YAKIMA — As a long-term plan to ensure a future with enough water for farmers and wildlife in the Yakima Basin moves forward, critics complain there hasn’t been enough transparency in the process.
Last month, a Senate committee in Washington, D.C., approved legislation to authorize the first 10-year phase of the 30-year plan, which calls for more than $4 billion for additional water storage, fish passage, water conservation and habitat protection.
The Yakima Herald-Republic reports a House bill is also being drafted.
Praised for ending decades of litigation and bitterness between competing interests, the plan is called vital to the future of the fertile Yakima Valley, one of the nation’s greatest farming regions. But it is not without opponents, who say the process hasn’t been inclusive enough. There have also been worries about cost and being able to satisfy the diverse needs of water users.
“We continue to object to the Yakima Workgroup portraying the Yakima Plan as the product of diverse interest groups, when the workgroup remains unresponsive to comments and concerns from those not at the table,” said Elaine Packard, a representative from the state chapter of the Sierra Club.
Lake Kachess homeowners worry about wells drying up, lower property values and reduced fire protection when the reservoir is drawn down. To the south, cabin owners and campers don’t want to see Bumping Lake expanded by a new dam that would flood cabins, campgrounds and old-growth forest. Some environmental groups oppose any new reservoirs.
Finally, there are fiscal watchdogs who say the plan’s benefits don’t justify the price.
Some opponents met with the bill’s lead sponsor, Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., last fall.
“Sen. Cantwell’s staff was handed a mess. The plan is poisoned fruit from a contaminated process, so it could not be made acceptable,” said Bill Campbell, a retired scientist who lives along Lake Kachess.
Distrust of the plan and the workgroup are so high, critics say the only fix is to scrap the whole thing.
That would be the wrong move for the region, Yakima County Commissioner Mike Leita said.
But Chris Maykut, a Bumping Lake cabin owner and president of a group opposing the new dam plans, called the plan a house of sticks.
“Everyone got something they wanted and if one group pulls out, it falls apart, ” Maykut said.
In 2009, the federal Bureau of Reclamation and the state Department of Ecology convened a group of “stakeholders” — irrigators with junior water rights, the Yakama Indian Nation, county officials and fish and wildlife agencies — to review past studies and look for solutions to the basin’s water shortages.
The agencies developed the workgroup’s ideas into the Integrated Plan.
But opponents say the plan is the work of agriculture interests seeking a way to build more water storage and work around past attempts that failed cost-benefit tests.
Opponents contend the plan ignores an independent economic review by a team of Washington State University scientists who found that the water supply projects failed cost/benefit tests and the benefits from fish passage are not as large as initially estimated.
Supporters maintain that looking at the economic benefits of each component of the plan in isolation misses the point — it was designed as an integrated plan because it’s worth more together than the sum of its parts.
