Just above Highway 38, a road runs straight through Collinston, a community of just about 60 homes that runs along the Bear River. Kelly Lemmon and his wife, Connie, are two residents of Collinston.
“We're unincorporated, meaning we're not a municipality. We're governed more by the county than by any city,” Kelly Lemmon said.
Like much of the West, drought has dried up the springs and wells Collinston’s community members rely on.
“That's where their spring is up there and that's dry. They have that for water and livestock and also for wildlife,” Lemmon explained, pointing to a dry well his neighbors had been pulling their water from for years.
On the east side of the road, people’s lawns are brown and their trees are dying due to lack of water.
“These guys have a hard time getting the water they need. You can kind of see — just look at the lawns, sometimes the ones that are really having a hard time getting water,” Lemmon said.
The west side is a similar story. Though the newly developed houses on this side of the road get their water through the Bear River Water Conservancy District, the rising price for their water has limited their access to water.
The district’s mission is to conserve and protect water rights, but a group of Collinston citizens, including Kelly Lemmon, says they aren’t keeping to that mission.
“Our contention is they’re not doing a very good job of protecting water rights,” he said.
As part of their plan to provide water to residents of Box Elder County, including residents of Collinston, Bear River Water Conservancy District submitted a request for 500 acres of unappropriated water in 2018. Their reasoning is in part due to the reliability groundwater can provide during drought.
Blake Bingham, Deputy State Engineer for the Utah Department of Natural Resources Division of Water Rights, said while drought isn’t the foremost reason for well applications, it is a rising factor.
“We can certainly see a trend that people, at least large water systems, are looking to shore up their water supply through groundwater because it's more reliable than a surface flow, which might ebb and flow within a drought year,” Bingham said.
Given drought conditions, water is becoming more and more of a precious resource and Collinston residents are concerned about it. Because of this, the initial application immediately saw a flood of protests. They believed that the approval of this well would go against state code, specifically in two particular areas, as laid out by Kelly.
“To approve a well, the proposed use will not impair existing rights, or interfere with the more beneficial use of the water. And the application was filed in good faith and not for the purposes of speculation or monopoly,” he said.
The protests led to a hearing that placed the application on hold, where it remains to this day.
Within the years 2020-21, the Bear River Water Conservancy District drilled two wells in nearby areas, one in South Deweyville and Harper Ward. Both wells resulted in less than 10% of water than was hoped and approved for. As a result, the district filed another application to appropriate 210 acre feet by drilling a new well directly above existing homes and wells in Collinston, three miles north of where the previous application requested. Once again, protests were filed by Collinston citizens and a second hearing was held.
Arguments were presented by citizens challenging the district's data and reasoning for the proposed Collinston well. At the same meeting, the district proposed an application for a non-production well at the Collinston site.
Non-production wells are a tool that, Bingham said, the state uses to aid in their decision making.
“A non-production well is a tool that, as a state engineer, we often use, just to get a better idea so that we can have more information in front of us when we're deciding whether to approve or reject the application,” he said.
After months of negotiation between the district and the Logan office of the state's water rights, the non-production well was approved.
“How we look at non-production wells is as a tool to better understand the hydrologic conditions associated with the aquifer from which the well is proposing come from, to divert water from,” Bingham said.
Essentially what this means is that although the non-production well has been approved, water pumped from the well cannot be used for anything other than testing.
“It's kind of like it doesn't exist, because you can’t put the water to what’s called beneficial use,” Lemmon said.
“Generally, when non-production wells are pumped, they're essentially discharged back into a stream or something like that, and returned to the hydrologic system or into a retention pool and allowed to percolate back into the groundwater. Any water produced from a non-production well cannot be put to beneficial use,” Bingham said.
The goal of the non-production well is to see the effect a potential well in this area has on the groundwater. If you stress the aquifer, will it be able to bounce back? Is there enough water in that area to begin with? All of this determines the impact on existing water rights in the area.
As part of the approval process for their non-production well, the district laid out a test plan. This test was a source of contention by the state, but not for the same reasons as the citizens.
Here is the district's plan: In order to ascertain the effect this well would have on existing wells, the district would dump 1.25 million gallons of culinary water in their system to an overflow pond adjacent to the well.
“That's coming out of their other pipeline. It's water that would normally be going on this lawn down here that's paying $600 a month,” Lemmon said, noting the rising cost of water from the District.
Within their negotiations, the state voiced concern that dumping the water into an adjacent overflow pond would influence the monitoring of the wells and distort the results. The district came back with a plan for a pre-test, performing essentially the same test originally proposed, but this time to determine if dumping the water into the overflow pond would taint the results. This would cause an additional 1.25 million gallons of water to be put into the ground. But how accurate would those results be?
“We feel that even muddies the water even more because when they do their test when they drill their well, their test will pump at least a minimum of another 1.25 million gallons of water out," Lemmon explained. "But that may be in a different season. Different drought conditions. I mean, you're not really doing an apple-to-apple comparison.”
The district has been approved to run this pre-test. Currently, the overflow pond has been dug out and the pre-test is expected to run sometime in November.
Citizens of Collinston like Kelly Lemmon are unsure of how to proceed. After filing a protest that garnered the signatures of 111 local residents and property owners, they have done their best to stay up to date on the movement of this pre-test and the non-production well. But they have been unsatisfied due to the lack of communication on an issue that hits so close to home.
Bear River Water Conservancy District has thus far declined to comment on the issue. Stay tuned to UPR for further updates and the next segment on this complicated water issue.
