Irrigation Leader March 2015

Volume 6 Issue 3

March 2015

Troy Allen: Meeting the Challenges of Growing Year Round

Good People

By Kris Polly

W

hen I write my column for Irrigation Leader, I often review the contents of that particular issue for a unifying theme or message to underscore.

This issue of Irrigation Leader has a strong Texas flavor, as intended. However, when I review the table of contents, what I see is a list of very good people who take a great deal of pride in their jobs.

Troy Allen is a solid Texan and a problem solver. He is respected by his peers and is popular among them. I like Troy because, just like a farmer, he is always thinking about a better way to do something. Chairman Rob Bishop (R-UT) of the House Natural Resources Committee is proving to be different in many positive ways. He is a humble man with views on irrigation and water policy like those you would hear from any group of farmers at any coffee shop throughout the West. One long-time committee staffer was recently surprised when Chairman Bishop walked into his office for a friendly discussion about what the Chairman wanted to get done. Generally, staffers are summoned for such meetings, but this Chairman is hands on.

As general manager of the North Plains Groundwater Conservation District, Steve Walthour has a Texas-sized job with jurisdiction over 7,335 square miles. Steve’s leadership and vision are clearly up to the challenge, as he tells us about the great efforts his district and farmers have made to improve irrigation practices and conserve water supplies. Kyle Miller has faced every district manager’s fear of “no water” for almost four years. His personality and dedication to his job really comes through in the article. LaMarriol Smith of the Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority does a great job

explaining the recent Fifth Circuit Court ruling on the whooping crane case. After five years and $7 million spent by the good people of the Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority, this case is an example of how the Endangered Species Act is a wonderful law for lawyers, but not for the people it affects and certainly not for species.

Rick Reinders of Watertronics is an impressive individual with an equally impressive company. His quote, “Quality is the best assurance for continued success in business,” is a universal truth. By testing and certifying every pump before it leaves the factory, Watertronic’s operates at the same high standards and expectations of every irrigation district manager I have met. Howard Danzig is a highly intelligent individual and a solid American patriot. Those qualities are readily apparent when one meets Howard. He has also saved some irrigation districts a tremendous amount of money by improving their health insurance programs.

It may sound over the top to say there will probably be a statue of Howard erected at some point, but Loup Basin Reclamation District could certainly afford it with the money Howard has saved them.

We hope you enjoy this issue of Irrigation Leader and reading about the featured individuals, their issues, and their accomplishments. They are all good people.

Kris Polly is editor-in-chief of Irrigation Leader magazine and president of Water Strategies LLC, a government relations firm he began in February 2009 for the purpose of representing and guiding water, power, and agricultural entities in their dealings with Congress, the Bureau of Reclamation, and other federal government agencies. He may be contacted at Kris.Polly@waterstrategies.com.

The Water and Power Report www.WaterAndPowerReport.com The Water and Power Report is the one-stop aggregate news site for water and power issues in the 17 western states. Sign up for the free “Daily” service to receive e-mail notice of the top headlines and press releases each business day.

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Irrigation Leader

MARCH 2015

C O N T E N T S 2 Good People

By Kris Polly Volume 6

Issue 3

Irrigation Leader is published 10 times a year with combined issues for July/August and November/December by Water Strategies LLC P.O. Box 100576 Arlington, VA 22210 Staff: Kris Polly, Editor-in-Chief John Crotty, Senior Writer Robin Pursley, Graphic Designer Capital Copyediting LLC, Copyeditor SUBMISSIONS: Irrigation Leader welcomes manuscript, photography, and art submissions. However, the right to edit or deny publishing submissions is reserved. Submissions are returned only upon request.

ADVERTISING: Irrigation Leader accepts one-quarter, half-page, and full-page ads. For more information on rates and placement, please contact Kris Polly at (703) 517-3962 or Irrigation.Leader@waterstrategies.com.

4 Troy Allen: Meeting the Challenges of Growing Year Round

10 Assessing the State of Water and Power in the West

By Congressman Rob Bishop, Chairman, House Natural Resources Committee

District Focus 12 The North Plains Groundwater Conservation District

By Steve Walthour

MANAGER'S PROFILE 16 Kyle Miller

WATER LAW

CIRCULATION: Irrigation Leader is distributed to irrigation district managers and boards of directors in the 17 western states, Bureau of Reclamation officials, members of Congress and committee staff, and advertising sponsors. For address corrections or additions, please contact our office at Irrigation.Leader@waterstrategies.com.

22 Suit Calls Into Question Scope of the

Copyright Š 2015 Water Strategies LLC. Irrigation Leader relies on the excellent contributions of a variety of natural resources professionals who provide content for the magazine. However, the views and opinions expressed by these contributors are solely those of the original contributor and do not necessarily represent or reflect the policies or positions of Irrigation Leader magazine, its editors, or Water Strategies LLC. The acceptance and use of advertisements in Irrigation Leader do not constitute a representation or warranty by Water Strategies LLC or Irrigation Leader magazine regarding the products, services, claims, or companies advertised.

Rehearing in Whooping Crane Case

COVER PHOTO: Delta Lake Irrigation District General Manager Troy Allen Irrigation Leader

Agricultural Stormwater and Return Flows Exemptions Under the Clean Water Act

By John Crotty

24 Fifth Circuit Denies Request for

By LaMarriol Smith

BUSINESS LEADER 28 Rick Reinders of Watertronics 32 Howard Danzig

THE INNOVATORS 36 Plug-and-Play Hydro:

Voith's StreamDiverTM

38 Classified Listings 3

Troy Allen standing outside the pumping plant located along the Rio Grande.

Troy Allen: Meeting the Challenges of Growing Year Round 4

D

elta Lake Irrigation District (DLID) is the largest agricultural district in the Rio Grande Valley, delivering water to 83,000 acres of irrigated land that produces cotton, sugar cane, grain sorghum, corn, citrus, pastures, and vegetables. The district also delivers raw water to five municipalities. It runs water approximately 320 days a year.

Unique to the valley, DLID owns and operates a 28-mile canal, which dates back to the mid-1930s, from the Rio Grande to DLID’s first outlet.

The district diverts up to 640 cubic feet per second (cfs), with four 160 cfs pumps from the river, lifting the water 20 feet before letting gravity do its work. DLID operates 240 miles of lined canals, 42 miles of earthen canals, 165 miles of concrete and PVC pipe, and 53 relay pumps that are electric and diesel.

Troy Allen has been the general manager at DLID for nearly 12 years.

Prior to his current position, he worked at Harlingen Irrigation District for 16 years. Irrigation Leader’s editor-in-chief, Kris Polly, spoke with Mr. Allen about the challenges of maintaining and operating a district year round, working on the border, and finding creative solutions to everyday problems.

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Kris Polly: How do you do maintenance with a yearround growing schedule?

Troy Allen: Maintenance is very difficult due to the fact that we can’t shut the canals down more than a few days at a time. We have to schedule all the major repair work. We work with the farmers on scheduling time to shut the system down for repairs. That gets very difficult because you think you might have a small repair that ends up requiring the lining of 100 feet of canal. You plan on being down for a day but end up being down up to 10 days. At that point, we set up a bypass pump or a pipeline to continue providing water.

Kris Polly: Do you have a lining and piping program?

Troy Allen: We have a capital improvements program in which we try to install 2 to 4 miles of pipeline a year. That translates to a little over 30 miles of new pipeline—12 to 48 inches in diameter—in the past 11 years. We replace old concreted-lined canal and old mortar joint pipe with PVC pipe.

We also work with the Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) every year to install new pipelines on farmland. This helps our farmers conserve the water they have. NRCS designs a system that will irrigate the land more efficiently. DLID installs the new system for the farmers.

Around 40 percent of the land in DLID is laser leveled and waters well. Flood irrigation is primary—about 55 percent of DLID land is flood, 40 percent is drip, and 5 percent is sprinkler irrigated. Flood irrigation is used on sugar cane, cotton, corn, grain sorghum, and pastures. A large majority of drip is used on citrus and vegetable crops, although last year we had 250 acres of cotton on drip and it did phenomenally well. Sprinkler irrigation is primarily used on grass and pasture land.

The downside of drip irrigation is that we have to fill these old concrete-lined systems. If they are at the end of the line, there are times when we’ll divert up to 50 acrefeet for a farmer who uses 4 to 5. This is a huge loss for the district if there is only one farmer using drip irrigating on the line.

