Column: Tribe looks for 'revenge' with water rights settlement

The last of 18 compacts, with the Confederated Salish-Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation (CSKT) remained. Over a thousand pages, it was made public just days before the 2013 Legislature was to go into session.

but state water rights held by non-tribal irrigators (who own 90 percent of irrigated reservation lands) would be voided in favor of Farm Turnout Allowances set at a flat 1.4 feet per year.

CSKT also claimed water rights off reservation in the form of enforceable minimum instream flows, with a super-senior priority date of “time immemorial,” a condition no other Montana tribal compact allows. From the Bitterroot to the Swan to the Flathead, even the Kootenai, these flow rights would be co-owned by FWP and U.S. Fish and Wildlife, also an unprecedented arrangement with unknown impacts.

Next, all major agricultural irrigators hydrologically connected to these rivers (basically every producer in western Montana) would be subject to call if instream flows fell short.