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"It was in 1961 or 1962 and my wife and I were talking about marriage and I said, 'Things will be all right., We'll have the Animas-La Plata and we can make a living and settle down here: We've got six grandkids now and we still don't have the Animas-La Plata~ - Sheldon Slade. Animas-La Plata Conservancy District 30 - C 1996 High COUntry News 1990 Sachs lends some support to Englert's claim. "A major risk for the tribe would have been proving an 1868 priority for some of its water," it stated. Although it still only exists on the drawing board, the Animas-La Plata Project has been part of life in the Durango area for decades. "It was in 1961 or 1962 and my wife and I were talking about marriage and I said, 'Things will be all right. We'll have the Animas-La Plata and we can make a living and settle down here,''' said Sheldon Slade, a dairy farmer in nearby Red Mesa and a board member of the Animas-La Plata Conservancy District. "We've got six grandkids now and we still don't have an Animas-La Plata." Area residents first asked the Bureau of Reclamation to look into the possibility of a water project on the Animas in 1904. In the decades since, dozens of versions of the project have been contemplated and the existing project has become so complicated that one critic con- tends that few people, even at the Bureau of Reclamation, understand it. "If you make an issue so complex that it boils down to, being for or against water, the bureau is going to win," says Evert Oldham, for- mer head of Our Lands, a New Mexico group that opposes the project. "The bureau has a strat- egy of information overload." The 1968 Colorado River Basin Act autho- rized construction of an earlier incarnation of the project - a reservoir on the Animas River near Silverton, and 48 miles of canals and tun- nels to take the water to Durango. That project, which one observer said "would have caused a great deal of environmental damage," ran head-on into the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, and the Animas-La Plata project then metamorphosed into its present form. Critics say the project's current stalemate with the squawfish is just one of its inherent problems. Some predict the cost witl escalate to $1.5 billion. They point out that the project would increase the salt load of the Colorado River Basin, flood prime deer and elk habitat, use water that has flowed over a uranium tail- ings site, stymie a burgeoning rafting industry, and alter the habitat of the Animas, which has been called "the best riparian habitat in New Mexico, bar none." The Environmental Policy Institute called it "one of the most iII-Q>n- ceived reclamation projects in the nation's his. tory." Perhaps its most criticized feature, howev- er, is the amount of power it would consume. Ridges Basin Reservoir, the 280,000 acre-foot centerpiece for the first phase of the project, lies some 500 feet above the Animas River, where water will be diverted and pumped uphill to fill it. This will consume an estimated 165 million kilowatts of energy per year- the same amount used by a city of about 26,000 people. Even Bureau of Reclamation project team leader Ken Beck calls the pumping require- ment "horrendous." "It's a contravention of every conservation philosophy there is," said Oldham. "I think we ought to be going about resolving some of the problems we have in this nation, not compounding them." Oppone~ts also say much of the land slated for irrigation by the project is poor farmland, and point to the government's current policy of crop retirement. In La Plata County, Colo., the 1985 Farm Bill's conservation reserve program has taken 10,500 acres of land - almost none of it irrigated - out of production, primarily to con- trol erosion. "Forty-five million acres of the nation's farmland are being taken out of production for 10 years, yet here we are funding a project that will bring 50,000 acres of new farmland into production," says Oldham. "In my opinion, that's a subversion of national security." But Keith Dossey of the Department of Agriculture's soil conservation district in La Plata County said the project will irrigate non- Indian land that is currently farmed without irrigation, rather than bring new land into pro- duction. "!t'Ureally help this area of the state," he sa;d. "The farmers will respond to the pro- ject by di~ersifying and raising the crops that they're short of." For Slade, the project means being able to raise more feed for his dairy cows:"ln the past three years we've had a terrible drought," he said. "This past year I raised 1,000 bales of hay, UsuaUy I can raise 1,500 or 2,000." For the Ute Mountain Utes, it could mean anything from developing a feedlot to raising organic carrots on land that has never been farmed before. Three weather stations are col- .