Organizing for Endangered and Threatened Species Habitat Draft

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is put to beneficial use within district boundaries. Denver's suburbs, especially, covet Northern water, and the district has set itself against water raiders from outside entities. Colorado Nexus: Mountain Reservoirs on the Poudre River Mountain storage reservoirs at higher elevations are highly valued because they afford the maximum delivery options by gravity flow, deeper narrow canyons permit smaller dams, less water surface exposure per unit volume and cooler temperatures reduce evaporation losses as compared to plains reservoirs. These advantages have made mountain sites prime candidates for reservoir construction, and most such mountain sites in the West were located on federal land, especially federal forest land. Many dams, reservoirs, canals, and pipelines have been constructed on U.S. Forest Service land-some placed there well before creation of the U.S. Forest Service-- and operate under permits granted by the U.S. Forest Service (Blumm 1994). In 1991, six special use permits expired for reservoirs on the upper Poudre river, the biggest tributary to the South Platte. These facilities were owned by four Front Range cities, one irrigation mutual company, and the Public Service Company of Colorado, now known as Excel Energy, and were located on the Arapahoe-Roosevelt National Forest. In anticipation of obtaining renewal for permits that had last been granted before the environmental legislation of the early 1970's, it quickly became apparent to the reservoir operators that the Forest Service would consult with the FWS as required under the terms of the ESA. During the course of the permit renewal process, the Forest Service sought to impose "by-pass flow" regulations on the reservoir operators to advance the environmental agendas of the agency. All of this threatened to reduce yields of the projects, and Colorado water constituencies created a firestorm of protest in Colorado and eventually in Washington D.C. (Lockhead 2000). Then, in June of 1994, the FWS issued its biological opinion that concluded that any Forest Service renewal of the six mountain reservoir permits would jeopardize the existence of the whooping crane, least tern, piping plover, in Nebraska critical habitat, and also pallid sturgeon further downstream on the lower Platte. The Forest Service at that point only had a total of seven permits under consideration for renewal on the Front Range, but the agency was contemplating that over a hundred would be coming up for review within a a few years after the turn of the new century. The situation was quickly becoming impossible for all parties. There was only one reasonable option. The water users of the Platte basin would have to work collaboratively with the FWS to do collectively what could not be individually accomplished-i.e., create a reasonable and prudent alternative that could serve the needs of listed species in central Nebraska and provide regulatory certainty for water users serving the needs of millions of citizens in the three basin states. 22