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prohibited those projects from adverselyaffecting the use of water in the system allocated to the State of Colorado. Shortly thereafter, Congress began appropriating funds for the SJCP, with construction completed in 1972. The project diverts 110,000 acre-feet per year from upper tributaries of the San Juan River in Colorado into the Rio Grande Basin in New Mexico.4 NIIP was authorized to provide the Navajo with 110,630 acres of irrigation development. Up to 508,000 acre-feet may be diverted for this purpose. Importantly, the Act provides that NIIP and the SJCP will share water shortages, rather than allowing the Tribe to assert its senior right in times of shortage. NIIP is being developed in 11 separate blocks of about 10,000 acres of irrigable land each. Block 8 is currently under construction. As of the end of fiscal year 1997, completion of the project will require an estimated $374 million over an estimated 14-year period. NIIP is operated by the Navajo Agricultural Products Industry (NAPI). Based on modern irrigation methods, it is now estimated that NIIP will require no more than 275,000 acre-feet of consumptive use of San Juan River water for the completed project. The Navajo Nation, however, claims the right to divert the full 508,000 acre-feet under the 1962 Act and asserts that in any event, this is no limitation on its reserved water right claim, which the Navajo Nation asserts is even bigger. Notwithstanding that Congress began funding NIIP construction in 1963, by 1991 only Blocks 1 through 6 were complete with less than 65,000 acres of the project's 110,630 acres being irrigated. In that year ESA Section 7 consultation on Blocks 1 through 8 of the project resulted in a biological opinion that construction and operation ofthe partial project was likely to jeopardize the existence of the Colorado squawfish. In response, the BIA proposed a "reasonable and prudent alternative" (RP A) which allowed for the completion of Blocks 7 and 8 without an increase in the amount of water depleted under baseline conditions. This was accomplished by changing NIIP's cropping pattern, increasing the amount of conservation acreage, and by transferring water depletions previously credited to the Hogback and Fruitland Irrigation Projects.5 No further action was taken on Blocks 9-11 until consultation re-commenced in 1999. settlements in the Taos area and for San Juan Pueblo. As discussed on page 10, the Jicarilla Apache Tribe is a beneficiary of the SJCP, pursuant to its 1992 water rights settlement. 4 The imported water is stored and held for release in Heron Reservoir as a water supply for municipal, domestic, irrigation, and industrial uses. An annual allocation of up to 5,000 acre-feet of water is available, under separate legislation, to maintain a minimum pool of 1,200 surface acres for fish, wildlife, and recreation at Cochiti Lake. 5 Three irrigation projects along the San Juan River, in addition to NIIP, were constructed by the BIA for the Navajo Nation: (1) Hogback Irrigation Project for lands on the north side of the 4