Kris Polly: How much of your district abuts the Rio Grande?

Troy Allen: We own a 400-foot strip of land along the river. That strip of land is tied to our diversion canal, which is centered within that 400-foot-wide strip of land that runs from the Rio Grande 28 miles to our east reservoir, then 2 additional miles to our west reservoir.

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Our farthest diversion point from the river is 66 miles.

Kris Polly: What kind of issues do you have being on the border of the United States?

Troy Allen: Some of our largest issues involved human trafficking across the border. Eleven years ago, when I first started here, people would cross the river coming over to the United States looking for work. The people crossing the river were friendly; they would wave or stop to chat with our employees.

Nowadays, when folks cross the river, my guys working at the pump house go in and lock the door. Some people are still crossing to find work, but now most people are coming across for other reasons. It is a challenge. Some nights, my guys fear for their lives. In 2011, one of our excavator operators was asked to quit cleaning the canal by three individuals who had crossed the river. Someone had created a footpath under the tree line between the canal and drainage ditch. They didn’t want the brush cleared because they were concerned about being exposed.

They questioned my operator as to why he was clearing the brush. Thank goodness they did not brandish any weapons, so he wasn’t in fear of his life—but he was very concerned.

Other than that, we haven’t had any safety issues. We are currently doing some work on the canal by the river, and we continue to see quite a few people using our canal as a corridor to get away from the river.

Kris Polly: Have you taken increased security precautions compared to 10 years ago?

Troy Allen: We have placed sensors at the river pump house that inform us if a pump shuts off so we don’t have to physically man it all the time. We are also in the process of putting up cameras at the pump house to help monitor the activity. If the situation gets really bad, we can remotely monitor the pumps. I would never put my employees in harm’s way.

Kris Polly: What would you say is your biggest challenge?

Troy Allen: The largest issue is having the ability to shut the system down to do repairs. Right now, on our main supply line, about 3 miles away from the river, we have an 11-foot-diameter concrete pipe that goes under the Arroyo Colorado and a state highway. The pipe was poured in place in 1938 and has had a few leaks over the past 10 years. This year, we developed a pretty sizable leak.

Thankfully, the recent rains have allowed us to shut down 6

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the system and repair the pipe.

This pipe has a 1-foot-thick wall—what we thought would be a simple repair has taken a lot longer. We are using a new product to repair the pipe—it is an epoxy, a primer, and a sealant from Partsmaster™. The applicators have used the product to patch up tanks in water treatment plants; we’ll also be using one of their products inside our pump house to patch a 60-year-old steel pipe that would cost $200,000 to fully replace. We can repair the pipe for less than $1,000.

Kris Polly: Given your experience as an irrigation district manager, what would your advice be to younger irrigation district managers?

Troy Allen: The biggest challenge is dealing with farmers. You have to treat all the farmers equally no mater how many acres they irrigate. Some of the farmers have been irrigating for years, and the methods that they used 50 years ago worked great then. But now, we have to focus more on water conservation. It can be challenging when you ask a farmer to change his irrigation method.

We need new managers in the valley. Many [current managers] are getting close to retirement age. You have to have a passion for it, because it is not an 8-to-5 job.

Troy Allen inside the pumping plant.

Irrigation Leader

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Assessing the State of

Water and Power in the West

By Congressman Rob Bishop, Chairman, House Committee on Natural Resources Those of us from the western United States are fully aware of what irrigated agriculture means to our local ways of life, regional economies, domestic food supplies, and international markets. Indeed, the visionary leaders who created our water projects were outside-the-box thinkers who transformed deserts into some of the most productive soils in the world and made our western urban and rural landscapes, and all those in between, what they are today.

Serial litigation and regulations are doing their best to undermine that promise. The current U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s “Waters of the U.S.” proposal is a veiled Washington, DC-knows-best attempt to regulate almost any body of water—including irrigation canals—under the guise of environmental protection. The U.S. Forest Service has also proposed a directive regulating groundwater, an area that has historically been within the purview of state jurisdiction. These policies are part of a massive overreach

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of federal authority and are seen as unsolicited, unwelcomed, and unjust by those at the state and local levels. I know from my experience as a state legislator that it’s the people who live on the land and work on these issues that have the best knowledge of proactive environmental protection and water use, not unelected bureaucrats in Washington. Under my leadership, the House Committee on Natural Resources will introduce and advance legislation that will rein in this federal overreach.

The Endangered Species Act (ESA) is another wellintended federal law that has been hijacked by real and threatened litigation that has forced many federal, state, and local water agencies and farming operations to walk on eggshells. The water crisis facing much of California’s San Joaquin Valley is a microcosm of how the needs of a three-inch endangered fish can be more important than entire communities and local farms. Now, it’s the irrigated farming communities that are endangered as these regulations exacerbate natural drought. My

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committee will focus on the role of states and localities in species protection, promoting data transparency and other common-sense proposals that are necessary to help both species and people. Indeed, federal laws like the ESA are often full of outdated notions that environmental needs and human activity cannot be in harmony. The truth is that they are mutually dependent and they must coexist— and the current policy regime is failing both. This mindset must be changed in both the law and regulatory arenas.

We must also have an infrastructure renaissance so that our society can prosper and that our natural resources remain healthy and robust for generations to come. Instead of accepting the status quo of water supplies, we must expand the water pie for both human and environmental needs. This return to abundance will include building more water storage, more canals, more hydropower, and more electricity transmission so that renewable energy can reach the marketplace.

Unfortunately, right now, many of our environmental laws and stove-piped bureaucracies are inhibiting new investments and curtailing innovative thinking. For example, our nation needs permitting reform that streamlines applications. Federal agencies must be stopped from blockading projects that help people and species.

There are potential water storage projects in California that should be greenlighted to boost both irrigation and fish flows, and yet they have been stymied by a 20th-century, bureaucratic, paralysis-by-analysis approach.

Our nation put a man on the moon in 8 years—yet these projects have been studied for over 12 years.

If these challenges are going to be addressed, we have to think differently and not be afraid to honestly assess other landmark laws such as the National Environmental

Irrigation Leader

Policy Act (NEPA), which is one of the most expansive regulatory regimes in the country. While no one can dispute the intent of NEPA, it is a law that requires oversight. NEPA created the White House Council on Environmental Quality and touches anything and everything with a federal nexus. Yet, a report last year from the U.S. Government Accountability Office concluded that there is very little available information on the costs or benefits of the thousands of NEPA-related analyses conducted each year. We must have greater oversight in this arena in order to identify regulatory duplication and mitigate exorbitant costs and delays associated with the NEPA process. To pursue these priorities, I have elevated NEPA to the exclusive jurisdiction of the full committee for the 114th Congress.

As an American history and government teacher for 28 years, I compare the past with the present to see which policies work and which need to be revamped. It is undeniable: When it comes to water and power, the current regulatory framework is failing us in the present and will fail us in the future. Policymakers must return to a can-do mindset that shuns the unacceptable bureaucracy and places our nation on a path to water and power abundance.

Rep. Rob Bishop (R-UT) is the chairman of the House Committee on Natural Resources. He has represented Utah’s first congressional district since 2003. Prior to becoming a congressman, Rep. Bishop spent 28 years as a high-school teacher in Utah, focusing on American history and government.

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District Focus

The North Plains Groundwater Conservation District

By Steve Walthour

T

he North Plains Groundwater Conservation District (NPGCD) is marking its 60th anniversary in 2015. The district was created by petition in January 1955 for the purpose of protecting and conserving groundwater resources north of the Canadian River in the Texas panhandle.

Led by an elected board, NPGCD provides water conservation education to stakeholders, collects groundwater data, sets and enforces groundwater production standards, and issues well permits.

Groundwater Conservation Districts

In 1949, the state passed the Underground Water Conservation District Act, which enabled the creation of groundwater conservation districts. Groundwater conservation districts are the legislature’s preferred method for the management of groundwater resources in the state of Texas. The districts are fully charged with managing the state’s groundwater through regulation and conservation education.

There are about 100 districts throughout the state, ranging in size from the largest—the High Plains Underground Water Conservation District, which consists of 16 counties between Amarillo and Lubbock and serves 11,850 square miles—to districts that encompass only a portion of a county. District management is inherently local because the districts

are led by locally elected or locally appointed boards.

