New cooperative entity could improve irrigation
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Editor,
The federal water compact legislation provides the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes with $90 million a year over the next ten years, beginning this year, to rehabilitate and modernize our broken-down irrigation project. Because rehabilitation and modernization will have an impact on the project’s operation and maintenance, and vice versa, it will be important for project management to work closely with the tribe.
From 2010 to 2013, the project was well managed by the Flathead Joint Board of Control and the CSKT Cooperative Management Entity, but conflicts among irrigators forced the Bureau of Indian Affairs to resume project management in 2014. Irrigators and project employees have not been happy with the way that BIA bureaucrats from afar have managed the project. As importantly, there is legitimate concern that BIA bureaucratic procedures will undermine local cooperation between the tribes’ rehabilitation and modernization work and project operation and maintenance.
Fortunately, the federal Compact legislation provides one or more irrigation districts the opportunity to establish a new entity with CSKT to manage the project. With the Mission-Jocko districts still at war against the Flathead Indian Reservation, the ball is in the hands of the Flathead Irrigation District. The tribes and the FJBC took seven years to reach an agreement on the original CME. By building on that agreement, hopefully, it can be done in a much shorter period of time.
But, there are many tasks on the road to a new agreement. If a new cooperative entity is to be in place by the beginning of the 2022 irrigation season, FID needs to get to work, but FID commissioners cannot do it alone and need to hire the necessary expertise.
The compact also established a Compact Implementation Technical Team consisting of technical representatives from the Montana Department of Natural Resources, project management, BIA, CSKT and irrigators. Because the CITT will provide advice and assistance with respect to the tribes’ rehabilitation and modernization decisions, FID active participation in the CITT with technical expertise would provide irrigators a voice in such decisions.
Dick Erb
Moiese
