HAVRE, Mont. (NMB) – The Ability to Pay Study that will determine how much water users of the Milk River Project can afford to pay for operations and maintenance costs is almost completed.
Ryan Newman is the Montana Area Manager for the Bureau of Reclamation spoke virtually during Friday’s St. Mary’s Rehabilitation Working Group meeting and provided this update:
“We’re working through it right now. The final draft has been completed and is going through internal reviews. We’ve had several pretty intense discussions on it recently and we’re anticipating having it finalized in the very near future. So the big lift has been completed – all the studies, the analysis, the modeling – that was done all last calendar year. By the end of last calendar year, we did have the final draft. Now it has to make its required review loop through our agency, and it’s doing that right now. We anticipate a final version in the very near future … Right now we’re thinking it should be done early-to-mid February. If we uncover something that requires us to take a look back at something that was modeled or an assumption, that could kick us out a couple of weeks. But we’ve completed (the draft) and once we have that final version, we’re prepared to, in this forum, do a presentation and walk through what we found and how we got there and what it looks like.”
Milk River Joint Board of Control President Wade Jones then asked Newman if they found that there is an ability to pay, but Newman declined to give anything away.
“That’s to be determined. That’s what we’re looking at right now. I’ll tell you, it’s a pretty telling process when you go through and run the models and look at all the different enterprises… we do whole farm evaluations and look at profitability and how that relates to ability to pay. We’ve gone through and landed at the final draft, but we still need to go through and do some pretty substantial reviews on that, and that’s what’s happening right now. I can’t answer that because I don’t know exactly what it’s going to look like. So I wish I could give you a straight up answer, but like I said, I can’t. I can just kind of duck around it like I’m doing. But when we’re getting our reviews done, we will be able to answer that. And that is coming up soon.”
The ability to pay study was funded by the St. Mary’s Working Group last March as a way to get the ‘St. Mary’s Reinvestment Act’ moving forward in Congress. Although that legislation remains stalled, Milk River Joint Board of Control Project Manager Jennifer Patrick says it helped get the ball rolling to get $100 million in funding through the recently passed Bipartisan Infrastructure bill.
“This is what started everything. We couldn’t get anything from (the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee). Senator (Jon) Tester took that opportunity, and so that’s kind of where…these keepings are still running in parallel. If there is something in (Energy and Natural Resources) with a Reclamation title in it, we’re still looking at it. But this ability to pay study is separate from the infrastructure money also.”
The future of the stalled legislation is unclear, especially as Congress enters a midterm year. Representatives for Senators Jon Tester and Steve Daines said at Friday’s Working Group meeting that there is a chance this could get attach to a larger piece of legislation.
Under the current arrangement, water users are responsible for about 74 percent of operations and maintenance costs, while the remaining 26 percent is taken care of by the federal government.