No matter the size, they all have a wide range of abilities to manage water locally. Most districts focus on conservation education.

Panhandle Irrigation

NPGCD’s jurisdiction covers 7,335 square miles in all or part of eight counties in the northern Texas panhandle. It is very much a rural district, serving approximately 80,000 people. Our offices are located north of Amarillo in Dumas, Texas. There is very little surface water in our area. Groundwater is essentially the only source of supply for municipalities, industries, domestic and livestock uses, as well as irrigated agriculture. Irrigated agriculture uses 95 percent of all the water pumped in our district. Within the district, over a million acres of corn and other crops rely heavily on irrigation from the declining Ogallala aquifer. As aquifer levels decline, agricultural irrigators must adjust their practices to continue operating.

The area produces 1.5 to 2 million acre-feet of

Pivot on corn in north Texas.

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Irrigation Leader

NPGCD's boundaries.

groundwater annually to primarily grow several different crops, including corn, cotton, sorghum, wheat, and potatoes.

Our annual precipitation varies from one end of the district to the other. Our district receives as little as 15 inches on the west side near New Mexico, and up to 24 inches on the east side near Oklahoma. Altitude is the reason for the difference in precipitation, and altitude plays an important role in crop production. The Ogallala aquifer, which extends from South Dakota to the Texas southern high plains, developed as a giant series of alluvial fans from the ancient Rockies to the west of our area. On the west side of the district, the elevation is 4,600 feet above sea level. By the time you travel 160 miles to our eastern boundary between Lipscomb County and Oklahoma, the elevation drops to 2,600 feet. Despite the precipitation difference, some of our crops react much better at those higher altitudes, probably because of the lower temperatures during the summer at the higher elevations.

Though minor amounts of flood irrigation exist on the east side of the district, most of the irrigation applications today are low-elevation spray applications and low-energy precision applications through pivots. Some producers are beginning to install subsurface drip systems.

This past year, the district took its research field, which it has been supporting since the early 1960s, and converted it into a demonstration field to showcase all the different types of technologies and methods available to irrigators in our area. The goal is help producers make the leap to some of these water conservation strategies.

In 2010, the NPGCD board of directors initiated an on-farm conservation agricultural demonstration project called the 200-12 Reduced Irrigation on Corn Demonstration Project. The 200-12 Project establishes on-farm demonstrations by area producers to show how water conservation technologies and irrigation management practice adjustments can reduce on-farm groundwater use, allowing irrigated agriculture to remain financially viable into the future. The project’s goal is to grow 200 bushels of corn on 12 inches per acre of irrigation water under a center pivot.

The local producers joined the district as co-operators and used real-time data and other information to monitor crop and soil moisture conditions while managing irrigation applications. Each cooperator chooses commercially available corn hybrids, determines seeding and fertilizer rates, and schedules pesticide and herbicide applications. Each field is equipped with a remote continuous tracking and control system for monitoring and managing irrigation application frequency. The district works with the co-operator to monitor applied irrigation, rainfall, soil moisture, and plant fertility for crop health maintenance and to quantify project results.

Advanced technologies, such as electromagnetic soil mapping, variable rate irrigation, and satellite imagery, are being incorporated in the project.

If the project translates to 3 inches of reduced crop irrigation across the district, the water savings will be

Conservation Education

NPGCD works to encourage our producers to be efficient and to conserve as much water as possible. Today, there are so many new technologies and methodologies available that it is extremely difficult for any one producer to keep up with all of them. NPGCD works to be a source of that information in a way that enables producers to evaluate what strategies will work best for their operations.

We are the only groundwater conservation district in the state that has its own water conservation demonstration field.

Irrigation Leader

A field trip to an NPGCD 200-12 Reduced Irrigation on Corn Demonstration Project.

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250,000 acre-feet annually, prolonging the viability of agriculture irrigation in the region.

For the project, NPGCD tapped into different funding resources and looked for partners to share in the cost of the program. Initially, we could not find funding partners, but the board was committed to the project and three of our board members committed their own acres to do the demonstrations, with no funding to protect against potential yield loss. In 2010, the program showed that the approach had substantial merit, with one of the board members producing 198 bushels of corn per acre using only 10.86 inches of irrigation.

As a result of our success in putting together the 200-12 Project, the district partnered with the Texas Water Development Board and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, through a conservation innovation grant, to continue the program. The Texas Water Development Board contributed funding so NPGCD could expand the 20012 Project beyond the three initial demonstrators. The Natural Resources Conservation Service funded the NPGCD partnership with the High Plains district to the south, Texas Tech University, the Texas Alliance for Water Conservation, and others in a consortium to perform on-farm water conservation demonstrations across the Texas panhandle and high plains. That program concluded this past December.

Furnishing Data for Informed Water Management In addition to its conservation outreach programs, the district is committed to providing the highestquality data available to make informed responsible management decisions. We permit or register all wells, measure water levels and groundwater production, calculate saturated thickness, determine total storage capacities, monitor aquifer decline, and perform hydrogeologic and socioeconomic analyses of the affects of management strategies on the area. Over 10 years ago, the district’s board of directors recognized that the indirect estimates of how much groundwater was being pumped within the area were grossly inaccurate. As a result, the district has required all new wells to be metered since 2003. Owners of wells drilled before 2003 can use alternative methods prescribed by the district to report their production until they drill a new well on their property. At that time, they must meter all production on that contiguous production unit. Using data gathered from flow meters and alternate methods has improved the accuracy of our groundwater withdrawal estimates by 20 to 30 percent in some areas.

In 2005, the state set up a joint planning process that required groundwater conservation districts to set desired future conditions by 2010. Without the data we collected through our metering and alternative methods, we could

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have set desired future conditions that were unobtainable.

The Challenges and Goals Ahead

The area and the state have experienced a drought that has lasted since August 2010. Though all the years have been dry since 2010, the area experienced one of the driest and hottest years on record in 2011. It was so hot and dry that well capacities declined and could not keep up with crop water need. In June of that year, temperatures of 100– 110 degrees, very low humidity, and constant high wind speeds caused extensive crop damage across the region.

This year, we’ve had a series of light snows with moisture levels we have not seen since 2010. Though parts of the state are receiving moisture closer to normal conditions, the Texas panhandle and high plains are still in a drought— some of it exceptional or extreme—but we are getting a little moisture. Producers in the area have learned from their experiences through the drought and are adjusting their irrigation practices and farming methods to take better advantage of the moisture we do receive.

The statewide drought has enhanced the debate on whether the state should continue to manage groundwater resources through locally elected or appointed boards leading districts or use a more centralized management method. The district’s mission is to maintain our way of life through conservation, protection, and preservation of our groundwater resources. Responsibly managing those groundwater resources through our locally elected board that understands our aquifer conditions and groundwater needs provides the best protection and preservation of our local groundwater resources and economy. The local board develops management strategies that fit our area.

Our greatest focus is our conservation outreach program to educate our community on groundwater conservation and to promote buy-in from producers to use the water conservation tools and methods we demonstrate.

Demonstration increases awareness of the technology, but the district needs to move from awareness to adoption.

We are building a program that will take that next step to adoption. We are evaluating the potential to cost-share proven conservation tools and methods shown in our demonstrations and elsewhere, working with producers and suppliers to present new tools, and providing practical training to engage producers to use those conservation tools and practices.

Steve Walthour has been general manager of the North Plains Groundwater Conservation District since May 2007.

Prior to his current position, he worked for the Edwards Aquifer Authority in south-central Texas. You can reach Steve at (806) 935‑6401.

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Manager’s Profile

Kyle Miller

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W

ichita County Water Improvement District No. 2 provides agricultural, municipal, and industrial water supplies to the people of Wichita Falls and the surrounding agricultural community in north Texas. Formed with Improvement District No. 1 in 1920, District No. 2 constructed its water supply infrastructure—Lake Kemp and Lake Diversion—on the Wichita River from 1921 to 1924.

As Wichita Falls developed, the need for irrigation diminished, and in 1961, the city annexed District No. 1.

In a normal year, District No. 2 delivers 40,000 and 45,000 acre-feet a year to 14,000 irrigable acres of Bermuda hay and cotton. With a growing season from March through the end of October, District No. 2 generally shuts off water in early November. Average annual precipitation in the region is 28 inches. Unfortunately, District No. 2 has not seen anything close to a normal year since 2010. Record drought was registered in 2011. From 2011 to 2014, total precipitation has measured 13, 19.75, 21.26, and 22 inches, respectively, in each year.

