White River flows through water issues

Last updated Saturday, December 9, 2006 10:32 PM CST in News

By Doug Thompson
The Morning News

Put simply, at least two-thirds of the state will be directly affected by decisions over the White River within the next 10 years. The first of the upcoming decisions to be made is on minimum flow.

"Minimum flow" is the technical term for a simple principle: Release water from White River dams at a rate and at the right time to keep the river's gravel and sand saturated. That porous zone between the main channel and the river's banks is where insects live. Those insects are the food supply for trout and other animals, the entry-level slot on the food chain.

"The whole idea behind minimum flow is food," said Jim Gaston, owner of Gaston's Resort.

Minimum flow is a condition trout fishermen, the state Game and Fish Commission, and the resort businesses along the river have sought for decades.

Putting the principle of minimum flow into practice would affect the sale of electricity to approximately 7 million customers in six states. It would require renovation and compensation to operators of marinas and other boating facilities on lakes. It would raise the usual water level of the lakes behind White River dams, since water would not be released as quickly as the lakes fill from rain. Dams on the river would require $5 million in new equipment and software.

Finally, minimum flow would require refinancing of an as yet undetermined amount of debt owed to taxpayers.

This is one of the simpler water issues facing the White River.

Irrigation wells in the Grand Prairie farming region of east Arkansas will not be viable within the next 10 or 15 years, according to state estimates. They are growing less viable every day, says John Edwards, executive director of the White River Irrigation District.

Work on the $320 million federal plan to pump White River water into on-farm reservoirs is on hold. The elusive ivory billed woodpecker's habitat is in the river's watershed.

The state's Natural Resources Commission will request from the Legislature next month a three-year, $4 million study on water needs, said agency Director Randy Young. It will include, but not be limited to, the claims to water from the White River. All claims for water are becoming increasingly interconnected, Young said. Such a survey hasn't been done in Arkansas since 1989.

Beaver Lake Key

Beaver Lake on the White River provides drinking water for more than one in nine Arkansans, according to U.S. Army Corps of Engineers figures. The key in getting a minimum flow agreement took Beaver Lake almost completely out of the process, said P.J. Spaul, spokesman for the corps.

An agreement was reached between members of the state's congressional delegation, the corps, Northwest Arkansas constituents vitally concerned with safeguarding the water supply and the federal agency that sells the power generated by the dams to allow a trout hatchery at the Beaver Lake dam.

The water that will flow through that hatchery will provide about half of what Beaver Lake would have provided under previous minimum flow plans. Under the new plan, the other three corps-owned lakes along the river will make up the rest.

The approximately 110 miles of river flowing below Bull Shoal's Dam would benefit from minimum flow, Gaston said. That and the lakes themselves are home to much of the water-based tourism industry of Arkansas. Trout fishing along the White River brings in directly about $180 million in business, according to state Parks and Tourism Department figures. That does not include the usual multipliers applied to tourism figures.

The dams on the river were made for flood control and for generating power -- and that's all, Spaul and Gaston said.

"It's a design philosophy about dams straight from the 1930s," said Gaston, a former member of the state Parks and Tourism Commission. He's advocated minimum flow for 30 years.

"I've had people say that I'm just in it to make more money because I'm in the resort business," he said. "Well, I assure you that I could have made a lot more money doing something else with all the time I've put into this."

There were three vital players in the long-running dispute: the corps, the tourism interests and electric utilities. "If any two of those were for something, it would happen," Gaston said. "If two of them were against it, it wouldn't."

"It was a turf game," Gaston said when asked why reaching an agreement took so long.

"As far as the power companies were concerned, creating another use for those lakes, any use, was a precedent they didn't want to set."

There was more to consider than turf, said George Robbins of the Southwestern Power Administration.

Electrical Needs

The corps built the dams but the administration, which is part of the U.S. Department of Energy, sells the power from them and other dams in a six-state area, including Arkansas, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas. The direct customers of the administration are restricted by federal law to nonprofit entities such as rural power cooperatives.

"Nothing is for free," Robbins said. "There's power generation and there's flood control. Take water allocation from one, and there will be less of it."

The administration sells electricity in 10-year contracts. Money from those contracts goes to repay taxpayers for the power stations, transmission lines and other facilities built, maintained and operated at taxpayer expense.

A percentage of each lake's capacity is allocated to flood control. That water is emptied as soon as possible after each flood to leave as much capacity as possible for the next flood. When that water is released, there's a surge instead of the gradual release needed for minimum flow. Therefore, the gradual releases of minimum flow would mean that the lakes, as a rule, would hold more water and have higher lake levels on average than they do now.

Having more water in Bulls Shoals, for instance, means Beaver Lake will not be able to release as much water for power generation, even though the "allocation" of water for power purposes remains unchanged, Robbins said.

Those power facilities were built at taxpayer expense, Robbins said. Money from the sale of electric power will pay back the expense of building those facilities, with interest. Decrease the amount of power produced and somebody has to bear the expense. Either the power customers will make up the difference in higher rates or the taxpayers will. Congress has decided to account for that expense by refinancing the debt on the electrical facilities when and if minimum flow takes effect.

"I really hate to give a number. It would be in the millions of dollars," Robbins said. It may be a paper transaction, but it will have an impact on the Treasury's bottom line, he said.

The final agreement in principle on how to achieve minimum flow was passed by Congress and signed into law last year, said 3rd District Rep. John Boozman, R-Rogers. Now there's the matter of getting the money, mainly for changing the dams.

