Lawmaker says irrigators can’t afford Forest Service fees

Plans are underway to transform New Fork Lake near Pinedale as ranchers fret over potential costs.

Some irrigators using reservoirs on National Forest land can’t afford special use permit fees required under federal laws, a Wyoming lawmaker said as he asked U.S. Forest Service officials to help.

Wyoming’s Speaker of the House Albert Sommers (R-Pinedale) told two Forest Service officials last year that irrigation districts “simply can’t afford to pass that [fee] through” to individual ranch owners. He focused his comments on his Sublette County district, where members of the New Fork Lake Irrigation District face a $30,187 annual permit fee for use of the lake’s reservoir on the Bridger-Teton National Forest.

Irrigators haven’t paid the permit fee since it was first required in 1976. One reason is that the U.S. Forest Service never billed the irrigators, according to an email from that agency.

Had the government collected fees over the last 48 years, it could have brought in more than $800,000, according to WyoFile calculations based on today’s proposed fee and inflation. A state proposal to provide irrigators with more water by rebuilding the New Fork Lake dam, dredging a narrow passage between two parts of the waterbody and draining the lake further prompted a federal review that uncovered the non-payment.

Irrigators constructed the 37-foot high, 250-foot long New Fork Lake Dam in 1925. It is considered a high-hazard dam where misoperation or failure would probably cost human lives. The irrigation district comprises 99 irrigators and covers 14,612 acres north of Pinedale along the western flank of the Wind River Range.

If federal bookkeepers slipped up, irrigators also missed a financial opportunity. For a brief period following passage of the Ditch Bill Act of 1986, they could have petitioned to have their system grandfathered. Had that happened, permit fees imposed under the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 could have been waived.

Now irrigators are in a pinch, Sommers said at a meeting of the Legislature’s Select Water Committee last year when he questioned regional U.S. Forest Service officials.

The required permit fee “basically has become a new charge,” Sommers said. “Now, because … somebody didn’t get a filing done under the Ditch Act, they’re having to pay at times substantially more.

“I hope you guys are gonna crack that nut and figure out a way that we don’t break these little water districts because they simply can’t afford to pass that through,” Sommers said to Jacque Buchanan, then the deputy forester for the agency’s Rocky Mountain Region, and Chris Campbell, deputy forester for the Intermountain Region.

Unbearable burden?

Wyoming wants to increase storage at the reservoir, which currently holds 20,340 acre feet above the lake’s natural elevation. (One acre foot would flood most of a football field a foot deep.) It would do so by reconstructing the dam and lowering the outlet to enlarge storage by 8,000-9,400 acre feet, according to Forest Service and state documents.

Reconstruction, estimated at $12.7 million a decade ago, would involve dredging the lake’s “narrows” to drain the upper half of the water body by five feet more than is currently possible, Forest Service documents state. All told, the new reservoir would fluctuate by 22.6 feet, the federal agency states.

At the Select Water Committee hearing in Pinedale last year, Sommers urged the federal officials to “help the advancement of providing more storage rather than an impediment to storage.” Imposing the fees “could cause a ditch company to not be able to provide water, to not be able to utilize the resource,” he said.

“I hope you are looking at that broader issue,” he said. “It’s been a big issue here, and I really worry about any expansion of reservoirs or new reservoirs on Forest Service land.”

Enlargement of the reservoir would provide $496,000 per year in agriculture benefits, according to a state study. In 2017, a state water official said New Fork irrigators pay $1.50 an acre foot compared to some operations that are willing to pay as much as $25.

Forester Campbell said the fee issue is huge, “not just for the state of Wyoming but across the country.

“It’s my understanding that we are not currently enforcing those fees yet,” he said. “I understand that doesn’t calm your nerves when you see the bill come and you know that it’s hanging out there.”

“We are engaged nationally on this,” Campbell said. “We do understand the impacts that this will cause to those local water districts and to the folks in Wyoming.”

Bridger-Teton and regional officials talking with higher-ups in Washington, D.C. about the fees “as well as creating proposed changes to the regulations and directives to expand possible options for rental rate reductions when it is in the public’s interest to do so,” the Bridger-Teton said in an email to WyoFile.

Not delinquent

The annual fee is based on irrigators using 172.5 acres beyond the roughly 1,300 acre surface of the natural lake. The Forest Service uses a formula based on land values to calculate the fee.

Because the Bridger-Teton didn’t bill the irrigation district in the past, “the Forest does not consider them to be in delinquent in their debt,” agency officials wrote in an email.

A representative for the New Fork Lake Irrigation District declined to comment. The reservoir enlargement would supply late-season irrigation, a term that’s ubiquitous in large Wyoming water projects, along with ancillary benefits.

Although the state grants the right for irrigators and others to use water, which Wyoming claims as its property, it doesn’t guarantee a supply.

Wyoming proposed to enlarge the reservoir, eschewing simple reconstruction. It also dismissed a conservation alternative that would have provided more water to irrigators than the plan to lower the outlet and dredge the narrows.

The Bridger-Teton expects to address the request through an environmental assessment that’s underway.

The Wyoming Water Development Commission’s operating criteria allows it to waive its normal 75% grant limit if projects add more than 2,000 acre feet of storage, essentially covering most of the costs. Enlargement would make the project affordable for irrigators.

Water developers also have been spurred on by former Gov. Matt Mead’s 2015 initiative to develop 10 new storage projects in a decade. Wyoming has proposed and built several projects in the Colorado/Green River basin to fully use its share of the basin’s flows that are now under scrutiny due to climate change and new calculations of the region’s water yield.Under its latest proposal to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, Wyoming and three other upper basin states that supply the bulk of the Colorado River flows would pass down less water when reservoirs are taxed. Among the initiatives to address the iconic but over-subscribed western waterway is a $400 million BOR program to promote upper-basin conservation. Wyoming would oppose that plan if the state cannot control distribution of its share of conservation grants.

WyoFile is an independent nonprofit news organization focused on Wyoming people, places and policy.

This story was posted on March 14, 2024.