A judge in Montana recently ruled in favor of landowners and ranchers fighting against a housing development project near Helena that could have put further stress on steadily declining groundwater reserves.
Public defiance: Initially, the state and county governments had signed off on a developer’s plans to build 39 homes that would pull their water from wells, a project that was challenged by local residents in central Montana. But Broadwater County District Court Judge Michael McMahon found that the county commission and state’s Department of Natural Resources (DNRC) had conducted an “abjectly deficient” environmental assessmentfor the housing construction.
His 85-page order stated that the offices’ approval of the project displayed “hostility” toward a previous court ruling that requires the government to consider the potential harms to the environment and groundwater before allowing for development.
“It should give DNRC pause that citizens with seemingly no legal training appear to have a better grasp of the exempt well limits than DNRC, the agency charged with administering the Water Use Act,” McMahon wrote.
While the coalition fighting this project celebrated the ruling, developers worried about its long-term implications.
“Where are we going to house citizens of Montana?” Eugene Graf, president of the Montana Building Industry Association, told The New York Times, adding that he hopes state lawmakers revise the law.
Shutting off the tap: If upheld, the “landmark” decision has the potential to curtail many new development projects in rural Montana, reported the Montana Free Press. The ruling isn’t the first of its kind: At the end of January, the Nevada Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the state can restrict new groundwater pumping if it will negatively affect other users and wildlife, while Arizona’s governor is pushing for broad reforms and the creation of groundwater-minded laws across the state, as my colleague Wyatt Myskow reported in December.
These actions come amid a widespread reckoning against rampant groundwater usage. Last August, a New York Times investigation revealed that much of the U.S. is facing drastic declines in their aquifers as climate-fueled droughts force residents to rely more on groundwater supplies for water than rain or snowpack. More recently, a study showed that this pattern can be seen globally, with aquifers shrinking around the world.
But not all hope is lost.
“We also find cases where declining groundwater trends have been reversed following clever interventions,” Scott Jasechko, a water resources expert at the University of California, Santa Barbara who co-led the study, told my colleague Liza Gross.
For example, Tucson, Arizona, reversed groundwater declines in some areas by constructing “leaky ponds,” which seeped much-needed water into aquifers, the study’s authors wrote in The Conversation.