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1 1 1 1 1 u The Missouri River Basin: The Agreements and the Results The third detail involved Reclamation getting into the comprehensive planning business in 1939 when it was authorized to develop plans for the conservation and use of the waters of the Missouri River Basin and to allocate the construction costs of reclamation projects to flood control and navigation to the extent that those purposes were served by a project.lls Under this authority, Reclamation prepared a basinwide plan which addressed both mainstem flood control needs and the expansion of irrigated agriculture. This plan came to be known as the Sloan Plan, after its primary author, William Glenn Sloan, then Assistant Regional Director of Reclamation's Billings, Montana, office. The Sloan Plan called for two major dams and one minor one on the mainstem of the river in the Dakotas totalling about 25 million acre-feet. It provided for 83 irrigation reservoirs on various tributaries, with a total storage capacity of approximately 14.5 million acre-feet. It even dared to propose diverting and consuming water from Ft. Peck Reservoir for irrigation purposes. Total irrigated acreage under this plan came to about 4.7 million acres, about 1.4 million of which would be outside of the Missouri River Basin in northeastern North Dakota. The fourth detail which brought upper and lower basin interests into conflict was the desire of the lower mainstem states to deepen and widen the navigation channel in the lower mainstem of the Missouri -- from six to nine feet in depth and from 200 to 300 feet in width. In the view of the Commissioner of Reclamation, "... the requirements of anine-foot-deep channel would 'permit no additional irrigation development at all' in the upper basin"117 because the capacity of such a channel would require that upstream consumption be foregone in order to leave flows in the river. For their part, the governors of the upper basin states observed "... that 'the use in perpetuity of 32,000 or 35,000 cubic feet per second [for the navigation channel] out of an average flow of 37,600' was neither the most economic nor the most beneficial use of water.'.118 iie Reclamation Project Act of 1939, ch. 418, § 9(b), 53 Stat. 1193 (codified at 43 U.S.C.A. § 485h(b) (1986)). "' J. FERRELL, supra note 103, at 25. 18 Id. at 26. Footnote omitted. 39