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<br />e <br /> <br />e <br /> <br />Kuhn: <br /> <br />Thank you, I'm Eric Kuhn, Colorado River District. As you know the <br />Colorado Water Congress has a special project on this, endangered species. <br />The role of the Water Congress's special project is, in effect, to finance and <br />supervise Tom Pitts' participation in the recovery program. As such Tom <br />Pitts or the water users representative sits on the implementation <br />committee along with the state's and federal agencies' who's also members <br />of the management committee and the other committee structure of <br />recovery program and you have the letter from Tom in your packet. I <br />won't say much more, I basically agree with what Gene and David Harrison <br />has said and that is there are two issues here that need to, both careful <br />though and a lot of work and attention. First is this memorandum of <br />agreement because I think it will really set the model for many other <br />instream flows that are going to be appropriated by this Board for the <br />success of the recovery program and the water congress special project asks <br />that when you do that you do that in an open public manner with the <br />federal agencies, I'm sure you will, they probably have a requirement that <br />you do that. Contract negotiations would be required to be open and we <br />would like to comment and stay involved in that process. The second issue <br />is one that I think many on the Water Congress special project committee <br />considered perhaps to be the most difficult or maybe one of the most <br />pressing problems that we have on the Colorado River and that is this issue <br />of sufficient progress. Sufficient progress, the River District went through <br />that with Muddy Creek, with our reservoir on Wolford mountain, we <br />received a Wildlife opinion. At the time the recovery program <br />had only be in place for a couple of years and it really was not clear <br />whether or not there was sufficient progress so what we did was we bought <br />an insurance package. We agreed to additional conservation measures <br />beyond what were specified in the recovery program in case the recovery <br />program ran into problems and didn't work. So that was the first issue of <br />sufficient progress and it was one that we could, in effect finesse, we <br /> <br />14 <br />