U.S. Water News Online
HOOVER DAM -- Water officials from California, Arizona and Nevada and the federal government enacted a 50-year plan to protect lower Colorado River habitat, help native species and ensure states can keep getting the water and power that one official called "the lifeblood of the Southwest."
The top Bureau of Reclamation official at a ceremony at the base of the massive Hoover Dam hailed the Lower Colorado River Multi-Species Conservation Program as a unique example of "cooperative conservation" supported by the Bush administration.
The $626 million program will benefit "the many important species, including humans, that rely on the Colorado River," said John Keys, Bureau of Reclamation commissioner.
Interior Secretary Gale Norton signed the pact, leaving final signatures to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and California Department of Fish and Game. Norton did not attend the ceremony due to a death in the family.
"Today's agreement represents the largest, the longest-term and the most innovative partnership plan for habitat restoration on a river system in the United States," said Craig Manson, assistant Interior secretary for fish, wildlife and parks. "There is simply no comparable program in the nation."
But environmental groups were not part of the ceremony. Officials with organizations that quit the decade-long negotiations derided the final product as one-sided.
"It's cooperation between the water users, power producers and federal government to provide legal and political protection from litigation," said Michael Cohen, of the Oakland, Calif.-based Pacific Institute.
Cohen said his group pulled out because environmentalists were outvoted and participating entities had no goal to improve habitat in the fragile Colorado River delta in Mexico's Gulf of California.
"This plan is worse than doing nothing, because it effectively closes the door on meaningful lower Colorado River restoration for 50 years," Cohen said.
Kim Delfino, California director of Defenders of Wildlife in Sacramento, said her organization was studying whether the program violated federal and state environmental laws.
"It does not provide for true conservation on the river," Delfino said. "They had an opportunity to provide conservation and they didn't."
The agreement calls for restoring 8,132 acres of riverside, marsh and backwater habitat for at least 26 species native to the river, including six federally protected species: the razorback sucker, bonytail and humpback chub fish; the Yuma clapper rail and southwestern willow flycatcher birds; and the desert tortoise.
Jennifer Pitt, a Boulder, Colo.-based analyst for the Environmental Defense advocacy group, said the agreement was driven by a need to comply with the federal Endangered Species Act.
"The stakeholders who participated in the shaping of this plan want certainty in their water deliveries," Pitt said. "I take issue with billing it as a restoration effort when in fact we're replacing what we're taking away, if that."
Arizona state Water Resources Director Herb Guenther, who spent more than a decade developing the program, called it the best and largest multi-species protection plan ever assembled.
"We decided we couldn't account for the habitats in the delta because we didn't have the control," he said. "What we know of as the Southwest, the cities, farms and power that goes with it, result from harnessing this river. We can't go back to the way it used to be."
Norton joined officials signing a memorandum of understanding in September that led to the final agreement.
It involved six state agencies, six Indian tribes, 36 cities and water and power authorities, and six federal agencies that bureau officials said provide water and power to more than 20 million residents in the three states, plus irrigation for 2 million acres of farmland.
With one act, it aims to protect threatened and endangered species along 400 miles of river from Lake Mead to the U.S.-Mexico border, while ensuring uninterrupted water and power operations using Colorado River water.
It calls for the federal government and local agencies to put up $313 million of the cost, and for the program to be overseen by a Bureau of Reclamation steering committee that will meet annually. California will pay about $155 million, with Arizona and Nevada paying roughly $77.5 million each, officials said.
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