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^~;)'~ - ~>t)i>f,~1, 1 9 9 ',o<%i,t&fB';w't:",:w " ' ; ,,~,;i1"~",,"oc' < 'll, *'t#Y;',j ?'::"i\ ';"""" Miles Davies Protesters at what was to be the groundbreaking ceremony for the Animas-La Plata Project. Constroctlon never actually started, stayed out of the fight. As a result, 00 one has ever mounted a serious challeoge to the project. The late 1980s changed thaI. The EPA veto of Two Forks Dam - based in part on envi- ronmentalists' arguments that the massive dam wasn't needed - broke a barrier that had kept the environmental community out of major water policy decisions in Colorado. And when the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund intervened in Animas-La Plata on behalf of the endangered Colorado squawfish, it and other environmental groups realized that A-LP was not impregnable. Under cover of its Indian blanket, says Legal Defense Fund lawyer Drew Caputo, Animas-La Plata is a disaster. In fact, Caputo and co-counsel Lori Potter found so many problems that they say challenging the project is a turkey shoot. Since 1990, the Legal Defense Fund has twice stopped the long-awaited groundbreaking on Animas-La Plata with legal actions. In 1992 Caputo and Potter filed four lawsuits againslthe Bureau and emerged with four victories, prov- ing that the Bureau had violated at least five sep- arate federal laws lrying to push the massive $640 million project through. Cases included violations of the Clean Water Act, the Freedom of Information Acl, the Endangered Species Act, the Administrative Procedures Acl and lhe National Environmental Policy Act. "They break lhe law and we catch them," says Caputo. "Animas-La Plata makes no eco- nomic or environmental sense, and the only way the Bureau will be able to move forward is to keep trying to break the law." As a resull of the lawsuits, it may be years before project sponsors or the Bureau can do the engineering, economic and scientific stud~ ies to put the project on a firm foundation. Thus far, lhe Bureau has not found bedrock. For example, in court last year the Bureau agreed to update its 1980 final environ- mental impact statement on A-LP. But the draft supplemental E1S released last October was so bad that the Environmental Protection Agency flunked the document and warned that unless the Bureau rewrote the EIS yet again, it would consider the agency in violation of the National Environmental Policy and Clean Water acts, Caputo didn't wait for the Bureau 10 respond: He immediately gave the agency 60- day notice of intent to sue if it proceeded with construction of any aspect of the project. In addition to a sue, sue, sue approach, the environmental groups are trying to lakc the offensive by putting an alternative to A-LP on the table, j"st as the critics of Two Forks Dam did. To give lheir alternative credibility, the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund and its clients - nine state and national environmental groups - hired one of Colorado's mosl respected engineers, former State Water Engineer Jens Danielson, as a consultant. "'The Bureau has two choices, It can either keep trying to bull ahead illegally with Animas-la Plata, in which case we will continue to sue them and beat them in court Or it can recognize that Animas-La Plata is an illegal turkey that cannot and should not be built ..~ - Drew Caputo and Lori Potter in a letter to the editor, Durango HErald @ 1996 High Country News - 17