Remembering Richard Lemargie
PHOTO COURTESY OF DARVIN FALES.
Richard was a great mentor and friend. His recall of events and the history of the Columbia Basin Project was pretty amazing. When I came to South District, Richard took the time to share the background and important aspects of the project with me. I could count on his advice to handle difficult situations or to just make work simpler. He became the attorney for the South District in February 1985, serving for over 33 years. He was a family man and talked often of his children and wife. He liked to call after I had been on a hunting or fishing trip to get the details. He was a man who enjoyed the outdoors, and he could tell a good story. My favorite time with Richard was a drive we took up to the Sinlahekin Valley, near the Washington-Canadian border. He showed me his hunting camps and fishing spots, and you could tell it was one of his favorite places on Earth. His wisdom, wit, and friendship will be missed.
Richard’s father had negotiated the CBP repayment contracts on behalf of Reclamation, so I always thought that Richard saw things as if he had personal skin in the game. There was some latitude within the law and its regulation given to the districts. While this was beneficial in the end, it created internal controversy in deciding how to implement the law locally. This was true at the East District, where it turned out there was nearly a triangle among the views of the attorney, the board, and the manager about some of the options. In the end, no one had it all their way, but there was a successful and longstanding compromise. I have always admired Richard’s professionalism during this episode. He was instrumental in crafting a durable compromise despite his strongly held personal views. Much later, Richard was a leader in crafting agreements, changes in state laws, and Reclamation contract supplements that opened the way to bring a surface water —DAVE SOLEM supply to a region known as the SECRETARY-MANAGER, SOUTH Odessa Groundwater Subarea. COLUMBIA BASIN IRRIGATION This area, which for a long DISTRICT time was irrigated with ancient, nonrecharging groundwater, is Richard Lemargie was probably immediately adjacent to the CBP predestined to be an attorney and had long been scheduled The "empty saddle." Quincy-Columbia Basin Irrigation District on the Columbia Basin Project to be supplied by CBP canals. honored Richard Lemargie by placing his photo and other (CBP). He was born at Grand All that had been on hold for items in the chair he used during their board meetings. Coulee, the son of a prominent decades. During much of the Bureau of Reclamation solicitor. 1990s and early 2000s, the CBP In about 1977, Richard became the attorney for the East Columbia was hammered politically, because of endangered and threatened Basin Irrigation District. Later, he also became the attorney for salmon and steelhead listings, to reduce its water use, even though the South and Quincy-Columbia Basin Irrigation Districts, as significant CBP canal system and on-farm conservation efforts were well as the three districts’ canal hydropower arm, Columbia Basin ongoing. In the early 2000s, Endangered Species Act pressures had Hydropower, representing all four organizations simultaneously. reached the point that the state of Washington’s water resources One now-long-ago episode I remember Richard for is our program was also being affected. The state reached out to the CBP adaptation to the Reclamation Reform Act. While that federal to see if there was a way for the state’s needs and the CBP’s needs, law is now mostly just part of the landscape, it was the hot button and the water resources of both, to combine to craft a solution issue during its heyday in the 1980s. The law contained deadline that would better satisfy both out-of-stream water users and indates by which districts had to implement policies about how they stream needs. The entire process is too complicated for the space would administer the new land limitation law and its regulations. available here, but suffice it to say that Richard saw an opportunity Richard, like most or all other irrigation district attorneys, detested for a win-win solution. Even though he had long voiced caution this particular law, viewing it as a unilateral alteration by the about broadening the uses of the CBP water right to include users federal government of repayment contracts. Keep in mind that outside the confines of the CBP, Richard took the lead in crafting IRRIGATION LEADER
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