Idaho's 2024 Legislative Session: Agriculture, Water, and Resource Legislation

Idaho's 2024 session ran into the ground water year

The Legislature adjourned on 10 April 2024 having enacted a statute on common ground water supply for the Eastern Snake Plain Aquifer. Within seven months, three new mitigation plan dockets had opened at the Department of Water Resources and one of them had produced a stipulated mitigation plan approved by final order. Legislation and administration ran on the same subject in the same year, and neither record shows the other.

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 so each can be looked up directly. It sits between the 2023 summary and the 2025 summary.

What Idaho's 2024 legislative session produced

The second regular session of the 67th Idaho Legislature convened on 8 January 2024, the second Monday of January, as Article III, Section 8 of the Idaho Constitution requires. It adjourned sine die on 10 April 2024, having sat 94 days, six more than the 2023 session.

Across the session, 717 bills, resolutions, memorials, and proclamations were introduced. Of those, 330 became session law, numbered as chapters 1 through 330 with no gaps in the sequence.

Fifty-one of the 717 measures addressed agriculture, water, or natural resources:

• 27 were enacted
• 5 resolutions and memorials were adopted
• 1 failed on a recorded floor vote
• 18 died without reaching a floor vote at all

Idaho's 2024 agricultural and resource measures that became law

Chapter numbers are how these are cited now that the session has closed. Full text for each is at the Idaho Session Laws.

Ground water was Idaho's 2024 session

Three measures in this record point at the Eastern Snake Plain, and only one of them passed.

Senate Bill 1341 became chapter 110, adding provisions on common ground water supply for the aquifer. House Bill 611 died in House Resources and Conservation; it would have set conditions for the issuance of orders establishing material injury, which is the finding that triggers curtailment under the conjunctive management rules. House Concurrent Resolution 22 also died in that committee; it resolved how the aquifer should be managed.

What happened next is on the Department of Water Resources docket rather than in the statute books. Three new mitigation plan dockets opened at IDWR during 2024, CM-MP-2024-001 for Bingham Ground Water District, CM-MP-2024-002 for Falls Irrigation District, and CM-MP-2024-003 for the ground water districts, and the last of those drew a final order approving a stipulated mitigation plan on 19 November 2024, amended on 7 February 2025. The mitigation plan record carries the detail.

The 2025 Legislature returned to the subject by concurrent resolution rather than by statute, and the 2026 Legislature wrote consumptive use limits for large industrial users into law for the first time. A subject that produces a failed bill, a failed resolution, and an enacted measure in one session is not finished.

Two other patterns in Idaho's 2024 session

Pesticide warning labels ran three times and never passed. House Bill 653 died in House Business, Senate Bill 1245 failed on the Senate floor, and Senate Bill 1432 died in Senate Commerce and Human Resources. That is the only agricultural measure of the session to draw a recorded floor defeat. The subject then vanished: no measure mentioning pesticides was introduced in either the 2025 or the 2026 session.

Where a pair of bills covered the same ground, the second one passed. Estrays ran as House Bill 707, which died in House Agricultural Affairs, and as House Bill 712, which became chapter 263. Cervidae quarantine ran as House Bill 536, which died in the same committee, and as House Bill 591, which became chapter 108. Livestock depredation compensation ran as House Bill 485, which died, and as House Bill 592, which became chapter 51. Agricultural protection areas ran as House Bill 473, which died in House Local Government, and as House Bill 608, which became chapter 215, and then were rewritten again in 2025 by Senate Bills 1133 and 1187.

The federal file moved by memorial. Senate Joint Memorial 103 opposing removal or breaching of the lower Snake River dams was adopted. House Joint Memorial 9, which asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission about dam flows, and House Joint Memorial 6, opposing Bureau of Land Management rules, both died in committee. A memorial changes no Idaho statute, which is why it clears a chamber more easily than a bill. Two of the three memorials in this file still failed.

What to watch from Idaho's 2024 session

Statutes about common ground water supply are read alongside the conjunctive management rules whenever a delivery call is administered, so chapter 110 applies while those calls stay open, and four of them are.

The Kootenai River Water Rights Adjudication, provided for in chapter 223, is a northern Idaho adjudication in its early years. Unlike the Snake River Basin Adjudication, which concluded in 2014, it is generating live claim activity now.

Chapter 243 gave the Department of Lands duties and authority for good neighbor work on national forests, which is the mechanism by which state crews do federal forest work on ground the state does not own.