwater districts.

Why the settlement matters, and remaining work

The director said the settlement provides a path for additional tributary-basin groundwater users to join the mitigation plan if they accept proportional reductions and financial contributions for recharge or storage water purchases. He also stressed that if a court appeal does not change the recent federal decision, the department will resume processing four outstanding show-cause petitions and expects to continue taking such petitions in the future.

Weaver warned that a pending state-court stay on deferred domestic and stock water claims in the Snake River Basin adjudication remains tied to the federal litigation; if that stay is lifted, the department could face a massive workload of claims. "We don't know exactly how many of those rights are out there," he said, "but it is likely in the tens of thousands, if not in excess of a hundred thousand claims that could come in."

Document-management failure and recovery

Weaver said the department lost access to its online water-rights document-management system in October 2023 after what he described as a catastrophic failure. The agency had recently migrated more than one million records into a new Laserfiche environment that public users could access via online portals; the outage prevented automated public access and disrupted internal operations. He said department staff worked with the state Office of Information Technology Services and contractors to rebuild servers, repopulate lost data and restore triple-redundant storage. Most documents are now again available in Laserfiche; Weaver said records from the gap period remain under reconstruction and the department hopes to fill that gap by the end of the calendar year.

Budget requests and staffing

Weaver reviewed five decision units the department requested for fiscal year 2026. He emphasized a request to fund five full-time positions to establish a water administration bureau that would report directly to the director. The positions are intended to support creation and operation of water districts and the department’s statutory obligation to administer water in adjudicated basins. Weaver said the department’s strategic objective is to create or modify two water districts per year but that at the current pace it could take decades to meet demand without additional staff.

Other requests included funding for: an ongoing public information officer to replace part-time contract communications support; ongoing GIS and software licensing; a one-time online application to accept beneficial-use submittals; and a transfer to staff aquifer monitoring and measuring work paid from existing loan-repayment receipts tied to a settlement agreement (the Pristine Springs settlement).

Statutory and boundary changes

Weaver described Senate Bill 1341, which changed the administrative boundary used for delivery-call proceedings on the Eastern Snake Plain; the new boundary (effective July 1, 2024) brought about 1,500 additional irrigation water rights into the delivery-call process. To avoid forcing mitigation during an active irrigation season, he issued an order allowing affected users until Nov. 1, 2025, to have mitigation plans in place.

Modeling and the effect of recharge and reductions

Weaver summarized modeling that estimated the combined effects of state-sponsored managed recharge and private pumping reductions. From 2016 through 2023 the department averaged about 268,000 acre-feet per year of state-sponsored managed recharge and about 341,000 acre-feet per year of combined private recharge and pumping reductions, for an average combined impact of roughly 600,000 acre-feet per year. Weaver said modeling indicates those actions have altered a long-term downward trend in aquifer storage, though he cautioned that declining incidental recharge from canal lining and irrigation efficiency remains a concern.

Committee questions and next steps

Committee members pressed Weaver on issues including whether the director should act as hearing officer in contested cases (Weaver said he has used independent hearing officers for the most contentious proceedings and worried that an outside adjudicator might lack needed technical and institutional knowledge), the mechanics of curtailments, how the mitigation-plan four-year averaging works, and the department’s capacity to process a potential influx of deferred claims.

Weaver closed by saying the department will pause active development of a separate Eastern-Snake-Plain groundwater-management plan while the mitigation plan is implemented and evaluated, but that the department will publish management budgets, indices and water-master instructions and will continue to create water districts in tributary basins.

Ending

Weaver told the committee he hopes the settlement holds and emphasized the need for additional staff and infrastructure to implement the mitigation plan and long-term administration of adjudicated basins.