Failed Water Management

Failed Water Management

Failed Water Management. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report.

The Odessa Subarea has been a hotbed and it's getting even hotter. Darryll Olsen with the Columbia-Snake River Irrigators Association says successful water resources management requires competence and honesty.

OLSON: We were originally asked to come up and reevaluate the economics that the Bureau was doing and reconfigure the system and after that we were requested by the irrigators to stay there and actually continue pre-construction engineering and put together the financial package.

There are four parts to the system and Olson says they have signature authority from the lenders for $42-million dollars.

OLSON: We could have started on it last fall. In May of 2014 a request to the Bureau and the District for the new water service contracts and the Bureau has stalled. The District then came in and said they were interested in trying to build the systems. They don't have any financial package. The irrigators have told them they don't want them involved in the building of those.

He says the bottom line is that the wells are going dry, farmers and communities are suffering.

OLSON: After a meeting in January this year with the Bureau and the District and other parties where the Bureau gave a commitment to go ahead and start working on the contract na then immediately turned around and try to sabotage that effort, we decided there was no other choice but to take the Bureau which is the entity that can actually issue the water service contracts and put them into litigation over arbitrary and capricious action.

That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network of the West.

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