Idaho's 2020 Legislative Session: Agriculture, Water, and Resource Legislation

Idaho's 2020 session was the forfeiture session

Two of the twenty agricultural enactments of 2020 are about losing a water right rather than getting one. House Bill 615 put the burden of proving forfeiture on whoever asserts it. House Bill 592 rewrote forfeiture of stockwater rights. Both reach an operation that holds an old right and uses it intermittently.

The session ended abruptly. The Senate adjourned sine die on 19 March 2020 and the House the following day, with the Sine Die Report noting that the closing days ran under emergency declarations. At 75 days it was the shortest session since 2016.

This page reconstructs the agricultural and resource record from the Legislature's own bill index and Sine Die Report, with a session law chapter on every enacted measure. The year after is the 2021 summary.

What Idaho's 2020 legislative session produced

The second regular session of the 65th Idaho Legislature convened on 6 January 2020. Regular sessions are annual under Article III, Section 8 of the Idaho Constitution.

Across the session, 628 bills, resolutions, memorials, and proclamations were introduced. Of those, 341 became session law, numbered as chapters 1 through 341 with no gaps in the sequence.

Thirty-seven of the 628 measures addressed agriculture, water, or natural resources:

• 20 were enacted
• 3 resolutions and memorials were adopted
• 1 bill was vetoed
• 13 died in committee

That veto is the only one in the agricultural file across the sessions this library covers.

Idaho's 2020 agricultural and resource measures that became law

Full text for each is at the Idaho Session Laws.

Idaho water right forfeiture in 2020, and who has to prove it

Under Idaho law a water right can be lost through nonuse, so forfeiture attaches to every right that is not exercised every season. Stockwater and supplemental irrigation rights are the ones most often used that way.

Chapter 296, House Bill 615, provides that a party asserting that a water right has been forfeited bears the burden of proving it. Where the burden sits decides contested cases that turn on incomplete records of historical use, and old rights on range ground are exactly the ones with incomplete records.

Chapter 253, House Bill 592, rewrote forfeiture of stockwater rights specifically. A companion bill, House Bill 586, died in House Resources and Conservation, and the subject returned in 2022 with two more bills, one of which became chapter 215 of that year, and again in 2023 as a joint memorial that died.

The adjudication and the rest of Idaho's 2020 water file

Chapter 50, House Bill 382, provided for the Bear River water rights adjudication. Idaho adjudicates its basins one at a time: the Snake River Basin Adjudication ran from 1987 to 2014, the northern Idaho adjudications are ongoing, the Bear River was provided for here, and the Kootenai River followed in 2024.

Six other enacted measures work on water administration, including the authority of the Director of the Department of Water Resources, diversion for hazardous substance cleanup, and two on irrigation district lands.

The Idaho bill vetoed in 2020

House Bill 487, on prohibited acts and rulemaking under the pesticide and chemigation statutes, passed both chambers and was returned vetoed on 26 March 2020, after the session had adjourned. It came from the House Agricultural Affairs Committee. Pesticide and chemigation provisions were amended successfully four years later, as chapter 52 of 2024.

Idaho hemp failed twice in 2020, then passed the next year

Two 2020 measures would have provided for hemp: Senate Bill 1253, on research and production, died in Senate State Affairs, and Senate Bill 1345 died in House State Affairs. Idaho enacted its industrial hemp provisions the following session, as chapter 242 of 2021, and amended them again in 2026.

Idaho's 2020 federal file

Three joint memorials opposed removal or breaching of the dams on the Columbia and Snake river system. Two died in Senate Agricultural Affairs and one, Senate Joint Memorial 110, was adopted. The Legislature took the same position again in 2021 and 2024, which is what a standing position looks like in the record.

House Joint Memorial 15, supporting federal work to modernize NEPA regulations, was also adopted. NEPA is the process that governs grazing and timber decisions on federal ground, which is most of the range in Idaho.

What to watch from Idaho's 2020 session

The burden of proof rule in chapter 296 shows up whenever a forfeiture claim is made, including inside delivery call proceedings where a junior challenges a senior's use.

The Bear River adjudication continues, as do the northern Idaho adjudications. An adjudication is the only process that produces a decreed right, and a decreed right is what gets administered when a call is made.