Idaho's 2022 Legislative Session: Agriculture, Water, and Resource Legislation

Idaho's 2022 session: storage, stockwater, and a definition of personhood

2022 was a storage year. The Legislature stated its intent on raising Anderson Ranch Dam, rewrote the forfeiture rules for stockwater rights, revised the revolving account that lends for water projects, and repealed a river commission. It also passed a statute declaring that environmental elements and artificial intelligence do not have legal personhood, which is a position on whether a watercourse can hold rights of its own.

This page reconstructs the agricultural and resource record of that session 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 2023 summary.

What Idaho's 2022 legislative session produced

The second regular session of the 66th Idaho Legislature convened on 10 January 2022 and adjourned sine die on 31 March 2022 after 81 days, which the Sine Die Report notes was a return to a traditional time frame after the two sessions before it.

Across the session, 661 bills, resolutions, memorials, and proclamations were introduced. Of those, 327 became session law, numbered as chapters 1 through 327 with no gaps in the sequence.

Thirty-four of the 661 measures addressed agriculture, water, or natural resources:

• 15 were enacted
• 1 resolution was adopted
• 1 bill failed on a recorded floor vote
• 17 died in committee

One adopted resolution is the lowest count in this record. Where 2023 and 2024 carried memorials on federal land and water questions, 2022 did its agricultural work in statute.

Idaho's 2022 agricultural and resource measures that became law

Full text for each is at the Idaho Session Laws.

Four Idaho 2022 measures to understand

Chapter 214, House Bill 584, states legislative intent regarding the Anderson Ranch Dam raise. Anderson Ranch is a Bureau of Reclamation dam in the Boise Project, not a state facility, and a statement of legislative intent is the instrument available to a state whose interest in a project it does not own is real but indirect.

Chapter 215, House Bill 608, revised forfeiture of stockwater rights. Forfeiture is the mechanism by which an unused water right is lost, and the record shows the subject is unsettled: an earlier 2022 bill on the same point died in committee, and in 2023 House Joint Memorial 3 on stockwater forfeiture died as well.

Chapter 290, House Bill 749, establishes provisions for the Lemhi Basin Comprehensive Settlement. Basin settlements are how Idaho resolves a set of competing claims without running each one through adjudication, and the Lemhi file kept moving: in 2021 the Legislature had directed the Idaho Water Resource Board to consider the basin by concurrent resolution.

Chapter 322, House Bill 720, provides that environmental elements, artificial intelligence, and certain other entities do not have legal personhood. Read against a river, that is a position on whether a watercourse can hold rights of its own. A companion bill on the same point, House Bill 647, died in House State Affairs earlier in the session.

Idaho irrigation district governance in 2022

Three of the fifteen enactments are irrigation district and canal company governance: who qualifies to vote in a district election, what notice a canal company owes, and the oath a nominee takes.

An irrigation district is a governmental entity with the power to assess, and the people it assesses are farms, so a change in who can vote in a district election is a change in who controls a water budget. The same file kept moving in later sessions: division boundaries and district lands in 2024, hearings and directors in 2026.

What died in Idaho's 2022 session

Seventeen measures died in committee, across the six subjects below. Three of the six ran on two vehicles within the session.

• Stockwater forfeiture ran twice. House Bill 558 died in House Resources and Conservation before House Bill 608 became chapter 215.
• The Taylor Grazing Act preference-rights bill, Senate Bill 1252, died in Senate Resources and Environment, as did Senate Bill 1251 on written agreement between permittees and private right holders on state land exchanges.
• A confined animal feeding operations bill and a notice and violations bill, House Bills 466 and 468, both died in House Resources and Conservation, while the CAFO improvement fund itself passed as chapter 51.
• Rural veterinarian loan repayment ran twice, as Senate Bills 1344 and 1380, and died both times in an agricultural affairs committee.
• Barbed wire fencing ran twice, as Senate Bills 1312 and 1345, and died both times. It came back in 2023 as Senate Bill 1063 and died again.
• Senate Bill 1313 on water storage rights and the Director of the Department of Water Resources died in Senate Resources and Environment.

What to watch from Idaho's 2022 session

The Anderson Ranch raise is a multi-year federal project, and legislative intent from 2022 is the state's marker in it.

Stockwater forfeiture keeps returning because the underlying tension has not been resolved: a right that is not exercised can be lost, and range use is intermittent by nature.

The personhood statute has not been tested against a water right, and until it is, chapter 322 is a position rather than a precedent.