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"1 I The rules Colorado Lt. Cl:Jv. Gail Schoettler's ground rules for A-lP consensus: , Don't attack; fie positive. Wcrk to develop a feeling of collaboration. No legal nitpicking (nervous laughter since more than half the people at the table are lawyersl. Usten to each other carefully. Don't play issues out in the press or characta"ize another side to the press. Lay disagreements j'Nith people on the :table. . ~ group , p-ess releases. . Jll"E!a~ut caucuses reCK ' . - 89dcyRumsey l , . . . . . . . . , . , . , , , I' " , , , . . . . " , " ~ 1996 Grassroots Organization, and Lori Poller, who was until recently with the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund - delight in criticizing the Rube Goldberg nature of the design: the way it would pump water 1,000 feet up from one river to another, the many miles of canals and pipes, the reservoirs to store the water, the hundreds of millions it would cost, the enormous amount of electricity it would take to 'keep the three pumping stations going, the low economic value of the crops it would finally produce. But the genius of the project doesn't lie in its engineering; it lies in its politics. A-LP was designed by the proponents in the room - led by water attorney Frank "Sammy" Maynes, now one of the backbenchers - to create a coalition powerful enough to extract the mil- lions of dollars needed from the V.S. Congress. As the proponents and Colorado's elected offi- cials see it, this project is "owed" Colorado, the way Arizona was "owed" the Central Arizona Project and California was "owed" Hoover Dam. It's a birthright. From the perspective of political design, A-LP is a work of art. It has bound together almost half of those at the negotiating table - two Indian tribes, Anglo farmers, and Anglo towns in Colorado and New Mexico - in an interracial and interstate coalition that also crosses political lines. In the recent Senate campaign in Colorado, candidates Tom Strickland, a Democrat, and Wayne Allard, a Republican, agreed on almost nothing except Animas-La Plata. Some speculate that Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell would still be a Democrat if environmentalists hadn't tied up A-LP. But it is being tied up, smothered in a bear hug administered by the environmentalists and bureaucrats who are also at the table. This year, when the a~reau of Reclamation completed its final.supplemental environmental impact state- merit, with 13 appendices, the hug got tighter. The ElS fills a four-foot bookshelf, but its' length didn't impress the Environmental Protection Agency; the agency found fault with the project's effect on water quality and the Bureau's failure to examine alternatives. So the EPA threatened to refer A-LP to the President's Council on Environmental Quality, which is a sort of purgatory that projects go to when federal agencies deadlock. At best, it would place ~-LP deeper within the Beltway 4 - 0 1996 High Country News I and farther from local interests. That's the regulatory gridlock. In, the courts, lawsuils are in play: three against the Bureau by opponents, and one against the EPA by proponents. A cOurt injunction intended to protect archaeological resoun:es forbids the Bureau to move dirt; a congressional directive orders the' Bureau to immediately move dirt. The project is also knilled ,iilto a 'plan intended to recover the endangered Colorado squawfish and razorback sucker downstream in the San Juan River. That's' where the Endangered Species Act comes in. And A-LP is part of the' negotiations over salt, selenium, mercury and heavy-metals loading in rivers throughout the Four Corners, That's where the Clean Water Act comes in. This sampling shows why the opponents in the room have been able tn stop the bulldoz- ers. Onl y overwhelming consensus can dear the road. So Gov. Romer 'brought everyone to Arvada to talk and, maybe, to reach an agree- ment. A-LP's deeta'l'OOts Any agreement will grow out ,of the pr0- ject's history.'A..f;PIs the brainchild ofan era when the federal gnvernment was rephimbing the West. First authorized by Congress in 1968, its roots go back at least to the 1930., when early boosters envisioned a huge dam dose to the headwaters ofdre'Anilitas River, higb iillhe San Juan Mountain.,,~~ck Ih~" A:Lf",I1,~rt- ers wanted to move 265,000 acre-feet of water from the AnimaS' River.to the LaPlalli River to water a dry plateau. Gradually iheproj~ got scaled tia<;k, and forced out of lhe rop'uilla\ns' and on!O the 'flats as sUPl'i'rters adaPt~ to tlie fisw an# e~viron~ mental rea1ities of the day. " " :, Then, in 1972, an ignor~ people intruded on this grand plan, The Southem Vte an~ Vte, Mountain Vte tribes' we'h('to' CflUrt'to c;i;.im, 93,000 a~re-feeto(~ater on ~even Co(on,do rivers. Their ngnts, ulider the V .S: Su~rc;me Court's Winteni Doctrine, go back to 1868; the year the tribes' treaty with the V.s. established the two reservations. ' , V nder the treaty signed by Chief Ouray, the VIes had agreed to become' fanners. Treaties like these, 'arid the water rights' they implicitly convey, are common across the West; but they are always ignored by the !~ n