District manager Kyle Miller has guided the district to adapt and survive through these tough times. Irrigation Leader’s senior writer, John Crotty, spoke with Mr. Miller about his district, its challenges, and dealing with drought.

John Crotty: Please tell our readers about Wichita County Water Improvement District No. 2.

Kyle Miller: District No. 2 delivered its first irrigation water in 1924. The construction of Lake Kemp, Lake Diversion, and our canal system was all done with horses, mules, men, and shovels. This was all done without GPS and modern construction equipment. They started construction in the late teens and finished the dam and canal systems within a 4- to 5-year period. I’ve heard that there were men lined up to take a shovel to get the project done.

District No. 2 manages both lakes. We have a full-time employee who lives at Lake Kemp. Lake Diversion is exactly that, a diversion. It doesn’t store the volume of Kemp, but we can run it by way of the Wichita River from Lake Kemp to Lake Diversion, where our canal system starts.

Eighty-five to 90 percent of our district is still

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flood irrigation. Quite a bit of it is laser leveled; the land is bordered and gated. The Natural Resource Conservation District has been instrumental in adopting those techniques. But in some ways, we still operate a lot like we did in the 1920s. It is all gravity flow.

We also supply water to a coal-fired power plant, which is 50 percent of our revenue. We signed a contract with it in the mid-1970s to supply water. It is 23 miles from the lake—the plant built a pipeline and pump station that it maintains. The district just has to keep the lake at a certain elevation. That contract has kept this irrigation district alive over the last 30 years.

We charge a flat tax—people are taxed on the number irrigable acres they own. They pay that flat tax whether they use that water or not. It has remained very low since 1976—$5.45 per acre. If we didn’t have that power plant, our rates would likely be around $17 per acre. Up until this drought, a lot of people haven’t thought about the real value of water. Whether municipal or agricultural, we deliver the water at a price that does not reflect the value of the resource.

Our main crop is coastal Bermuda hay. The reason for that is our water quality. The crop works with our soils, salt content, and irrigation methods. Our farmers can get four or five cuttings a year. The horse business is big in this part of Texas. There is also some cotton in our district that is irrigated with drip. We have had several producers adopt drip over the last 10 years. We also had some producers putting canals into pipe with what we call alfalfa valves.

Kyle Miller: The City of Wichita Falls has had water rights along with the water improvement district since the 1920s. It is just starting to use the Lake Kemp water as part of its municipal water portfolio. Within the last seven or eight years, the city built a new reverse osmosis facility. The city does use two other area reservoirs, but their current storage levels are only at about 20 percent.

Lake Kemp is only at 28 percent of its full capacity.

The district owns and operates the canal beginning at the south side of Lake Diversion to the city’s pump station. From the pump station, the city pipes it 12 miles to a water treatment facility in Wichita Falls. The city pays us some operations and maintenance money every year.

Many properties within district borders have been subdivided. They continued to be taxed by the district whether they use the water or not. Often, if one of those smaller plots runs a little hay meadow, they will need permission to go through a neighbor’s property to get their water.

John Crotty: Please describe the relationship between Wichita Falls and the district.

Back side of Lake Kemp gate tower/outlet works. The conservation pool is 1144.00 MSL.

Lake Kemp gate tower/outlet works.

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John Crotty: What are some of the district’s biggest challenges?

Kyle Miller: Besides the lack of volume over the last three or four years, our biggest challenge is water quality.

Our chlorides and total dissolved solids, even when we have more water in the lake, are not as desirable for irrigation water as we would prefer. There are natural salt springs upstream on the Wichita River.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has developed a chloride control project upstream on our fork of the Wichita River. It puts better quality water in Lake Kemp.

The Corps dams up the river for most of the year with an inflatable dam, diverting natural saltwater over to a brine lake upstream of Kemp. There are evaporation spray fields that it pumps the saltwater through. We’ll have a lot of days in the summer that are over 100 degrees. High winds, too. The Corps can evaporate a lot of it. It is an amazing operation. When there are high-flow rain events, the Corps deflates the dam and lets large amounts of freshwater flow to Kemp.

Getting federal funding for this has been a real challenge. To be honest, if we had more population in this area, they would look at more seriously. It is a quality and quantity issue.

John Crotty: What kind of impact has the drought had on the district?

Kyle Miller: Our district has not delivered irrigation water in the last three growing seasons. Anything that we can do to be more conservative with our water, we have.

Since the onset of the drought, we have been trying to spend as little money as possible. Since it has been three years since we last delivered water, we have people asking, “What are you district guys doing?” Our revenue has stayed the same because we collect taxes, the City of Wichita Falls pays us for operations and maintenance, and we have our contract to sell water to the power plant. But we really haven’t been putting money back into some of those conservation projects, like putting canal into pipe.

Perception is a challenge. People don’t always see the work we are doing out in the country. In this part of the country, mesquite trees take over areas. It impacts our drainage. We have our crews out excavating those trees to protect the system.

The year 2011 was the year from hell that all of us hopes we never go through again. This has been the best year of the last four for rain. There’s been light drizzle, and actually, some mud is on the ground right now. We are not out of it, but we have seen a bit of rain recently, which is a lot more promising than what we have seen.

John Crotty: What brought you into the district?

Kyle Miller: I was actually a county extension agent for nine years before I took this job as a manager. My degree is in animal science. As a county extension agent, you have to know a little bit about everything. I came from what was mainly a ranching county—cow and calf production.

This job has been a very interesting one. For my first five years, there was irrigation water. I won’t say I took it for granted, but I never thought there would be a point where I came to work to manage an irrigation district but didn’t have any irrigation water. The longer we get into this drought without irrigation water, the more I wonder how long people paying the taxes will have a decent temperament and attitude about it. But for the most part, our taxpayers have been understanding and have kept a positive attitude. I think they realize that the drought is beyond all of our control.

Part of being an irrigation district manager is water management, but there are general management issues that take up a lot of your time.

John Crotty: Where would you like to see the district in the next five years?

Kyle Miller: I would love to see all these canals with water in them during irrigation season. I would love to see the district and our producers back to normal operations.

I have four employees responsible for delivering water, and their job title has totally changed the last three years. I’d like to see this district operating at pre-2011 levels.

John Crotty: What advice do you have for other managers dealing with drought?

Kyle Miller: That question is the same question that I proposed to Tom Buchanan, the general manager of Lugert-Altus Irrigation District. I know Tom through the Red River Valley Association—he’s been a year ahead of me in this drought. In 2011, we actually delivered water and they didn’t. There are a lot of similarities between his district and ours. I asked him what do you do—and how do you do it—in this kind of prolonged drought. He told me that you try to find as many projects that you can do that don’t really cost a lot of money.

Retain your employees. I am trying to keep my employees employed because when we come out this drought, their knowledge is so valuable for district operations. Every one of those four ditchriders that I mentioned earlier knows this district better than I do.

And hope and pray for a lot of rain.

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Water Law

Suit Calls Into Question Scope of the Agricultural Stormwater and Return Flows Exemptions Under the Clean Water Act

By John Crotty

O

n January 9, 2015, the City of Des Moines Board of Water Works (DMWW) trustees filed a 60-day notice of intent to sue pursuant to the citizen suit provision of the Clean Water Act (CWA). See 33 U.S.C. § 1251 and Iowa Code § 455B.111. On March 16, 2015, DMWW filed its complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Iowa, Western Division. The water utility is alleging that 10 drainage districts upriver of the City of Des Moines—governed by three county boards of supervisors—have discharged pollutants into the Raccoon River in violation of the CWA and Iowa law (as well as for regulatory and physical takings and common law claims of public and private nuisance, trespass, and negligence).

Background on the Parties

DMWW is a public utility that provides drinking water to 500,000 people in the Des Moines metropolitan area. To that end, DMWW operates three water treatment plants that draw from the Raccoon and Des Moines Rivers and employ a variety of collection and treatment technologies, including membranes, radial collector wells, and infiltration galleries. Essential to DMWW’s treatment portfolio is a $4 million nitrate removal facility—the world’s largest—built in the early 1990s. DMWW built the facility to help the utility comply with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s maximum contaminant level for nitrate, which is currently set at 10 milligrams per liter.

