Controversial water rights bill dies in committee

By ANDREW WELLNER

Frontiersman.com

PALMER — In its short life, House Bill 77 stirred up a lot of controversy, not least of which was in the Mat-Su where the borough assembly chewed its water rights provisions over multiple times, sparking a heated related fracas over mayoral power.

But in the end it seems lawmakers decided it was either a bad idea or just wasn’t worth the trouble. The bill died an unceremonious death on Thursday, smothered in the Senate Resources Committee.

“What began as an efficiency permitting bill morphed into a heated debate and it’s driving Alaskans apart,” one of the measure’s erstwhile champions Sen. Cathy Giessel, R-Anchorage, was quoted saying in a press release. “It is clear that this bill raised a lot of concern among constituents and at this point there doesn’t seem to be a resolution.”

It was Giessel who hammered the final nail in the legislation’s coffin, deciding with the blessing of Senate President Charlie Huggins, R-Mat-Su, to let it wither in her committee.

The bill would have done lot of things, but the controversial part, at least for borough officials, was that it removed the right of private parties to apply for water reservations in streams and other water bodies. Reservations required that a certain amount of water remain in the water body and would preclude businesses or other parties from pulling too much water out.

The state said that the process wasn’t eliminated, just changed, that private organizations would need to find a state sponsor but could still get water rights reservations. There were worries that anyone — even Outside groups — could apply for the reservations and abuse the process, stifling development in the state.

Foes said the proposed change would squelch individual rights. The state Democratic Party called it a “power grab” in a press release crowing about the bill’s demise.

Gov. Sean Parnell had initiated the legislation and by the end, according to media accounts, even he had asked for it to be pulled.

“HB 77 was so toxic that Republican Sen. Peter Micciche said it was like the 13th floor of a hotel, a place that nobody wanted to go,” reads another press release celebrating the measure’s demise, this one from the campaign of Byron Mallott, who is running for governor as a Democrat.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270

or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.