Bills take aim at preserving farms' access to water

By STEVE BROWN

Capital Press

OLYMPIA -- Rep. Bruce Chandler's name appears on several pieces of water rights legislation in this year's regular session.

In his dozen years in the House of Representatives, the Republican from Granger has sponsored or co-sponsored many bills with a central purpose: "to help the water resources program become more efficient."

House Bill 1297, for instance, concerns the relinquishment of water rights. "It has become the habit of the Department of Ecology to base water rights on recent use," he said. He wants to direct the department to look instead at the peak year of the past 15 years.

That would cover the different circumstances in terms of crop rotation and weather variability and would give a more complete, more realistic picture.

"Crop decisions should be based on the success of the farm rather than what may have been an odd weather pattern or marketing," Chandler said. "It would stabilize the supply of water for irrigators."

Ecology should focus on managing the water, he said, "getting it to where it needs to be, rather than simply rationing water until it's all gone."

Proper management would get away from what he called "the culture of it being a zero-sum game" in which protecting environment and agriculture is an "either-or" decision.

As ranking Republican on the House Committee on Agriculture and Natural Resources, Chandler has co-sponsored several other water issues now before the Legislature:

* HB2415 (primary sponsor Rep. Vincent Buys, R-Lynden) would create a new process and a new method of calculating annual consumptive quantities for water users who have switched to a more efficient type of irrigation.

* HB1117 (primary sponsor Rep. David Taylor, R-Moxee) would remove all references to relinquishment from the Revised Code of Washington. Instead the state would rely solely on the common law doctrine of abandonment.

* HB2192 (primary sponsor Rep. Brian Blake, D-Aberdeen) would create a perpetual appropriation of 100,000 acre-feet of water from the main stem of the Columbia and Lower Snake rivers to irrigate biofuel and organic crops.