improvements

from Ag Journal Fall 2020

relief after wildfires

Saving for the future

KRD utilizing every minute of the offseason to make improvements

Jacob Ford / Daily Record Kittitas Reclamation District, the largest irrigation water supplier in Kittitas County, is continuing to develop better sealed canals to save more water which will then be used to help rehabilitate the streams in the county.

By KARL HOLAPPA staff writer

As the 2020 agricultural season wraps up and the water is turned off, the Kittitas Reclamation District has no time to take a break. Instead, the district will be utilizing every minute the canal system is turned off to make improvements and study ways to conserve more water in future seasons.

KRD Manager Urban Eberhart said a district board meeting was held Sept. 24 where a construction contract was awarded for the South Branch Canal piping and improvement project. The project will focus on the canal downstream from Robinson Canyon. Local outfit Belsaas and Smith came in with the low bid of $2,000,019. Construction will begin this fall and will be conducted over the winter, continuing into 2021.

Eberhart said this project is one of a series of improvement projects which began with the Manastash piping project in winter 2014/15. Over that time, he said the district has committed to approximately $23 million in conservation projects.

“Each winter has been a busy construction time for us, because our construction window is when the canals are off,” he said. “The $23 million gets us started on our ultimate goal of $387 million of projects that we have planned out as we move forward.”

Eberhart said funding for the projects comes from multiple sources and is made possible through the work done by team members of the Yakima Basin Integrated Plan to secure state and federal funding.

“We have multiple sources that we are working on and that we have been successful at receiving in the past,” he said. “It all boils down to getting our canal system improved as quickly as possible so we can make better deliveries to the farms, and at the same time help out some of these critical streams like Manastash that need help moving forward.”

To date, Eberhart said the district

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has completed 8.7 miles of piping as a result of the combined projects, saving an estimated 5,805 acre-feet annually.

“Our goal is to ultimately save and store right at 100,000 acre-feet of water annually, where we will be able to implement conservation measures and make ag deliveries better,” he said. “But also create room in the canal where we can build smaller surface reservoir storage projects and put some of that saved water in those.”

Eberhart said the district is also looking at opportunities for groundwater storage, where they can move some of that water out into areas where it hasn’t been getting to, taking advantage of the elevation that they have in their canal system. By letting the water percolate into the ground in those areas, he said the molecules will be slowed down as they move back towards the river system.

Eberhart said the district is currently looking at a project in the Taneum Creek area, which would involve digging test wells and installing measurement apparatus to determine groundwater storage capacity and calculate how long the water would take to get back to the stream system. He said the district is also working in collaboration with Trout Unlimited, the Washington State Department of Ecology and the Bureau of Reclamation on a major water marketing analysis in the Yakima Basin to help determine methods to efficiently move water around the system.

“An example of water marketing is what we’re doing with the Tributary Supplementation Program, where right we’re saving water and then creating room in the canal to carry some of that water around and put that into streams,” he said. “That is a version or form of water marketing. All of the projects that we’re working on are all interrelated through each other. The water conservation is related to the groundwater storage and our conservation is related to our surface water storage, because any time we save water, we need to have some place to put it and hold it for when it is needed and when it could do the most good. We’re finding ways to provide the opportunity for multiple uses of the same molecule of water as it is working its way back down the system.”

Due to legislative timing, Eberhart said the district is anticipating that a full legislative budget for fiscal year 2021 will not be made available until the first of the year. In the meantime, he said the district is working with other funds already available, including the $2 million earmarked for the current piping project.

“Once we get a federal budget approved, then we should have more money available to us to do additional projects which would be continuing on the one that we have upstream of Robinson Canyon Road,” he said. “We’re still waiting for some funding for the second project, so we’re going to start on the project downstream of Robinson Canyon.”

For all the water currently being saved as a result of the district’s completed projects and looking forward to all the future conservation opportunities that will come from planned and ongoing projects, Eberhart said success comes as a result of the partnerships that have been forged through the Yakima Basin

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“We are finding that through the Yakima Basin, we are positioned very well because of our collaborative approach,” he said. “We’re not going at it individually. We’re going at it as a group of former adversaries that used to go looking for funding individually. We are no longer doing that. Our strength is in our teamwork, so we’re positioned very well for funding here in the Yakima because of the Integrated Plan.”

By collaborating as a team, Eberhart said the group has approximately $200 million worth of projects planned that can be implemented as soon as funding is made available in the coming years. If implemented, he said the combined projects have the potential of creating 1,100 direct jobs and 3,281 jobs if indirect ones are counted.

“We are geared up and we’re ready to go,” he said. “We’re positioned well because we’re organized. We’re hoping for a budget with some additional capability in it to keep us moving.”