Hi-Line Living: Looking for water in north-central Montana

Last week, amid sweltering heat and arid conditions, the Chippewa Cree Tribe of Rocky Boy's Indian Reservation was grappling with a shortage of available drinking water.

Chippewa Cree Tribal Water Resources Director Dustin White said July 10 that the water situation on the reservation was critical. Water levels within the reservation's water storage tanks had only 4 or 5 feet of water remaining. Unless people took measures to conserve water, the entire reservation would have only six days of water left.

"With the extreme heat, people are using a lot of water, and our source water just can't keep up with demand right now," White said.

The tribe responded by putting in place restrictions on the use of water by reservation residents. Last week, the tribe stepped up enforcement of a prohibition on watering lawns and gardens, use of sprinklers and filling of pools. First-time violators received a warning. A second violation would lead to the water being shut off at the home of an individual offender until restrictions were lifted.

"It's something we manage all the time. We feel frustrated all the time, disappointed that we have to tell customers to shut off their sprinklers," White said.

The solution

Rocky Boy is seeking to solve the problem by building water lines that run from the reservation 53 miles east to the Tiber Reservoir located just South of Chester, part of a large-scale water project created through its water compact with the state of Montana and the federal government - a project that has languished in funding for nearly two decades.

In 22 other off-reservation communities and rural water districts in Chouteau, Glacier, Hill, Liberty, Pondera, Teton and Toole counties that are part of the water project, the water users also want to use Tiber Reservoir as a water source.

The Rocky Boy's/North Central Montana Regional Water Systems Project would furnish a reliable supply of water from Tiber, treated through a single treatment plant and pumped to through a sprawling network of waterline to each community.

At present, members get their water from a patchwork of different sources. Communities like Rocky Boy and Shelby get their water from networks of wells, while Havre which gets its water from the Milk River.

The project consists of two portions, the core system, which will provide water to the residents of Rocky Boy, and the non-core system that consists of all the other locations.

Jody Hellegaard, general manager of the North Central Montana Regional Water Authority, oversees the project for non-core members. The authority's board is composed of 28 members appointed by participating cities, towns and water districts.The non-core system will consist of approximately 350 miles of pipe, 13 pump stations, three standpipes and 22 stations or vaults.

The core system is represented by the Chippewa Cree Construction Company, a tribally owned entity, Hellegaard said.

A summary of the project from the North Central Montana Regional Water Authority says the core system portion of the project will include a water intake structure, treatment plant, storage and pumping facilities, transmission pipeline and on-reservation water infrastructure.

How it started

The summary said the project began when the state of Montana and the Chippewa Cree negotiated a water rights claim by the tribe through the Reserved Water Rights Commission. The settlement allocated 10,000 acre feet in the Tiber for the tribe. The Montana Legislature in 1997 ratified the agreement and Congress ratified it and President Bill Clinton signed it into law in 1999. The project meant to supply the water to the reservation soon expanded to include communities and water users beyond the reservation.

As the final part of the federal approval process, President George W. Bush signed the Rocky Boy's/North Central Montana Regional Water System Act of 2002, authorizing the design and construction of the project.

The benefits

Communities that are part of the project joined for different reasons.

For some communities, like Rocky Boy, the project will resolve issues, such as a consistent supply, by providing a steady supply of water for drinking and other uses.

"It's basically our solution to long-term self-sufficiency for water," White said.

"It will provide economic development. It will allow communities to have the luxury we don't have right now, which is being able to have yards, gardens, kids playing with the sprinklers, stuff like that," he added.

For others, meeting state and federal regulations without spending large sums on new treatment facilities will be the biggest benefit. Federal and state regulations for water treatment often change, and when they do individual communities are often saddled with paying the cost of changing regulations in the form of expensive upgrades to water treatment facilities, manpower and additional tests that must be performed.

"In a little town like Kevin, Montana, if certain rules and regulations come down the pike, those hundred residents would have to pay $5 million to bring their system into compliance," said Shelby Mayor Larry Bonderud, who sits on the North Central Montana Regional Water Authority.

He said it is better and less costly for multiple communities to work to update one water system when regulations change rather than 23 different communities having to update their own facilities.

Other communities such as Havre have a sufficient supply of drinking water and have upgraded a modernized water treatment, but will use the water from the Tiber as a second source.

However, Havre Public Works Director Dave Peterson said if the St. Mary's Diversion, a 29-mile system of dams, dikes and siphons that provides water to communities like Havre was to dry up, water could become scarce.

He said that the project provides Havre with another source of water and if the anything was to go wrong with the more-than 100-year-old St. Mary's Diversion or Havre's population were to grow, the water sent from Tiber would be another way the city could get water.

Lack of funding

Though the federal legislation that authorized the design, planning and construction of the project was signed into law nearly two decades ago, Hellegaard said, only 20 to 25 percent of the project has been completed.

