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Idaho water director tells Jefferson County: delivery-call orders and expanded boundary require mitigation plans by late 2025
Summary
Idaho Department of Water Resources Director Matt Weaver briefed Jefferson County commissioners on recent delivery-call orders, recharge efforts and a statutory boundary expansion that brings about 1,400 groundwater rights into the Eastern Snake Plain Aquifer delivery-call process; he said new mitigation plans will be required by Nov. 1, 2025 and requested staffing and funding to administer the work.
Matt Weaver, director of the Idaho Department of Water Resources, told Jefferson County commissioners that actions the department issued this spring and summer on the Eastern Snake Plain Aquifer were aimed at fulfilling statutory duties and court rulings, not to punish irrigators. “Nothing in the actions that I took this spring or this summer were done out of maliciousness or to be punitive in any way to the groundwater users,” Weaver said.
Weaver outlined two decades of litigation and management rules tied to delivery-call proceedings and summarized recent hydrology and management activity. He said the state and groundwater districts have averaged about 250,000 acre-feet per year of recharge and roughly 350,000 acre-feet per year of conservation measures from 2016 through 2023 — “in combination, that’s about 600,000 acre feet of management…
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