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. I . e e e UUl:JlJ7 Wyoming Proposal Platte River Memorandum of Agreement January 20, 1995 The Wyoming delegation to the MOA process would like to offer the following approach for purposes of discussion. It is not our purpose to be speak for either Nebraska or Colorado. However, if the other states feel the approach has merit and the USFWS agrees the approach can be implemented, we would agree to discuss it with our water users. If the water users are agreeable, we will work with them to define to amount of water that is "realistically attainable". A. Background There are presenttY two processes underway relative to endangered species issues in the Platte River Basin. . 1. The Governors of Wyoming, Colorado, and Nebraska and Secretary Babbitt signed a memorandum of agreement to discuss the possibility of developing a Central Platte River Basin Endangered' Species Recovery Implementation Program (Program). 2. Section 7 consultations are pending or underway for Lake MacConaughy in Nebraska and federal reservoirs in the North Platte and South Platte Basins, as well as several municipal reservoirs in Colorado (Consultations). The USFWS has found it difficult to define how these two processes are related. This has been particularly frustrating to Wyoming as the primary purpose of our getting involyed in the program was to provide some certainty for our irrigators that rely on the large federal reservoirs. Governor Nelson, in an attempt to resolve the consultation relative to Lake MacConaughy, implemented a program whereby state officials and the entities involved in the reservoir defined the amount of 'water that they believed could be provided to the species without severely impacting the viability of the project. The effort culminated in the Nebraska Plan, which basically set aside 100,000 acre feet of storage space which should yield approximately 60,000 of water per year for the endangered species and critical habitat area. The'USFWS has developed target flows. The three states have each documented their respective concerns relative to the assumptions and logic used to develop theSe flows. If the USFWS continues to pursue these target flows, the development of the Program will be very difficult, if not impossible. During the MOA discussions, the USFWS has been using the terms "incremental approach" and "realistically attainable" to describe the basinwide plan and the amount of water that should be contributed to the species.