The project relies on a large dose of federal funds. Although the 2002 authorization provided $120 million for the core system and $60 million for the non-core, the rest of the federal funding for what was then projected to be a $229 million project has not been fully funded.

As a result, what started in 2002 as a project estimated to cost $229 million has, due to the cost of inflation, mushroomed to estimated cost of $377 million.

Initially, funding was to come from three sources: the member communities, the state of Montana and the federal government. Hellagaard said the state has paid its portion knowing that the sooner they could provide the funding the cheaper it would be. However at the federal level, funding has been intermittent coming a few million from the Bureau of Reclamation's budget which also funds several other projects.

For people involved in the project, it is a vexing situation.

"When you have six projects and only $46 million to split among them, you can see that nobody is going to get very much at the end of the day," said Keeley Barry of Advanced Engineering and Environmental Services Inc., a firm in Great Falls that works on both the core and non-core parts of the project."

"If you get $5 million on a $300 million project that's just barely anything," she said.

Bonderud said that is how the federal government does business.

"They have an obligation to fund these projects ... these projects are authorized, but to get that appropriation each year is always a battle," he said.

White said much the same.

"The frustration is, right now, all the money we apply to our water system is now basically just a Band-Aid. It's just putting Band-Aids upon Band-Aids and I don't want to say it was a waste of money, but had we had this waster system online we would not, Rocky Boy and these other communities would not be in this situation that we are in," White said.

Hellegaard said the funding situation presents a dilemma for communities about whether to spend money on short-term fixes to water treatment facilities when the ultimate solution to the problem will come when the project is finally completed.

The lawmakers

Montana Sens. Jon Tester and Steve Daines, along with U.S. Representative Greg Gianforte, have been supporters of more funding for the project.

Tester Communications Director Marnee Banks said that since 2015 Tester has secured $16.7 million for the project with an additional $46.5 million in 2017 that will be divided among all authorized rural water projects throughout the country.

Daines and Gianforte wrote a joint letter to acting Indian Health Services Director Michael Weahkee alerting him of the water situation on Rocky Boy and urging that he assist the tribe to find an alternative source of safe water if water storage tanks deplete.

White said with its small population and three-member congressional delegation, Montana has less influence than larger states,

"As they say, the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and those states that have the large constituency back east get the majority of the funding," he said.

Nonetheless, Montana's lawmakers have tried to get more and consistent federal funding for the project.

In a joint press release last week, Daines and Tester reintroduced legislation first introduced in 2012 by Sen. Max Baucus to set aside a pool of money for water projects.

The Authorized Rural Water Projects Completion Act would set aside $80 million a year for the next 20 years to rebuild and construct water infrastructure across the U.S. The money would come from the Bureau of Land Management's Reclamation Fund, which uses receipts from onshore oil and gas development to subsidize infrastructure projects.

"Water is a basic need for Montana families, farmers and ranchers," Daines said in the release. "We need to ensure that all Montanans have access to a reliable water supply, especially for our rural communities that are too often overlooked."

The legislation has since been referred to the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, on which Daines is a member.

Authorized Montana regional water projects including the Rocky Boy's/North Central project would have immediate access to the funds.

Banks said bipartisan support from Daines and five other cosponsors is something that increases the odds of passage.

However, lawmakers are also working on a limited schedule with a flurry of must-pass legislation including a series of appropriations bills that will consume much of the floor time.

What have they done lately

Though a steady stream of consistent funding would allow the project to be done more efficiently, Barry said, she and others working on the project are moving forward the best they can.

"They are just coordinating the best they can and utilizing the funds to make them as far as possible," Barry said.

And the lack of certainty hasn't brought the project to an absolute halt.

The authority has been putting in place parts of the system that will distribute water from Tiber once it is complete to improve water supply now, such as a connection from the Havre Water Treatment Plant to water users in northern Hill County who are part of the North Havre Water District.

Bonderud said the section of the project that runs from Conrad to Brady has been built and in operation for years. A segment of the project that runs from Shelby to Cut Bank and will provide Cut Bank with a portion of its water is 99 percent complete and expected to be in operation soon. A part of the project that goes from Shelby south to the Pondera County line is under construction and about 90 percent complete.

He said the project will eventually move north from Shelby to provide water to a 9-mile water district then and ultimately move north to Sweetgrass.

At Rocky Boy, where the need for water is dire, White said, since the project was first authorized about 21 miles of the 50 miles of pipe needed to reach Tiber is in the ground.

But though it might be slow, there is progress, he added. White said there will be a groundbreaking ceremony south of Chester 10 a.m Aug. 18 at the site where the water treatment plant will be built. White said the aim is to have the plant up and running within three to five years.

"I would like to see it all built in the next three years, but, realistically, we are probably looking at five years the way the federal funding has currently been going," White said.