Montana’s Water Future Depends on Cooperation, Not Conflict

For decades, some watersheds in Montana have utilized a collaborative, community-centered approach to balance management of limited water resources in this context of drought and overallocated streams. Cooperation, goodwill toward downstream neighbors, and voluntary conservation have proven effective at balancing ecological and community needs through local drought management plans coordinated by nonprofit watershed groups like ours.

Recently, a lawsuit filed against Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks (FWP) claims the state is failing its duty to protect rivers by not strictly enforcing their instream flow water rights.** The lawsuit’s premise would compel FWP to always make a call on their water rights, ignoring the complex realities faced by water users and the tangible conservation successes achieved through cooperation. While we support the state’s right to hold instream flow rights for fisheries and stream health protection, we are concerned that this lawsuit would not give FWP the flexibility to participate in collaborative efforts, dismantling the very solutions that are working on the ground: voluntary, community-based drought management plans. These plans, developed by local groups like the Blackfoot Challenge and the Big Hole Watershed Committee (BHWC) in partnership with state agencies and community leaders, are not a barrier to conservation; they are the best path forward. The ability of FWP to make calls selectively, honoring voluntary water conservation actions, is key to making collaborative drought management work in the Blackfoot and Big Hole. Thanks to participation by individual senior water rights-holders with rights far older than the State’s, this voluntary approach commonly delivers more water to the river than the State’s enforcement of its instream flow water right would.

For example, in the Blackfoot — where more than 80 landowners participate in the Blackfoot Drought Response Plan — one cooperating ranch owns water rights totaling 10.9 cubic feet per second (cfs) on a cold-water tributary to a critical bull trout stream. These rights have priority dates that are senior to the instream flow rights co-owned by FWP and the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. The 10.9 cfs of senior water is more water than would flow through this stream in mid-August even on a good year and is more than double the water flowing this year. Despite the perfectly legal ability to use these rights to their fullest, this ranch participates in Blackfoot Drought Response and has completed several water conservation and fish habitat improvement projects, so that they are now using less than a third of their allocated water rights. On top of that, the ranch cooperates with a neighboring ranch to rotate their respective irrigation activities, pooling their collective resources to reduce their combined water use and ensure broader community sustainability.

Similarly, in the Big Hole watershed, agencies, anglers, BHWC staff and area landowners are in regular communication as water levels drop, with water users giving back to the river in major ways. In severe drought years like this one, the BHWC has documented senior water right-holders losing $150,000-$200,000 in hay production due to voluntary cutbacks in irrigation and conservation to keep water instream. This summer, most Big Hole irrigators are operating at just 30-40% of their allocated water rights as they participate in voluntary drought management plans — with their focus on long-term watershed resilience rather than short-term production. When asked this summer, irrigators overnight delivered more than 40 cfs to the river, keeping sections of the Big Hole open for angling for an additional two weeks.

Thanks to the trust built through local drought management planning, our organizations have established opportunities to work with landowners on long-term solutions to drought. We sponsor scientific studies to better understand our water resources and potential solutions to keeping more water in our rivers later in the year. Landowners cooperate with us and other partners to implement stream restoration projects, revitalize riparian areas that capture spring flows, improve soil health to store groundwater, and install more efficient irrigation infrastructure. Our two watersheds have implemented dozens of stream restoration projects designed specifically to benefit native fish due in large part to the structure of our drought management plans and the relationships formed with landowners — work that has the added benefit of creating jobs for local contractors.

This flavor of cooperation is not possible within a strict adherence to the legal water rights framework. In places where cooperative drought management is working, requiring the State to use a heavy-handed approach to managing its instream flow water rights is a short track to picking a handful of winners and leaving many more losers, including the fisheries and aquatic health of our streams. Solely relying on traditional water rights enforcement threatens to put good agricultural stewards out of business and destroy trust-based, long-term conservation partnerships — which almost certainly leads to expanding subdivision, development of open space, and elevated pressure on scarce water resources. A one-size-fits-all approach to managing the State’s instream flow rights ignores the on-the-ground cooperation that has always existed among water users — who for decades have worked together to share the burden of drought based on drainage-by-drainage conditions.

In an arena as fraught with conflict as water is in the West, we should be celebrating the places that have built the goodwill and trust to support open dialogue and encourage individual sacrifices for the collective good. In a water-limited future, this is the best asset we have. Continuing a community-driven, collaborative and voluntary approach to managing water scarcity remains our best opportunity to ensure a resilient future for our fisheries, our agricultural communities, and the rivers that support it all.

**The lawsuit and some reporting incorrectly claim that the state has not been exercising its instream flow water rights at all. As part of local drought plans, the state does in fact exercise its water rights in two ways: by crafting and approving voluntary landowner conservation plans that are implemented and monitored during drought response and by making call on junior water rights held by water users who choose not to participate in voluntary water conservation. In the Blackfoot watershed, the state has made call on junior water rights holders without individual drought plans 17 times since 2000.

Pedro Marques, Big Hole Watershed Committee executive director, and Seth Wilson, Blackfoot Challenge executive director.