Organizing for Endangered and Threatened Species Habitat Draft

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CHAPTER SIX: COLORADO'S STRUGGLE--NARROWS, WII.,DCAT, TWO FORKS, AND BY-PASS FLOWS IN MOUNTAIN WATERSHEDS Nanows The Narrows Dam project on the South Platte river near Fort Morgan was first proposed in 1908 and in 1944 was introduced as one of the 300 projects authorized by the Pick-Sloan Act (Reisner 1986). The Narrows project was originally proposed as a multi-purpose project providing irrigation water, flood control, and recreational water use for Northeastern Colorado. The Army Corps of Engineers in 1931 sponsored the Narrows project for the purpose of flood control (Tyler 1992). After World War II, the Bureau of Reclamation took over responsibility for pushing the project and drafted plans that would create a dam approximately 147 feet high and 4 miles long, with the capacity to store 973,000 acre-feet of water (Woodward 1981), (Reisner 1986). Protection for the whooping crane under the ESA soon became one of many issues and ultimately would have a major part to play in termination of project plans. Years of haggling over Narrows led to the social construction of benchmark figures of at least 10,000 acres of habitat to be restored in central Nebraska and the over-all idea of Platte basin target flows volumes for re- regulation to that habitat. The discussion was critical to the emergence of the concept of a basin- wide federal-state collaborative plan-something that DOI and governors of the three basin states would eventually agree to negotiate in1994. In the end, the Narrows project failed for many reasons. The proposed location of the dam site was questionable on geological grounds. There was sharp conflict between upstream and downstream users-a serious political liability when supposed beneficiaries could not agree about project merits. Shrinking access to federal treasury dollars under Carter and Reagan administrations signaled changing federal priorities. Opposition to USBR river storage projects in general, and to the Narrows in particular, had increased to the point that it had become potent in state and federal political arenas. Finally, on January 20, 1983, the Fish and Wildlife Service issued its "jeopardy" opinion that had emerged out its evaluation of the Narrows proposal. The FWS found that the net annual depletion of flows to habitat would be 91,000 acre-feet. Such a massive impact on South Platte flow volumes and pulses could only damage whooping crane habitat (MacDonnell 1985). The doomed project was not, then, killed. It lingered for years in the vain hope that it could be revived. By the late 1990's its organizational sponsor, the Lower South Platte Irrigation District, quietly quit any attempts to prove diligence on behalf of project water rights. Wildcat In the late 1970's, Riverside Irrigation Company and the Public Service Company of Colorado obtained from Colorado's Division 1 Water Court a right for storage and use of 60,000 acre-feet of water on Wildcat Creek, a small tributary of the South Platte with an annual average 30