The House Subcommittee on Water, Wildlife and Fisheries held a legislative hearing on Jan. 23, 2025, to examine four bills. Three of the bills focused on western water issues, including continuing a pilot program that supports conservation at the Colorado River basin, to recharge aquifers, and to increase grants to tribes for water programs.

The three water-issue bills; descriptions of their contents; and who introduced each are:

1. H.R. 231, the Colorado River Basin System Conservation Extension Act of 2025, to amend the Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies Appropriations Act of 2015 to reauthorize the Colorado River system conservation pilot program through 2026; the bill was introduced by the Subcommittee Chair Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo).
    
2. H.R. 331 to amend the Aquifer Recharge Flexibility Act to clarify a provision relating to conveyances for aquifer recharge; the bill was introduced by Rep. Russ Fulcher (R-Idaho).
   
   
3. H.R. 635, the WaterSMART Access for Tribes Act, to amend the Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009 to increase tribal access to water conservation and efficiency grants; the bill was introduced by Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M.). 

H.R. 231 

Subcommittee Chair Hageman said the Colorado River Basin is one of the most developed, regulated and negotiated rivers in the U.S., and has numerous diversions, several major dams, and is managed through multiple compacts, laws, regulatory guidelines, contracts, court decisions and decrees.

However, the Colorado River Basin is experiencing long-term drought conditions, and while many actions have been taken to address drought in the basin, H.R. 231 would reauthorize the Colorado River system conservation pilot program (SCPP), a four year pilot program designed to explore solutions to address decreasing water levels in Lake Mead and Lake Powell, as well as for the potential of long-term drought in the upper Colorado River Basin, Hageman said.

Under the Colorado River SCPP, 45 projects have been funded at a total cost of $4.5 million, resulting in a reduction in the consumptive use of water by approximately 22,000-acre feet, according to Hageman. That reduction in water consumption demonstrates that voluntary, compensated water conservation projects can conserve water for Colorado River system storage, while helping mitigate and manage the impact of the drought conditions in the basin, she said.

In 2022 this program was reauthorized until Sept. 30, 2024, and H.R. 231 would extend funding for the Colorado River SCPP until Sept. 30, 2026, said Hageman, who added, “To be clear, this program is not and should not be viewed as a permanent solution to addressing the ground conditions in the basin.” Rather, “it is a tool that the upper basin states can use to reduce risk, and to test innovative water management strategies.”

H.R. 331 

Wesley Hipke, water project supervisor for the Idaho Department of Water Resources, testified on behalf of Idaho’s Water Resource Board (WRB), which is seeking an amendment to H.R. 331 that would make it easier to recharge the Eastern Snake River Plain Aquifer (ESPA). The WRB is charged with formulating a comprehensive state-water plan for conservation, development, management and use of Idaho’s water resources, along with undertaking and financing projects and programs that help meet those needs, he said.

“Idaho is a headwater state with significant water resources, but also includes vast semi arid and arid regions where water supplies vary significantly from year to year,” Hipke said. As with other western states, Idaho has water supply shortages and water use conflicts occurring across the state, most notably in the southern portion of Idaho, where the ESPA is located, Hipke said. “This aquifer supports about one million acres of irrigated farmland, municipal water supplies and thousands of domestic wells,” he said.

“The ESPA discharges spring flows into the Snake River, supplying water to an additional 600,000 of irrigated acres many municipalities hydropower generation and a multitude of other uses,” said Hipke, who added Idaho has made significant investments in water management, expanding water supplies and repairing and improving critical water resource infrastructure, with more than $500 million appropriated to the board since 2019 for water management improvements. However, “the water levels in the ESPA are declining at an unsustainable rate,” he said.

In increase the water levels in the ESPA Idaho have invested approximately $60 million on recharge infrastructure, said Hipke, who added those expenditures do not include program operations made by development of the aquifer recharge program. That program includes the use of existing irrigation canals for the transportation and percolation of water into the aquifer.

The problem is a significant number of the irrigation canals cross land owned by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which has taken the position that existing law allowing water to flow across irrigation canals that cross BLM owned land only applies to the owners of record, and not to third parties, Hipke said. Because of that, the WRB is required “to obtain new right of ways to conduct recharge through canals that already have existing right away,” he said.

The BLM right-of-way process can be onerous and will add significant time to development of recharge projects, which could severely delay the WRB’s ability to transport water for recharge purposes, Hipke said. Therefore, the WRB seeks an amendment to H.R. 331 that will enable it to more efficiently move water across BLM owned land for aquifer recharge, according to Hipke. 

H.R. 635

Rep. Stansbury told The Driller H.R. 635 is needed because “U.S. policy in the mid and late 19th century was to sign treaties and to sign executive orders with tribal nations to take away large swaths of lands that are part of their traditional homelands and left these communities on their own without funding for basic infrastructure, while other parts of the United States were building immense water infrastructure.”

“In those lands, many tribal communities were left without sufficient infrastructure to bring water to their communities,” so in 2025 there are communities across the Navajo Nation—which encompasses 27,000 square miles and is the size of Massachusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire combined making it the largest tribal nation in the U.S.—that still do not have electricity and running water. Within those areas, “there are thousands of families” that “have to haul water” to their homes, Stansbury said.

“One of the things that we’re trying to rectify with this legislation, (and) with the water rights settlements that we’re trying to advance for tribes, is to ensure that the federal government makes good on the treaty and trust responsibility of providing the funding for the infrastructure they (the U.S. government) never built,” Stansbury said.

Testifying in support of H.R. 635 was Dwight Witherspoon, attorney for the Navajo Nation Department of Justice, who said tribal members who have to haul water to their homes will use everything from a wheelbarrow loaded with jugs, to their cars, which increases the cost of 100 gallons of water dramatically. Within a municipality, the cost of obtaining 100 gallons of water is from 20 to 40 cents, but it is about $15.30 for those that have to haul water in their cars, according to Witherspoon. “So, there’s certainly an economic burden on using their vehicles,” he said.

Stansbury added that it is not just an economic cost on families who have to drive long distances— “sometimes 100 miles”—to fill up water tanks just to cook food, just to take a shower, just to have drinking water, there is “a psychological cost.”

Not having access to drinking water in the homes of members of Navajo Nation should not be a condition modern life in the U.S., said Stansbury, who stressed the WaterSMART Access for Tribes Act “is an important tool in the arsenal of addressing the immense water infrastructure needs of our tribal communities.”

“These are fundamental human rights issues,” she said. “If the American people at large really understood what it looks like, and what the psychological, spiritual, physical and just life stress is to not have adequate water infrastructure, I think people would really be shocked.”

Click here to view the hearing.