Water Rights: A Critical Montana Issue (Part 4)
Author: Eliza DuBose, Reporter for The Monitor; Boulder, Montana
This article was originally published in the inaugural East Helena Moniter December 17, 2025. It is reprinted with permission of The Monitor in Boulder, Montana.
Water has been all over the headlines lately, particularly in The Monitor.
From Boulder selling bulk water to a posh ranch-resort in the Crazy Mountains to an East Helena subdivision that needs to find a new water source, and from the state refusing to grant East Helena the water rights to the former ASARCO smelter lands to Clancy struggling to secure a reliable water source from more than a decade, there’s a great deal of ground to cover.
Thankfully, retired water rights attorney Stan Bradshaw – who literally wrote the “Buyer’s Guide to Montana’s Water Rights” – recently found the time to sit down with me to touch on all these topics as well as the history of water rights and how they’re shaped today. We chatted for so long, in fact, that the interview had to be broken into multiple articles.
This is part 4 of 4
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Monitor: Looking forward, how do you see Montana water law evolving? What reforms might make the state’s water regulations more transparent or successful?
SB: One key is getting Montana's water administration to the point where we have a handle on existing uses. That adjudication process, for all my frustration with it, is still one of those pieces of the evolution that’s taking us from here to there.
For places like Red Fox subdivision this probably isn't feeling like an evolution right now. But we are seeing growing awareness that we can't just keep doing this accumulation of groundwater wells in developments that are fairly intensive users. At the same time, sometimes solutions come out of conflict. The Crazy Mountain Resorts and Red Foxes –they could drive some of the evolution. Hopefully, there's a critical mass by the next legislative session.
It’s about recognizing that if you're going to build something that invites people to come, you need to at least on paper look at it on the front end and establish a limit. In the Broadwater case [Horse Creek Hills, which spurred the February 2024 decision against exempt wells], they didn't look at it at the front end. They just accepted the development.
We need to have a culture of review when it comes to the water, the DNRC piece of it, and the county level, reviewing these developments that are going to increase demand. Right now, we don’t have that culture and it doesn't work very well. But I think we've at least seen baby steps towards that, such as in the Broadwater case, and maybe we’ll see more as we go down the road.
The goal is to get to a point in our culture where we say, “Okay, you're going to put in a development here, a Horse Creek Hills or Red Fox, that's fine. But we’ve looked at it on the front end and you don't get to have four acres of lawn. You don’t get to have this or that.” We can come up with a laundry list of water conservation measures that must happen in those developments. And if they don't, you don't get approval.
A lot of dealing with existing challenges and growth is going to be changing the culture to making clear that the nice bluegrass lawn and 20-minute showers and other craziness we have now need to go away. And some of that will be by acculturation.
DNRC has an arm, the Drought Planning Office, and a lot of their work is educational. They go into basins and work to get people to do things that are more drought-resistant. I know some people there, and they're doing good work, but I don’t know if they are empowered enough to expand the reach of that.
We need to find a way to educate a decent chunk of our population, to bring their hearts and minds to the idea that we have to change behaviors so we're not just using up our water resources. That would go along with a more vigilant review and regulatory process, plus the DNRC could change new water rights and have, parallel to that, a good outreach and educational program for people who might be contemplating doing it and people ready to be more sustainable. The Southwest US has done more of this sort of thing than any place else, some successfully.
Monitor: And what steps might ranchers take to be more water-efficient?
SB: One of the things they can do is have on their diversion some form of measuring device. If it's in a ditch, it'll be what they call a flume. Flumes have to be placed necessarily precisely to get the water flow. That's something that is increasingly getting done. Measuring devices allow for diversions but don't block off the entire stream, and that's a good thing.
As we get further down the road on this, water disputes are going to crop up more. The whole thing is going to get more contentious, so having an accurate measurement of your water is going to be really important. In terms of things you can do to be more efficient in your use of water, you can line your ditch. That's not a cheap option. But it's something that some places have done, so they're not losing a lot of water out of the bottom of the ditch.
Some of the other things that come up have to do more with how they apply their water and where they apply their water. Scrapers do that very efficiently, but they're not necessarily the least consumptive thing that you can do. The classic example is, I can grow one pound of hay per acre as quickly as three tons of hay per acre. But that's three times as much water going to the plants, so the whole issue of what makes us more efficient is fraught with its own complications.
For a lot of the full-time ditches, reducing the flow was always very cumbersome – the effort it takes to adjust that. Now, some of the better-funded ranches have started turning to remote control, like one of my old leases in the Blackfoot. They can remotely get a reading and control the diversion to reduce flows. As technology advances, there's going to be an awful lot of challenges for modifying these things.
Monitor: That's often the problem with conservation: it's great once you’ve done it, and usually saves money in the long run, but it's very expensive to get there.
SB: Other states are way out in front on this. They have more stuff going on in terms of restoration work and flow and leadership among the agricultural community that has led the change. It's been interesting to see that play out, because it's been very clear to me that a lot of the older hands in Montana don't have the resources. But if you can work with them, not only will they work with you, but they'll become your advocates.
Whereas, I did some projects with wealthier ranchers, and when they didn't quite get what they thought they wanted, all of a sudden, I was Satan's right-hand man. That's given me a lot of heartburn, because I see it happening more and more all over the state, like the golf course in the Crazies (to which Boulder sold bulk water).
Monitor: OK, so what keeps you up at night about the current system?
SB: The possibility that we've passed some tipping point and that even everything we can do will not be enough to fix this.
In Rock Creek, where I worked years ago, the water always ran across an open flat all the way into the fall. But in the last two years, there’s nothing. And I don't know if there's been any major change in water use out there. What I do know is that the snowpack has been less. It's gone away quickly. And it's a system that is very much water table-driven.
All these pieces are dependent upon snowpack and water table and everything else. Right now, it's feeling like it's not enough, and I don't know what enough is. So that's what keeps me up at night, watching stuff that we worked on with really good people doing some amazing work, it's like spitting into the wind.
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Image 1 Caption: Eliza DuBose, Boulder Monitor Reporter
