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001593 2002] THE lAST GREEN lAGOON 949 Under the Basin States alternative, a full surplus is declared and water can be delivered for "all beneficial uses within the United States" in years when releases that exceed downstream demand are necessary for flood control purposes.287 Only under this final scenario, and only after all U.S. requests for surplus deliveries have been met, can surplus water be delivered over the Mexican border.288 On December 8, 2000, the Interior Department issued the Final EIS.289 Five days later, with an acceptable set of surplus criteria guaranteed for California, the boards of MWD, lID, and CVWD signed off on the QSA,290 On January 16, 2001, with all of the pieces in place and four days left in his. term as Interior Secretary, Secretary Babbitt signed a Record of Decision291 implementing the new Colorado River Surplus Criteria.292 The Final EIS for the Colorado River Surplus Criteria correctly noted that under any alternative, the frequency and however, this transferred apportionment can only be used to satisfy demands in the transferee state according to the Full Domestic Surplus schedule (i.e.. nD and CVWD cannot use extra Arizona or Nevada surplus apportionment for agriculture). The 70R line roughly corresponds to the current surplus determination line. The "R" refers to the Spill Avoidance strategy of reservoir operations thatBOR has used since the floods in the mid-1980s, which resulted in dangerously heavy - and, in the logic of the river, wasteful - flood spills throughout the Colorado watershed. Designed to reduce the "risk" of future spills, the "R" strategy estimates the amount of space that will be needed in a given reservoir the next year to capture the anticipated." flows without spilling. If there is less space in the reservoir than BOR anticipates it will need the next year, the water that must be dumped to create that space is considered "surplus." The "70" refers to the amount of water that BOR estimates will flow in the next year; in a 70R strategy, BOR expects an annual river flow that 70% of the previously recorded river flows would not have exceeded. The 70R criterion corresponds roughly to the strategy BOR has used in Lake Mead over the past decade, although it is slightly more aggressive. In practice. the 70R line (the point at which a surplus is declared under the "R" strategy) is around 1,200 feet of lake elevation at Lake Mead. The average release line over the past decade has been around 8 feet higher. 287. See Basin States Alternative, supra note 285. 288. Id 289. See FINAL EIS, supra note 71. 290. Quantification Settlement Agreement, Dec. 12, 2000, available at http://www.cvwd.org/Public_Docs/Quantification_Settlement_Agreement.pdf. 291. See Record of Decision, supra note 35. However, DOl is treating the implementation of deliveries to California in accordance with the Quantification Settlement Agreement as separate Secretarial actions requiring their own NEPA review. See 66 Fed. Reg. 14,211 (Mar. 9. 2001) (DOl's notice of intent to prepare an EIS for the action). DOl has recently completed the scoping process for an EIS that will address the impacts of the decision. See Scoping Summary Report: Implementation Agreement, Inadvertent Overrun and Payback Policy, and Related Federal Actions Environmental Impact Statement, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (Oct. 2001), available at http://www.lc.usbr.gov. 292. See Record of Decision, supra note 35.