Iowa’s 3,000 drainage districts serve more than 9 million acres of agricultural lands. Drainage has been an essential component of Iowa agriculture for more than a century. The authority to establish drainage districts has been enshrined in the Iowa Constitution since 1908 and is now governed by a comprehensive set of rules. Today, district members are typically agricultural producers. County boards of supervisors generally oversee the drainage districts and ensure the construction and maintenance of drainage outlets and levees.

The impetus for DMWW’s suit was increasing water treatment costs and the perceived shortcomings of Iowa’s Nutrient Reduction Strategy (NRS). In

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2013, the State of Iowa released the NRS, a voluntary program that calls for a 45 percent reduction in state nitrogen and phosphorus loads to address in-state water quality issues and hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico. Much of the strategy addresses the state of nonpoint source removal science and details best management practices. Iowa’s NRS, however, does not set timelines or funding mechanisms for nutrient load reductions. Bill Stowe, DMWW chief executive officer and manager, expressed DMWW’s frustration with the NRS in a press release on March 10, 2015, stating that “[the NRS] is simply not a sincere approach to protect the public health of Iowans . . . [and that] [w]e can no longer rely on voluntarism, rhetoric, and speculation to protect the waters of our state.”

The CWA Claim

Under section 301 of the CWA, the discharge of a pollutant from a point source into a navigable water is illegal. See 33 U.S.C. §§ 1311(a) and 1362(12)(A), and for the state analog see Iowa Code § 455B.186(1).

The term pollutant encompasses a broad swath of substances, including agricultural waste discharged into water—which is at issue here. See id. at § 1362(6). However, point source pollutant discharges are permitted pursuant to requirements set forth in a National Pollution Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit, as administered by the State of Iowa. See id. at § 1342. NPDES permits, however, are not required for “discharges composed entirely of return flows from irrigated agriculture.” Id. at § 1342(l)(1).

For the purposes of the CWA, a point source is “any discernible, confined and discrete conveyance, including but not limited to any pipe, ditch, channel, tunnel, conduit, well, discrete fissure, container, rolling stock, concentrated animal feeding operation, or vessel or other floating craft, from which pollutants are or may be discharged.” 33 U.S.C. § 1362(14); Iowa Code § 455B.171(19). The definition of a point source specifically excludes agricultural stormwater discharges and return flows from irrigated agriculture. Id. DMWW claims that nitrate levels and treatment expenses are ever increasing. The complaint alleges that nitrate concentrations in the Raccoon River at DMWW intake points exceeded the U.S. Irrigation Leader

Environmental Protection Agency standards 24 percent of the time from 1995 to 2014. In 2013, DMWW operated the nitrate removal facility for 74 days, with treatment costs totaling $500,000 for that time period.

The utility is reporting continued high treatment costs for 2014. In 2014, DMWW undertook a sampling program to test waters discharged by the drainage districts into the Raccoon River and observed excessive nitrate concentrations in multiple instances. Those data were included in the notice of intent to sue and the complaint.

The crux of DMWW’s legal argument is that the discharge of nitrate into the Raccoon River is in fact pollution via a point source. It argues (1) that the agricultural stormwater and irrigated agriculture return flows discharge exceptions do not apply to nitrate-laden effluent from drainage districts, which DMWW claims is groundwater; (2) that drainage infrastructure, as a network of conveyances and pipes, constitutes a point source by which nitrate-laden effluent enters the Raccoon River; and (3) as such, the drainage districts require an NPDES permit as a matter of law of both federal and Iowa law to discharge that effluent.

Selected Caselaw Pertinent to the Case

There is a limited body of case law addressing the nature of the agricultural exemptions. However, a brief review of that law indicates that the application of the exemptions is very much a fact-based inquiry as to whether a discharge is solely the product of irrigated agriculture or is commingled with nonirrigated sources.

In Fisherman Against the Destruction of the Environment v. Closter Farms, 300 F.3d 1294, 1297-98 (11th Cir. 2002), the Eleventh Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals concluded that “discharged groundwater and seepage” used to irrigate crops may be characterized as return flows from irrigated agriculture. The case involved a citizen suit filed by an environmental group claiming a Florida sugarcane farm that operated a drainage system conveying excess flood irrigation water into Lake Okeechobee was discharging “seepage” via the canals back into the lake without an NPDES permit in violation of the CWA. The court found that no NPDES permit was required for the conveyance because all the water that had seeped into the canals from the lake, “either above or below ground, has been used in the irrigation process” and that the discharge back into the lake is rightly characterized as a return flow for purposes of the exemption. Id. at 1297.

A more recent case addressing whether an underground tile drainage system is a point source or nonpoint source is ongoing in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California. In Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations v. Glaser, No. CIV S-2:11-2980KJM-CKD (E.D. Cal. Sept. 16, 2013) (Glaser), an environmental group alleged that the Grasslands Bypass Irrigation Leader

Project is discharging groundwater, unrelated to irrigation, via drainage tile into the San Luis Drain and the Mud Slough without an NPDES permit in violation of the CWA. After a thorough review of the legislative history of the exemptions, the court concluded that the exemption for return flows from irrigated agriculture applies to both surface and subsurface flows and covers discharges from irrigated agriculture that do not contain additional discharges unrelated to crop production. In its September 2013 ruling, the court denied the plaintiff ’s request for a judgment on the pleadings based on a lack of adequate facts to support the claim that some of the discharge is unrelated to crop production.

However, the court left open the possibility for the plaintiffs to amend their complaint. They did. And based the amended pleading, the court has allowed the case to proceed regarding the claim that the discharges are not composed entirely of return flows from irrigated agriculture because “they contain additional discharges from polluted groundwater originating from retired land that no longer supports irrigated agriculture.” See Glaser, No. CIV S-2:11-2980-KJM-CKD (E.D. Cal. March 27, 2014). The parties are currently undertaking discovery.

What This Means for Western Irrigators

The return flow exemption is intertwined with irrigated agriculture in the arid West. One of the driving forces prompting Congress to exempt irrigation return flows from the definition of a point source and from NPDES permitting was the reliance of western farmers on irrigation. See, e.g., 123 Congressional Record. S.21, 26,702 (Aug. 4, 1977) (statement of Sen. Stafford) (“This amendment promotes equity of treatment among farmers who depend on rainfall to irrigate their crops and those who depend on surface irrigation which is returned to a stream in discrete conveyances.”)

Nonetheless, given the limited body of case law and factual inquires required in the application of agricultural exemptions, this case should be on the radar of drainage districts and irrigation districts with drainage infrastructure across the West. There are dryland operations in the West with drainage components, as well as acres within irrigation districts that are used for drainage infrastructure but are no longer irrigated or farmed. Western municipalities dealing with increased treatment costs could look to upstream dischargers that fit one of those profiles to help bear treatment costs through a similar line of litigation.

John Crotty is counsel for Water Strategies LLC and the senior writer for Irrigation Leader magazine.

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Water Law Fifth Circuit Denies Request for Rehearing in Whooping Crane Case

By LaMarriol Smith

N

EW ORLEANS — The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, on Monday, December 15, 2014, denied a petition for rehearing en banc in The Aransas Project (TAP) vs.

Shaw, in which a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit reversed a judgment of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. In a June 30, 2014, decision, the Fifth Circuit panel agreed with the defendants that the plaintiff failed to prove its case that diversions of water for use by Texans had led to multiple deaths of federally protected whooping cranes in the winter of 2008.

A lawsuit against the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) was initiated by a group wielding the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA). The purpose was to bring a halt to water permitting on the Guadalupe and San Antonio Rivers by alleging multiple deaths of the endangered whooping cranes that winter on the Texas coast.

The Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority (GBRA) intervened as a defendant. With only two whooping crane carcasses and two partial carcasses found during 2008–2009, no evidence supported the double-digit 24

losses claimed by the plaintiffs.

Yet, on March 11, 2013, federal district court Judge Janis Graham Jack “adopted verbatim TAP’s proposed findings of fact” and held that the TCEQ caused the deaths of the whooping cranes by issuing water permits that resulted in diverting water from the cranes. The judge ordered TCEQ to immediately stop issuing water permits on the Guadalupe and San Antonio Rivers and also ordered a costly federal planning process that is duplicative of current state programs.

