Montana's water rights fractured by new development
O’Brien Creek is situated about four miles west of Missoula, Montana. Flowing alongside country roads, it meanders past neighborhoods on its journey to the Bitterroot River, a tributary of the Clark Fork. But years of drought, decreased snowpack and water siphoned off for crops, livestock and lawns have led to dangerously low flows by late summer. To protect the stream and its native westslope cutthroat trout and bull trout, the Clark Fork Coalition, a watershed-wide nonprofit, bought the majority of the creek’s senior water rights in 2014. This permits the organization to stop upstream homeowners from using too much water.
But that might be easier said than done. A few summers ago, Jed Whiteley, the organization’s project manager and monitoring coordinator, contacted every homeowner on the formerly agricultural land and told them they had to stop using large amounts of water by mid-July. The homeowners were shocked. “Nobody had made a call on the senior water right in a while,” said Whiteley. “They got used to not getting called on, and all of a sudden, we’re shutting them down.”
And such calls may soon become more common. Montana’s population has risen by 7.4% since 2010, and ranch lands across the state are being subdivided. But when land is divided, so are the water rights, creating an increasingly fractured landscape. For senior water-right holders like the Clark Fork Coalition, this makes protecting a valuable resource even more challenging.
The Clark Fork River’s 14 million-acre watershed stretches from the city of Butte in southwestern Montana all the way to Lake Pend Oreille in North Idaho. Once it was dotted with farms and ranches, but in recent decades, tens of thousands of new houses have been built in the region. From 1990 to 2016, over 1.3 million acres of undeveloped land in Montana was converted into housing, according to a 2018 report by Headwaters Economics. The demographic landscape is changing as well: Several western Montana counties are attracting younger people and new residents from across the country.
Read more: https://www.hcn.org/articles/water-montanas-water-rights-fractured-by-new-development
(High Country News)