Tempers are rising faster than spring temperatures as the Flathead Lake region braces for another challenging water year.
Last month, the Lake County commissioners petitioned the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission about “a real and dangerous public safety threat” due to the “dangerously low level of the lake during western Montana’s wildfire season.” The commissioners blamed Energy Keepers Inc., which operates the Se̓liš Ksanka Qĺispe̓ (SKQ) Dam at the foot of Flathead Lake, for putting more emphasis on protecting fisheries in the wider Columbia River Basin than it did on “protection of human life.”
Energy Keepers responded on March 20 that “quite simply, the county’s petition is nothing more than an effort to ensure a constant summer lake level to benefit a small group of lakefront dock owners. … Moreover, through this petition, the county further attempts to improperly shirk its own responsibilities to address wildfire safety and evacuation routes through its planning and zoning.”
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The dispute developed after lake levels reached 30.5 inches below full pool on Aug. 28 last year — a record low point. Flathead’s full pool is 2,893 feet. It has typically been able to stay within a foot of that level between June and early September. Last August however, it dropped to just above 2,890 feet.
This year's snowpack levels and precipitation forecasts from the Natural Resources Conservation Service indicate this summer will be just as dry, if not worse.
One thing the Lake County commissioners asked for was holding an extra 2 feet of water in Flathead Lake during the spring. To have room for potential spring flood management, Flathead Lake is usually held at 2,883-feet elevation in mid-April.
On Wednesday, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers approved an Energy Keepers request to do that. The Corps’ decision allowed Energy Keepers to move the spring level to 2,885 feet. Energy Keepers CEO Brian Lipscomb said that further adjustments could come in May, depending on how spring runoff develops.
The tribally managed, 208-foot-high SKQ Dam 5 miles downstream from Polson can raise Flathead Lake 10 feet higher than its natural state. It produces about 1.1 million megawatts of electricity a year. Hungry Horse Dam is overseen by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which is separate from FERC. It is 564 feet tall and produces 1.4 million megawatts. The Lake County petition sought to have both dams help keep Flathead Lake high — Hungry Horse by releasing more summer water and SKQ by holding it in.
Flathead Lake homeowner Stewart Weis was excited to hear the Lake County Commission challenge FERC about water levels. He said in his 25 years’ experience boating on Flathead, he’d seen winters with smaller snowpacks still fill the lake to recreational levels. Letting the water get 2 feet below full pool made boating much harder, he said, especially when trying to reach docks in the Polson Bay area that’s affected by the current from the Flathead River’s outflow.
On the other hand, Flathead Lake is currently 8 feet below full and dotted with dozens of boats participating in the annual Mack Days fishing tournament. Lipscomb said that shows water levels may make it inconvenient to store boats, but it doesn’t prevent anyone from recreating on the lake if they want to.
“On the way to Blue Bay, there’s a couple public docks along that stretch of highway,” Lipscomb said. “Last year that use was up tenfold, because when the lake was lower, there was hundreds of yards of gravel beach that don’t exist when it's full. People didn’t just have to sit on the dock.”
Trading accusations
The Lake County petition, signed on March 1 by commissioners Gale Decker, Steve Stanley and William Barron, made several challenges to EKI’s operation. Referring to the 2021 Boulder 2700 fire that burned about 2,600 acres and destroyed 31 homes and structures on the east lakeshore around Finley Point, it claimed “the low lake level during the summer of 2023 put residents … at an extremely vulnerable position if a wildfire had erupted any time after mid-summer.” Keeping the lake full would offer a secondary escape route for shoreline residents threatened by wildfire, they argued.
The petition told the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes it should give more attention to protecting human lives than to the dam’s license commitments for protecting fisheries in the Columbia Basin. “Whatever contracts in place that obligate EKI to provide water to support fisheries can be amended, or opted out of, in the interest of public safety,” the commissioners wrote.
And they claimed Energy Keepers was more focused on making money from selling hydroelectric power than it should be: “It appears that EKI could reduce some of the power production at SKQ in the interest of public safety without sacrificing substantial income,” they wrote, noting the dam generated $73.5 million in net revenues for the Tribes in 2022. They added, “EKI should consider leasing SKQ Dam to a corporation that has more experience and expertise in managing a hydroelectric facility.”