In the decision released December 15, Judge Edith Jones, writing for the majority, indicated that 11 judges of the Fifth Circuit had voted to deny TAP’s petition for rehearing en banc, thus leaving in place the 3-judge panel opinion (as modified), while 4 judges voted in favor of rehearing.

“After considerable thought on the issue of rehearing, the vast majority of the full Fifth Circuit decided to reaffirm the ruling of the original threejudge panel in this case,” Bill West Jr., GBRA general manager, said after the hearing about the opinion.

Three of the four judges who favored a rehearing signed on to a dissenting opinion written by Judge Edward Prado. He opined that the panel’s decision Irrigation Leader

independently weighed facts to render judgment in violation of principles of federal law and cautioned that the Supreme Court has reversed the Fifth Circuit before for improperly reweighing the factual findings of district courts.

The plaintiffs in the case have 90 days from the issuance of the opinion to file an appeal with the United States Supreme Court.

In the Fifth Circuit hearing, GBRA’s appellate attorney, Aaron Streett, of the firm Baker Botts LLP, argued that TAP failed to prove proximate cause as a matter of law because the chain of causation from permit holder to alleged harm to the cranes was too attenuated and unforeseeable to constitute proximate cause. The Fifth Circuit panel that consisted of Judges Jones, Jerry Smith, and Emilio Garza agreed, finding “[n]owhere does the court [District Court] explain why the remote connection between water licensing, decisions to draw river water by hundreds of users, whooping crane habitat, and crane deaths that occurred during a year of extraordinary drought compels ESA liability. . . . The court’s ambiguous conclusion cannot be sustained.”

The panel concluded that “the district court’s opinion misapplies proximate cause analysis and further, even if proximate cause had been proven, the injunction is an abuse of discretion. The judgment is reversed.” Because of the ruling, the district court’s injunction stopping the state of Texas from issuing water permits for the affected basins is of no effect.

In the revised panel opinion released December 15, the panel made minor clarifications to its proximate-cause

Irrigation Leader

analysis but reconfirmed its reversal of the district court.

In an article that appeared in the December 16, 2014, edition of the Victoria Advocate, Jim Blackburn, the environmental attorney that argued the case for TAP, said that the Texas environmental flow standards are not enough to meet the needs of the endangered cranes, and the mindsets of water users in Texas needed to change.

Blackburn commented in a December 16, 2014, blog posted by Asher Price of the Austin American-Statesman that he would file an appeal to the Supreme Court within the 90 days allowed. The deadline to file with the Supreme Court would be around March 15, 2015.

Records indicate the Supreme Court receives about 10,000 requests annually to hear cases, and from those, the Court selects about 80 for hearing.

[Editor’s Note: On March 16, 2015, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reported that preliminary survey data indicated 308 whooping cranes, including 39 juveniles, in the survey area centered on Aransas National Wildlife Refuge. The same day, TAP’s attorney filed a 331-page petition for a writ of certiorari with the U.S. Supreme Court.]

LaMarriol Smith is the executive manager for Strategic Communications and Public Affairs for the GuadalupeBlanco River Authority. You can reach LaMarriol at (830) 379-5822 ext. 239 or lsmith@gbra.org.

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Business Leader

W

Rick Reinders of Watertronics

atertronics is a Wisconsinbased company that produces agricultural pump stations and control technologies for highefficiency pumping. For over 30 years, Watertronics has developed complex, large-capacity pumping systems for water districts and farming operations.

In 2008, Watertronics became part of Lindsay Corporation, a Nebraskabased manufacturer of agricultural irrigation products. Watertronics has worked all over the world on irrigation projects, exporting its pumps to more than 25 countries. Irrigation Leader’s editor-in-chief, Kris Polly, spoke with company President Rick Renders about the company’s history, its pump system innovations, and its commitment to quality.

Kris Polly: Please tell our readers about the history of Watertronics.

Rick Reinders: Watertronics was started as a division of the Reinders family business, which focuses on turf irrigation and is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year.

We started manufacturing and marketing pump stations on a nationwide basis in 1986. We patented a unique device called an electronic butterfly valve—a signature feature of our pump stations. We still produce those valves to this day.

The business began in Elm Grove, Wisconsin, and we moved to our current location in Hartland, Wisconsin, in 1991. We added on to those facilities in 2000 and in 2003.

Lindsay acquired the company in January 2008—that was our entry into the agricultural markets.

We sell our products to the agricultural markets, the golf course markets, landscape irrigation market, and the municipal—domestic and effluent—markets.

Moving water is moving

water, whether it is for agriculture or golf courses. The principles are all the same. And the algorithms used to control the pumps stations are very similar.

Kris Polly: What is your company’s philosophy?

Rick Reinders: Quality and customer service—it is ingrained in our culture, and it is our focus.

We’re located in the Milwaukee metropolitan area—the same area where Harley-Davidson motorcycles and Milwaukee tools are made. It is a blue-collar market with heavy German influences. We have a heritage of building systems that last and are engineered to work harmoniously with the operator. We have pioneered such things as variable speed drives and touch-screen operator interfaces. Like a cell phone, our products are technically sophisticated but simple to use. We produce durable systems that save time, water, and energy.

Kris Polly: To have a pump station ready to go off the truck is a tremendous idea.

Rick Reinders: That is just the beginning of it. A pump station with a remote terminal unit, which we manufacture with our sister company, is automatically online. We can access a pump station located anywhere in the world from our offices or any smart-enabled device.

Lindsay’s FieldNET Pump Controls enable remote pivot and pump monitoring and control via laptop or tablet.

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Irrigation Leader

A significant amount of trouble shooting, service, and optimizing can be done without setting foot on the site.

We have designed our products so that sensitive electronic components are enclosed in a sealed cabinet.

That ensures the control of humidity levels, dust—all things detrimental to electrical components. Dust on an electrical component acts like an insulator. It enables heat to build up, which is the enemy of electronic components.

Our pump stations are often located along a road, near a field, or by a construction site, each of which has a lot of dust and debris. It has always made sense to protect our electrical components.

We pioneered this idea in the industry. We’ve been producing variable frequency drive (VFD) panels since 1988, when modern VFDs were being used for pump applications. That predates a lot of our competitors.

If you put an VFD in an enclosure, you have to remove the heat to keep it happy. Our pumps are cooled with air conditioners or heat exchangers that take some of the water that we are pumping and move it through a radiator system within the enclosure. It is an efficient way to remove heat from the system.

Kris Polly: What should every irrigation district and water agency know about Watertronics?

Rick Reinders: Our message is that there is a great cost justification for a packaged pump system. The integrated engineering that we put into our packaged system is difficult to duplicate. Unlike pump stations constructed outside, Watertronics pump station units are pretested prior to leaving the factory, and their performance is certified.

It is much easier to build something as sophisticated as a multiple-component pump station in a climate-controlled environment than it is on a site with dirt and wind.

We pretest our pumps and pump systems. The pumps,

Welding pump components at the Watertronics plant.

Irrigation Leader

motors, and piping are assembled on a skid that is set over a test pit in our facility that is 60-feet long, 20-feet deep, and 10-feet wide. We run tests as though it was pumping water through an irrigation system—from full flow to no flow.

We certify the performance of every pump—the amperage that it draws, the flow and pressure that it produces, the operating efficiency, and the vibration that it sees under dynamic operating conditions. All this information is data logged to a job file on the network. We use it as the ultimate quality control. We will cull pump, motors, and other components that do not meet our standards.

This process helps us ensure that when we ship a pump station halfway around the world, it will work right out of the box.

Kris Polly: As an irrigation component manufacturer, what issue or issues keep you up at night?

Rick Reinders: The main concerns that we have are proper maintenance of our pump stations. We like to see maintenance contracts and work with the customer on routine maintenance. It is important to verify performance on an annual basis to optimize the system for efficiency.

We program the pump curve into our advanced logic to optimize pump sequencing at varying pressures.

In addition to being pretested, every one of our systems includes a commissioning by a pump service network technician to fine tune the system and train the owner’s representatives on system operations and maintenance.

Kris Polly: In your capacity as the president of manufacturing company, what is the most important thing you have learned?

Rick Reinders: Maintain your standards. Quality is the best assurance for continued success in business.

Watertronics booster pump station at the Garrison Diversion Conservancy District in North Dakota.

