Grading your own work product

One of the major reasons the proposed Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes’ water compact failed in the 2013 Montana Legislature was that not enough information existed to evaluate the impacts of the compact on Montana citizens on and off the reservation, particularly with regard to environmental impacts, economic impacts to property values, and the legal and constitutional implications.  

Perhaps the most important piece of missing information was the amount of water that the tribes were claiming as their federal reserved water right, a number that the Compact Commission and tribes had failed to divulge.

As a result of this information vacuum, 50 legislators submitted a set of questions to the Legislature’s Environmental Quality Council in March 2014 requesting an independent study of these issues before the 2015 legislative session. This committee promptly punted those questions to the Water Policy Interim Committee, which formed a Technical Work Group to study the questions.  

However, instead of answering the questions posed by legislators, the interim committee limited the scope of the technical work group’s investigation to the quantification of the irrigators’ water rights as proposed in the irrigator water-use-agreement part of the compact, with no examination of the volume of the tribes’ federal reserved water right.  

Limiting the scope of work of the technical work group was a transparent effort to determine if the tribes’ “scientific” model could be used to justify the reduction of water to non-Indian irrigated lands.

In televised meetings throughout the summer, this Technical Work Group examined the “science” behind the tribes’ technical model. As of Aug. 13, the Technical Work Group had reached conclusive findings that the technical model could not be used for the stated purposes of limiting water to irrigators, that the tribes’ instream flow numbers were not based on fisheries science, and all of the “numbers” used in the proposed compact’s water-use agreement were negotiated, and in fact not based on science.  

In a 31-page report, the compact model was found to be flawed in issues of scale (on what level it could be applied), calculation of crop water use requirements and the irrigated land base, measurements of water use, and the uncertainties of data collection and accuracy. Even before the technical meeting of Aug. 13, the compact commission itself put out a report stating that the tribes’ model could not do what it claimed to do.  

Then on Aug. 26, something happened. The 31-page report morphed into a 100-page report which concluded that the compact’s technical model was based on “reasonable science,” the fisheries flows were valid and scientifically based, and that the plan to reduce water to the irrigated lands was based on science. Such a turn-around in findings clearly indicates that political science was applied to the findings of a technical work group, which of course calls all of the “science” studied by “experts” into serious question.  

That an Associated Press article appeared within three hours of the Aug. 26 meeting of the technical work group, crowing that the “experts say compact based on reasonable science” proves the political machinations were hard at work attempting to justify an unjustifiable compact.

That the revised report attempts to justify, instead of investigate, the compact is seen by its evaluation of the compact’s proposed increased instream flow values both on- and off-reservation. As opposed to actually investigating the proposed 300 percent increase in on-reservation instream flows, for example, the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks “experts” went “method shopping” for out-of-state and ou-of- country instream flow methodologies that rendered the compact’s numbers “reasonable,” because they resulted in “far less water than could have been claimed by these other methods.” The Aug. 26 report is littered with these spurious “scientific conclusions” that are politically driven and not scientifically based.  

As to the single most important question, the quantity of the federal reserved water right claimed by the CSKT, both the Technical Work Group’s Aug. 13 and 26 reports failed to even look at the question. The amount of water that the CSKT is claiming is critical to understanding the effect of the compact on the water supply and on other water users in Montana. Without this number, it is impossible to answer the legislators’ questions.

Unfortunately the political bias of the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation and the compact commission that the “tribes own all the water” in Western Montana is front and center. The compact commission still insists that it has “quantified the tribes’ federal reserved water rights,” even “state-based federal reserved water rights” — which is an oxymoron and contradiction in terms.

So as the 2015 legislative session approaches, legislators in fact have no more information than they did in 2013. Instead, they have been given biased studies that justify the compact, not critically evaluate it with an eye toward solutions. The only solution that the compact commission can offer is to pass it, because it is now based on supposedly “reasonable science.”

Just a final thought. If you were able to grade your own product, wouldn’t you always give yourself an A?

Catherine Vandemoer, of St. Ignatius, is a hydrologist serving as a consultant for Concerned Citizens of Western Montana, an organization dedicated to informing Montanans about the CSKT Water Compact, online at www.westernmtwaterrights.wordpress.com.