EKI’s March 25 response started with evidence that FERC had determined its 2023 activity was properly authorized by its license and oversight. It also noted that the commissioners’ petition proposed changing a FERC license without the license owner’s consent as well as violating the Federal Power Act and Endangered Species Act while changing the operations of another dam (Hungry Horse) that FERC doesn’t oversee. The response then turned to the public safety argument.
First, it stated that “CSKT operates the primary law enforcement agency, the primary fire prevention and fuel reduction program, and the primary wildfire suppression agency on the Flathead Reservation and within Lake County (along with) significant financial support to Lake County ... To the extent that the county is now concerned that neighborhoods on private lands surrounding Flathead Lake lack adequate evacuation routes for wildfire, that situation was caused by deficient zoning and planning policies of the county, and it is the county’s responsibility to remedy that situation.”
EKI challenged the safety of escaping by boat in a wildfire, recalling that “evacuation for the Boulder 2700 fire occurred in the middle of the night under extreme weather conditions with wind gusts up to 60 mph. Launching a boat in these conditions would have been extremely hazardous.” It added "if the county’s goal is to provide a secondary evacuation route to protect as many members of the public as possible, drawing down the lake and exposing shoreline around the lake provides a more appropriate form of egress as it would allow homeowners to use the exposed shoreline as a potential way out.”
"Lake County's petition not only requests relief that cannot be granted, but the concerns it identifies are self-inflicted and its solutions are meritless," the EKI response concluded. "(It's) nothing more than a transparent attempt to disguise the recreational interests of an elite select few in the cloak of a public safety concern."
Congressional interest
Last year's low water level also reduced the amount of water available to farmers in the upper Flathead Valley, where irrigation systems depend on higher lake levels to fill canals. The matter drew concern from Montana’s Republican Rep. Ryan Zinke and Sens. Steve Daines, Republican, and Jon Tester, Democrat, who all signed letters to the Bureau of Reclamation seeking more water from upstream Hungry Horse Dam to fill Flathead Lake.
Zinke later introduced a “Fill the Lake” act that, if passed, would require the federal government to keep Flathead at least 2,892 feet above sea level. In a November press release, he said the summer’s rapid snow melt “was exacerbated by the slow-working bureaucracy of the unelected officials of the technical management team that advises the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation on the Columbia River System … This bill takes out the ambiguity and forces the Department (of Interior) and its unelected bureaucrats to do their most basic job so that Montanans don’t suffer from their mistakes again.”
Both Hungry Horse Dam and SKQ Dam are tied into a 259,000-square-mile, 28-dam network spread across 259,000 square miles of the Columbia River Basin in the United States. Four more massive dams in British Columbia providing 35% of the average annual flow are also part of the mix and overseen by international treaty.
All of that involves a complex mesh of irrigation rights, hydropower contracts, federally protected fish habitat, flood control safeguards and recreation wishes. The Technical Management Team overseeing that combines five federal agencies, seven state governments, seven Tribal nations, and representatives from several utility companies. As a result, every drop of water running through those two dams gets checked, licensed and authorized by a long list of authorities before anyone launches a sailboat.
“(The Bureau of Reclamation) continues to listen to the TMT that is stacked with out-of-state interests and is unaffected at the loss of revenue to local businesses, farmers’ crops, and recreational opportunities the lake provides to Montanans,” Zinke spokesman Colton Snedecor said on Wednesday. Asked how that federal agency overseeing a multi-state network of dams is supposed to balance Montana concerns, Snedecor replied, “It’s obvious; we need more upstream Montana voices on the TMT.”
Snedecor said Zinke’s bill did not apply to SKQ Dam or Energy Keepers. It has been referred to the House Natural Resources Committee but hasn’t had a hearing scheduled. Snedecor said Zinke’s staff was also looking for ways to include it as a rider in the 2025 Energy and Water appropriations bill.
Even with the extra water stored this spring, the summer of 2024 will prove challenging for lake levels across Montana. Snowpack and moisture levels across the northwest part of the state are near record lows. The Montana Mesonet climate data system can combine multiple drainages to calculate available snowpack throughout the basins that feed Flathead Lake. As of April 4, they were showing the North, Middle and South Fork Flathead river drainages holding just 62% of their usual snow-water equivalent. That's putting the expected spring runoff trend barely above the record lowest level since 2003.
As Montana State Climatologist Kelsey Jensco put it, “there is a high likelihood that this year will be worse than last.”