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Business Leader

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Howard Danzig

ith aging workforces and rising health care costs, irrigation districts and water agencies, like all small to mid-size employers, have been grappling with ways to best provide health care benefits in a way that does not consume their budgets. Howard Danzig, president of Employers Committed to Control Health Insurance Costs (ECCHIC), has been working on these problems for the last 25 years. His solution is simple: Educate employers about the economics and dynamics of the health care system and place control of employer dollars back into their own hands. With a client base that includes irrigation districts in Nebraska and Missouri, the ECCHIC management team has been providing health care solutions to employers for 15 years. Irrigation Leader’s editor-in-chief, Kris Polly, spoke to Mr. Danzig about the insurance industry and rising health care costs, and empowering employees to make informed financial and health care choices.

Kris Polly: Please describe your business for our readers.

Howard Danzig: We advise small and intermediatesize employers how to use the same component resources that insurance companies and large employers use to get the best net cost per medical service or prescription. This is opposed to bundling the funding for it through a third-party insurance company that prefunds at a 40 percent increase from what the underlying institutional costs really are. So the unit cost for what a small employer uses, unless it has a major event, is about 40 percent less on average than the same cost using a premium. Therefore, there is more value and more affordability. It is making more efficient use of [the small employers’] dollar. We call it cost management or value-based benefits.

Kris Polly: What should every irrigation district or water agency board member know about your services?

Howard Danzig: They need to be open minded to be willing to understand the underlying economics of what comprises a medical benefit that comes with a premium.

They need to recognize that there is a cost per service that is not being absorbed by a third party. The issue is straightforward: the relative unit cost of [services and 32

prescriptions] at a wholesale price versus the unit cost of what they are buying at a marked up premium price.

If [board members] are willing to look at health insurance through the prism of that reality, they will get an entirely different result than they are currently receiving under their current insurance plans.

Kris Polly: You help small employers pay directly for medical services and pharmaceuticals.

Howard Danzig: We have the infrastructure that gives them the opportunity to do that. We give our clients the opportunity to use medical service wholesalers, known as medical networks, and pharmacy wholesalers, which are called pharmacy benefit management companies, so that they can buy health care and pharmaceuticals at the same institutional discounts that the insurance companies are benefitting from and not passing on to the consumer.

The foundation for our business is twofold. First, an employer must know what its costs are. [ECCHIC] positions the employer to know where every penny is going.

Most employers do not have this information. So we provide transparency and accountability. Second, whoever controls the cash for a program, controls the system. So when an employer gives up control of its cash to a third-party insurance company, it has disenfranchised itself from getting value from its benefit dollar. [The employer] has empowered the insurance company to make the employer subordinate to the mandates of the insurance company. ECCHIC works to shift the power the other way, creating accessibility to health care options and enhancing affordability of employer health care programs.

Kris Polly: What would a program look like for an irrigation or water district?

Howard Danzig: First, it is important to understand that there are four major components to health care program costs: the cost of medical services, the cost of administration, the cost of pharmacy, and the cost of insurance. When you unbundle these components, the underlying cost of each component is reduced.

ECCHIC sets a budget based on the market rate of premiums. We then position the employer to contract, Irrigation Leader

component by component, with the wholesale resources that sell to the insurance company. Our administrator handles all the paperwork and all the compliance requirements.

Employee benefits remain the same. Accessibility to doctors and pharmacies remains the same. But payment is done in a different way. The cost of insurance becomes a component of an employer’s overall health care program budget and the [cost] point at which insurance takes over becomes substantially higher. ECCHIC tries to find that optimum point at which insurance does not absorb cost but, in fact, adds cost.

Under our program, employees would go to their doctor as they normally would and present a card. The card is connected to a medical network. The doctor sends the bill to the network. The network reduces the cost of the contracted rate. The network sends the claim to the administrator, who determines eligibility and viability of the claim. The administrator itemizes the claim and sends the itemized statement of activity to the employer, who is now in control of the same dollars it had heretofore given to the insurance company. The employer then releases the funds to the administrator at the contracted discounted price. The administrator then distributes the money to the respective providers. The employer sees all costs.

With our program, we can evaluate the relationship between how much premium is committed for a particular component of a [health care] program and the underlying cost of the services that are being used. So from year to year, we determine at what point insurance needs to be put into place and up to what point it should not.

Kris Polly: Under your program, irrigation and water districts are essentially acting as their own insurance company.

Howard Danzig: What employers don’t realize is that they are already acting as their own insurance company.

They give control of funding services to a third-party insurance company that attaches its name to the funding and creates the illusion that it is the one providing insurance.

Insurance companies are in reality accounts payable systems.

The reason for insurance is to protect against an unforeseen event. There is a place for true insurance companies to absorb the cost of those truly unpredictable events. The insurance industry, however, has moved beyond that to become a mechanism for access to everyday medical services at a price that is lower than what those services actually cost. Insurance companies are retailers of bundled premiums, adding up to 40 percent to the cost of services.

Doctors today are being compensated through these insurance contracts at or below the levels by which they were compensated five to seven years ago. On a unit cost basis, health care is the only commodity in our economy that has had a cumulative zero percent inflation rate. Yet, we the consumers are led to believe that costs are out of control. They are not. What is out of control is the volume of services being used. While unit costs remain the same, premiums have increased 8 to 10 percent. The relative value of premiums is quite questionable.

Kris Polly: What would be the first step for an irrigation district or water agency to rearrange its current health care program?

Howard Danzig: ECCHIC provides a no-cost, no-obligation evaluation of what can be done. We would need a copy of the irrigation district’s or water agency’s current benefits structure; a listing of plan participants by gender, age, and family members covered; and exact location.

We would then look at the market rate premium in that area. We will then show the employer what insurance is needed and what is not.

Every employer group with whom we have had the privilege of working is spending less than they had been—all without cutting their benefits. We have dozens of employers with benefits budgets benchmarked to their premiums, whose premiums are the same as they were five years ago and surpluses accumulating every year. Employers can do whatever they want with those savings—it is their money.

Our goal is to keep the money in the hands of the employer.

Actual Client Profile

Out-of-state municipality in Missouri with 26 employees plus dependents; began program in 2006 Blue Cross premium Employer medical costs responsibility Employer Rx costs responsibility Employee deductible Employee out of pocket Copay for office visits Program Costs*

2006

2014

$28,000/month

$11,500/month

----

$4,600/month

----

$2,500/month

$1,000

$1,000

$1,000 (10% of next 10,000)

$1,000 (10% of next 10,000)

$20

$20

$28,000/month

$18,600/month

* Program budget for 2015 remains $28,000/month Irrigation Leader

33

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Steven L. Hernandez attorney at law Specializing in

U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Contracts and Western Water Law 21OO North Main Street Suite 1A P.O. Box 13108 Las Cruces, NM 88013

(575) 526-2101 Fax (575) 526-2506 Email:

slh@lclaw-nm.com

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EMPLOYERS COMMITTED TO

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The landowners and stakeholders of the Columbia Basin Development League Thank these companies for their support!

THANK YOU JR Simplot Co Big Bend Electric Cooperative Connell 76 LLC Evergreen Implement key Bank McCain Foods USa Inc McGregor Company Wells Fargo Insurance Services USa Inc Zirkle Fruit Company ag World Support Systems Bank of america Merrill Lynch ChS Connell Grain Inland Power & Light Co nelson Irrigation Corp northwest Farm Credit Services Quincy Foods LLC Twin City Foods Inc Washington Trust Bank

Since 1964, the League has supported Washington state’s Columbia Basin Project and its future development. The League is the only group representing stakeholders to protect Project water rights and educate the public on the renewable resource and multiple-purpose benefits of the Project.

You can help. Join today: www.cbdl.org/join Columbia Basin Development League PO Box 745, Cashmere, WA 98815 PhOne: 509-782-9442 FAx: 509-782-1203

The Innovators

Plug-and-Play Hydro: Voith’s StreamDiver™

L

ast year, the United States Congress passed a series of bills that eased the regulatory burdens placed on the development of low-head hydropower projects and created more opportunities for irrigation districts and water agencies to generate new revenues. With some of the regulatory concerns out of the way, districts still have to ensure that the economics of a small hydro project make sense. Fortunately, there are new products and components on the market that are tipping the economic scales to favor low-head development.

