It’s about the shares and the release

By Richard Shaw

(Editors note: This is a fourth in a series of five articles about the entities that manage water in the Price River drainage.)
There is only so much water to go around in central and western Carbon County and most of what is left in a normal year in July, August and September is stored in Scofield Reservoir.
When delivery of water is needed, the determination of how much will be released to the users falls under the direction of the Price River Water Users Association. The association owns the right to store water, but not for natural flow water.
The organization is set up something like the irrigation companies are (see the Sun Advocate May 21, 2015, Irrigators form largest group of water investors), in which they issue shares to the users that want water from the reservoir. A share is worth one acre foot of water in normal times.
Scofield was built during and just after World War II when the concern was that flooding of the Price River could endanger the Rio Grande railroad tracks in Price Canyon. History had taught the government a lesson. In 1917 the Mammoth Dam that was in Sanpete County near where the proposed Gooseberry Dam would be located in the future failed and poured billions of gallons of water down through Pleasant Valley and into Price Canyon disrupting the rail lines and causing huge damage in the town of Castle Gate. With the war effort on in 1942, concern was that the coking coal used to make steel at the Geneva Plant in Utah County could be affected should a flood take out rail lines again. So the dam (actually the second Scofield Dam whereas a smaller one almost failed in the 1920s) was begun. It was also part of a system that was intended to give more even flow of water through the summer season to the agricultural users in the Price River drainage.
The dam holds enough water for two full seasons when full at 73,600 acre feet of water. With drought cycles in the area generally being in the three to five year range, this has worked well for keeping the area in water. However, the latest drought cycle has lasted almost a decade (with a couple of exceptions for years that were normal or above).
The shares from the dam vary in value, based on how much water there is in any particular year. At times shares can also be leased from the owner of the shares. Many who own free flow water rights also own reservoir shares to supplement those early flow shares during the hot summer months.
Shares of water are delivered to the canal that an owner of the shares is connected to. Since the canal/irrigation companies carry the water, but it is not really part of their water shares, they charge the users a fee for doing that. Often new owners of shares get two or many even three bills from various agencies that carry and administrate their irrigation water and it can be confusing. The charter of PRWUA allows irrigation companies to do this. PRWUA shares can be moved from canal to canal, whereas irrigation companies cannot move shares. However a person may have to pay fees to the originating canal as well as to the new carrier each year.
PRWUA is run by a board made up of water users from across the area. Each year they evaluate the amount of water in Scofield Reservoir and determine how much water will be released to users. In a normal year they have released a full allotment of water based on the shares held. This year is not normal. Earlier this year based on runoff from snowpack and what was in the reservoir they were estimating that they would release 25 percent per share. However, at a later meeting in May they upped that amount to 33 percent, based on new projections and present use of the water in the reservoir.