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.~ . . Page 2 WRW washn x x x possible They wanted to include an Indian water rights settlement for the Ute Indians on the uintah and Ouray Indian Reservation in Eastern Utah. "Everything was on the table but Utah's share of Colorado River water and efficient use of CUP dollars," Christiansen told WRW. Initially, WRW was told, neither the supporters of CUP nor the environmentalists wanted to talk to the other. They were suspicious of each other. But Rep. Wayne Owens, D-Utah, of Salt Lake City, whose district is directly affected by CUP, then the only Democrat in the five-member Congressional delegation, repeatedly urged the environ- mentalists to talk to the CUP supporters. Finally they got together haJtingly, gradually. CUP's need for a ceiling increase is urgent. CUP was originally authorized as a $207,939,600 project within the Upper Colorado River Storage project (CRSP) in the 1956 Colorado River Storage Act (P.L. 84-485) providing water for irrigation and municipal and industrial (M&I) uses for Central and Eastern Utah, for the construction of 36.8 miles of aqueducts, other units, and four power plants. Since then the ceiling on the project has been raised and portions of the project have been reauthorized several times, but CUP is again close to its ceiling, so a ceiling boost and reauthori- zation of the project to include the agreement are imperative. The new CUP ceiling in the reclamation bill that is now headed for conference is $924 million, on which it is estimated $214,351,414 has already been spent. CUP is the largest project within CRSP. Two of the six units within CUP, the Vernal and Jensen Units in the Uinta Basin of the Upper Colorado River Basin, have been completed. The Bonneville Unit, the largest of the six units, involves a major di- version of water from the uinta Basin to the Bonneville Basin to the west where the bulk of the population in the state lives. It has been under construction since 1966. It is designed to be the major compo- nentof Utah's water supply in the future for both M&I and irrigation water. Three other units of the project never have been built. Christiansen currently is mayor of Alpine, Utah, south of Salt Lake City. He initially got involved with CUP while he earlier was mayor of Alpine from 1972-85, when the Bu/Rec wanted to build an aqueduct system for CUP in the Alpine area paralleling an old canal on the old Deer Creek project that had proved hazardous to children. Alpine insisted on the BU/Rec building a big underground pipeline instead. BU/Rec backed off its aqueduct plan in 1984 and built an underground pipeline to move CUP water thru the area. In the mid-80's the CUWCD board of directors drafted Christiansen to be general man- ager of the district. After Owens' intercession with the environmen- talists, Christiansen and several other representatives of water districts in the Salt Lake City and County area began to talk to representatives of Utah fish, wildlife and environmental interests, including Kenley Brunsdale, a former Owens staffer who was chairman of a Utah roundtable of environmental and outdoors groups; Jeffrey W. Appel, liaison to the Utah Outdoor Coalition; Douglas Day, former director of the wildlife program for the state of Utah; Fred Reimer, representative of the Stonefly Fishermen, and Bill Christensen, who represented an association of hunters. After negotiations had gone on for a half year at the state level, they were moved to Washington. (more)