Before Congress

Boozman and 1st District Rep. Marion Berry, D-Gillett, are leading sponsors for a $5.1 million appropriation for minimum flow. The congressmen were angling for an appropriation this year but time ran out. They'll try again next year, they said.

Of that $5.1 million appropriation, $3.8 million is for a siphon and related changes on the Norfork Lake Dam alone, said project engineer Mike Biggs of the corps office in Little Rock. Lake Norfork is not on the river but a tributary of it, the North Fork of the White River.

The dams are built for two speeds, Boozman said: On and off. They either drain away floodwater, or generate power at peak rates or they hold the water back.

"The problem is that there are many, many outstanding projects across the country that have been approved already, and we really don't have the funding for what we've already approved," Boozman said. "It's a very tough budget cycle, especially since a rule's gone out that there will be no new starts on corps projects until we make more progress on what's been approved already. There are very, very few exceptions being made to that rule, just a handful. We think we're going to be part of that handful. It's really not much money compared to other projects, and the benefits are so obvious."

The idea is getting more support from environmentally conscious members of Congress than many other federal projects involving dams, he said.

"The federal government gets accused of damming everything up," Boozman said. "This is a situation where we're doing something good from an ecological standpoint." In addition, "it helps an area where the river flows through some of the poorest counties in the nation," Boozman said.

Boozman represents Northwest Arkansas' 3rd Congressional District. Cooperation between him and Berry of the 1st District has been exceptional, and that's been the key to getting at an agreement, Gaston said.

Berry is also optimistic the White River minimum flow project can get through the ban on new projects.

"Mainly because of the serious environmental impacts when we don't have minimum flow," he explained.

The economic impact on game species like trout get all the attention, but the environmental concerns go beyond that to other species and that's been a major help in selling this project to other members of Congress, he said.

"It may not be the first in line, but it's one of the cheapest, most effective projects we can fund and that's been in its favor," Berry said.

Structurally, there's no problem with holding more water behind the dams to allow gradual release for minimum flow, according to corps engineer Biggs. The dams were built to withstand epic floods such as the great flood of 1927 and heavy floods of 1945.

It would take a minimum of two years to put into place when and if minimum flow is funded, Biggs said.

Irrigation

Maintaining minimum flow will not significantly affect plans to draw water further downstream in the Grand Prairie irrigation project, Biggs said.

That $320 million irrigation project would build a system of canals and piping to bring as much as 115 billion gallons of water a day from the White River to 1,000 Grand Prairie farmers.

The original $319 million cost estimate includes $208 million from the federal government, $87 million from the White River Irrigation District and the state, and $24 million from farmers. That estimate is being updated by a new study called for by state lawmakers in September.

The project is also the target of a federal lawsuit. U.S. District Judge Bill Wilson has halted construction pending studies on whether the project would comply with federal environmental law, including the Endangered Species Act.

"This project's won every lawsuit brought against it," Edwards said.

Arkansas' historic system of relatively limitless water use by anyone with access to it is drawing to a close, he said.

State Supreme Court rulings on water rights have held since the 1950s that a property owner has the right to take water from his property -- whether he borders a lake or a river or drills a well -- until it causes provable harm to someone else. The only type of water use that "trumps all others is drinking water," Edwards said. "It's on a level by itself."

Pumping from east Arkansas' Alluvial Aquifer brought about the need for irrigation.

"The question's been asked, why don't you just build on-farm systems where you recapture the water you've used already?" Edwards said. "The answer is that if everybody stops or cuts runoff from their land, it isn't going to flow down to the creeks and rivers any more."

Irrigation costs for his 2,000-acre farm jumped from around $30,000 to around $130,000 a year in the past two years, Kerksieck said. This was despite his use of surface water irrigation reservoirs on his farm, "land that had to be taken out of production to be used for water storage," he said. Irrigation costs spiked along with the price of diesel fuel and electricity, driving the pumps that dot the landscape of Arkansas farms.

The cost increase is compounded by falling water levels in the Alluvial Aquifer. Water costs more the deeper the pumps have to go to draw it.

The project will not drain the river dry during droughts because farmers will go back to wells when river flow is low, Edwards said. The plan is to use the river to fill on-farm reservoirs and other water-holding bodies while the river is high. That stored water would irrigate farms for much of the year.

This would reduce the demand on the Alluvial Aquifer, which can recharge itself much of the time when left alone. Wells would still be a necessary part of the irrigation process in dry years, but their use would be curtailed to the point that the aquifer's water levels would show average gains over the years.

Stopping irrigation is not an option, Kerksieck said: "Soybean yields would average 30 percent of what they are on irrigated land, with some years being complete failures."

Edwards said: "If farmers don't have options, they'll drill deeper wells. They'll go from the Alluvial Aquifer into the Sparta."

The Sparta Aquifer is the source of drinking water for towns in south and east Arkansas. It's long been noted for the purity of its water, for being overused and for being slow and difficult to recharge, Young said.

"Aside from the issue of whether you ought to be using a pure, drinkable water for irrigation, it's a simple fact that the more holes you drill into the Sparta, the more chances you have for something to go wrong, for something to spill into it that doesn't belong there," Edwards said.

"We have a chance to get this right," he said.

"Everyone will have to come to the realization that none of us has all the water we want, but we can have all the water we need."

Minimum Flow

Minimum flow is the technical term for a simple principle: Release water from White River dams at a rate and at the right time to keep the river's gravel and sand saturated. That porous zone between the main channel and the river's banks is where insects live. Those insects are the food supply for trout and other animals, the entry-level slot on the food chain.

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