One of those products is Voith’s StreamDiver™, a modular, scalable turbine designed for run-of-river power stations or canals with low heads. According to Brian Murtha, a Voith sales manager based in York, Pennsylvania, the ingenuity of the StreamDiver™ is its simplicity and robustness. It is a conventional turbine with all the bells and whistles stripped out. Beyond the rotation of the turbine and generator, it has no moving parts.

The bulb-shaped exterior houses the drivetrain of the StreamDiver™. The turbine is a water-lubricated system—all the bearings are river-water–lubricated and the generator itself is water filled. Mr. Murtha noted that this streamlined design reduces operation and maintenance costs relative to more traditional turbine concepts.

The StreamDiver™ may be installed directly into an existing weir or dam system. Installation is relatively simple, only requiring some kind of railing system—for example, within a gate slot. The turbine

The StreamDiverTM is designed to be low maintenance due to the absence of dynamic seals and peripheral systems.

itself is mounted on roller gates that can be dropped down into the water passageway and lifted back out as needed. StreamDiver™ units can be placed in parallel operation. Operators may control flow by switching individual turbines on and off or by regulating turbine speeds.

While the StreamDiverTM retains the need for a conventional trashrack, it can be designed in such a way as to eliminate the need for costly fish screening designs. In one civil configuration, the system is fully submerged and trashracks are placed horizontally.

As the water moves down the canal, water passes simultaneously through the turbines and over a spillway. In this case, the fish never see the turbine and do not interface with it.

Streaming water power plant utilizing StreamDiverTM technology.

36

Irrigation Leader

A Long History of Hydro

Voith is a 140-year-old, family-owned company with global headquarters in Heidenheim, Germany. Today, the company is active in paper machining, power transmission, and industrial services, and has worked in hydro over the entire course of its long history. It is a full-line supplier of equipment for new small and large hydropower projects, and it provides equipment and services for the modernization of hydroelectric facilities.

Voith is active globally. Within the United States, you can find Voith equipment at hydropower plants across the United States and, notably, at well-known plants like Hoover Dam, Wanapum Dam, and the Lewiston Pump Generating Plant at Niagara Falls. Voith was recently awarded a contract by the Grant County Public Utility District to rehabilitate and upgrade the 10 turbines in the powerhouse at Priest Rapids Dam on the Columbia River.

Cross section of streaming water power plant.

Disassembly of StreamDiverTM. Irrigation Leader

Improving the Feasibility of Low-Head Projects

This summer marks the third anniversary of the first StreamDiver™ installation. Voith partnered with Verbund, an Austrian utility with an existing hydroelectric infrastructure, to pilot the StreamDiver™. The project involved the exchange of an existing 500 kilowatt turbine with a 1.3-meter-diameter StreamDiver™. The project has run successfully and provided power through a direct grid connection since August 2012.

Mr. Murtha states that the StreamDiver™ is designed to make sites that were not feasible, especially where the head was too low, more feasible. Generally, the size of a turbine is driven by the size of the head; a low-head environment requires a large physical machine diameter.

Large diameter machines push design, construction, and equipment costs up. Initial cost offsets require significant power generation. The modular and scalable design of the StreamDiver™ seeks to address this scenario. The prepackaged design, according to Mr. Murtha, reduces engineering investments associated with traditional turbine installation.

The plug-and-play nature of the StreamDiver™ can work for hydro interests big and small. Mr. Murtha explained that “[the StreamDiver™] can make a 500-kilowatt project worthwhile for a utility that already has hydro capabilities to capture energy from spilled water.

[Voith] can also work with customers just getting into hydropower who may have water rights and some drops every few miles along their canals and are looking for additional revenue streams.”

For more information about Voith and the StreamDiver™, contact Brian Murtha at (717) 792‑7191 or Brian.Murtha@Voith.com.

Factory assembly of the StreamDiverTM—the bearing shield.

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CLASSIFIED LISTINGS Assistant General Manager of Operations and Maintenance The East Columbia Basin Irrigation District (ECBID) is accepting applications for Assistant Manager of Operations and Maintenance.

Working with a staff of approximately 100 employees, the opportunity to contribute to our operations presents itself in planning, implementation, supervision and advisory activities.

The District’s crews utilize a large fleet of vehicles and heavy construction equipment for maintenance, upgrade and development of large water conveyance facilities and associated appurtenances.

ECBID is located in the heart of the Columbia Basin Project, in Othello, WA. Our mission is delivering water in support of commercial agriculture. We serve over 154,000 acres of land and are currently developing facilities to deliver to another 87,000 acres. We operate, maintain, and construct many types of water conveyance facilities. With hundreds of miles of canals, drains, and pipelines, dozens of pump plants, and innumerable water delivery and control structures, each day brings a fresh set of challenges for operation and maintenance professionals. Do you enjoy a rural or small-town

lifestyle? Like working on a wide variety of projects in support of agriculture? We need a talented Assistant Manager of Operations and maintenance to help guide our crews and accomplish our water delivery objectives.

Submission of a resume and ECBID application is required; applications may be obtained at the HR Dept, ECBID, 55 N 8th Ave, PO Box E, Othello, WA 99344. The application deadline is April 8, 2015. Call (509) 488-9671 for the job description.

ASSSISTANT ENGINEER FOR OPERATIONS The Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District (the “MRGCD”) is soliciting applications for the position of Assistant Engineer for Operations located in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Under the direction of the CEO/Chief Engineer, this position is responsible for facilitating the MRGCD’s strategic objectives by planning, organizing, and coordinating the day-to-day activities and operations of the MRGCD, which provides irrigation, drainage for high water table areas and river flood control for the Middle Rio Grande Valley. The MRGCD also addresses environmental concerns and endangered species protection in collaboration with other agencies,

including the Six Middle Rio Grande Pueblos while recognizing the recreational benefits and opportunities of the MRGCD facilities and the Rio Grande Bosque.

Minimum qualifications include a Bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering and ten years of progressively more responsible management experience in the operation and maintenance of water delivery, flood control or other public works infrastructure. Candidates must have a current registration as a New Mexico Professional Engineer or the ability to obtain same within one year.

For information on posting to the Classified Listings, please e-mail

Qualified applicants must submit a completed MRGCD application to via e-mail hr@mrgcd.us, via fax (505) 247-3273, or mailed/dropped off at 1931 Second St SW, Albuquerque, NM 87102. In addition, applicants are encouraged to submit a resume describing their experience and qualifications. Applications and a detailed job description are available at http://mrgcd.com/ Job_Opportunities.aspx . Interested candidates must apply no later than April 24, 2015.

The MRGCD is an equal opportunity employer and all applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, national origin, disability or veteran’s status. All qualified applicants are encouraged to apply. The MRGCD offers excellent benefits. The salary for this position is DOE.

Irrigation.Leader@waterstrategies.com 38

Irrigation Leader

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2015 CALENDAR

March 4–6

Texas Water Conservation Assn., Annual Convention, Austin, TX

March 16–18 Utah Water Users Assn., Water Users Workshop, St. George, UT March 21–25 Nebraska Natural Resources Districts, DC Conference, Washington, DC April 13–15

National Water Resources Assn., Federal Water Issues Conference, Washington, DC

May 5–8

Assn. of California Water Agencies, Spring Conference and Exhibition, Sacramento, CA

May 15

Agribusiness & Water Council of Arizona, Annual Meeting and Water Conference, Tempe AZ

June 3–4

North Dakota Missouri River Stakeholders, Spring Conference, Bismarck, ND

June 10–12

Groundwater Management Districts Assn., Summer Session, Coeur d’Alene, ID

June 17–19

Texas Water Conservation Assn., Mid–Year Conference, Galveston, TX

June 22–23

Idaho Water Users Association, Summer Water Law & Resource Issues Seminar, Sun Valley, ID

July 8–10

North Dakota Water Resource Districts Assn., Annual Summer Meeting, Bismarck, ND

August 19–21 Colorado Water Congress, Summer Conference, Vail, CO August 25–27 Texas Alliance of Groundwater Districts, Groundwater Summit, San Marcos, TX For more information on advertising in Irrigation Leader magazine, or if you would like a water event listed here, please phone (703) 517-3962 or e-mail Irrigation.Leader@waterstrategies.com.

Submissions are due the first of each month preceding the next issue.

Past issues of Irrigation Leader are archived at

www.WaterAndPowerReport.com