YAKIMA, Wash. — On the banks of the Columbia River in north-central Washington, the small farm town of Bridgeport has been waiting 17 years for new municipal water rights.

The town’s population has nearly doubled in the past 20 years, from about 1,200 people to 2,200. Officials with the state Department of Ecology were close to helping it get new water rights for its growing population, but the effort recently failed.

Now, with proposed budget cuts to the Ecology Department’s water resources program, Bridgeport could be in for an even longer wait.

“If they cut their staff and their money, it’ll be years again before we get to it, and we can’t afford it,” Mayor Steve Jenkins said. “It’s going to pass us by.”

Residents, cities, irrigators and industrial water users in arid Eastern Washington have long complained about the backlog of new water rights applications and water rights transfers filed with the state. Ecology Department officials blame some on a shortage of employees to handle them and others on a shortage of water available for new rights.

The program has about 60 employees statewide responsible not just for processing water rights applications and transfers, but monitoring stream flows and conducting environmental reviews, water metering and public outreach, among other things. Two-thirds work in Eastern Washington.

The 2009-11 budgets proposed by Gov. Chris Gregoire and the Legislature would reduce money for the water resources program by between $1.8 million and $6 million.

The $6 million loss would require at least 22 full-time employees to be laid off, and possibly as many as 30, depending on which positions are cut, said Dan Haller, Ecology’s Columbia River Unit supervisor.

The department has a backlog of about 5,700 applications for new water rights, split about evenly between east and west of the Cascades. There are about 1,300 pending applications to change water rights, about three-fourths of those in Eastern Washington.

Ecology has been carrying job vacancies for the past year to prepare for the pending budget cuts, Haller said. But the permitting backlogs likely will increase with fewer employees — significantly so if the final budget is closer to the House version of $6 million.

“Under that scenario, we would be doing a major prioritization of our workload to make sure we preserve as many of the core functions as we can,” he said. “The good news is that we’ve had more staffing in the past few years.”

In 2001, Ecology had twice as many pending applications for water rights changes. Additional money allowed the department to hire more people and cut the backlog in the past seven years, he said.

Gregoire recently approved a plan to allow 500 new water rights to be doled out in the Columbia River Basin, with the water to come from a drawdown of Lake Roosevelt, the reservoir behind Grand Coulee Dam.

Jenkins said Bridgeport was in line to receive some of that water, but lawsuits by conservation groups have held up the plan.

“They can’t tell us how much we’re going to get, how much it’s going to cost, or when,” he said.

Darryll Olsen, executive director of the Columbia-Snake River Irrigators Association, said the bigger problem is Ecology’s position that there isn’t enough water for new water rights.

“To suggest they don’t have adequate manpower to do it, I don’t think is a fair statement,” he said. “The staffing levels are at the highest levels they’ve ever been.”