9377

• UCREFRP Catalog Number: 9377
• Author: Colorado Water Workshop.
• Title: 16th Annual Colorado Water Workshop.
• USFW Year: 1991.
• USFW - Doc Type: Western State College.
• Copyright Material: NO

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us and really worked him over, because we didn't think Fish and
Game had been doing anything for the river," Orsmbee recalls.
He and Murphy talked straight Bitterroot politics with the state
agent, insisting that the only way the rivet could be improved in
this valley would be by putting the Conservation District at the
center of the action.
Conservation districts are some of the West's more
grassroots organizations. They are made up mostly of farmers and
ranchers like Murphy and Ruffano, with a sprinkling of city folks
like Ormsbee. In arguing that the conservation district should
be at the center of any program to manage the Bitterroot River,
Murphy and Ormsbee were saying that the river had to be managed
by the people who were the closest to it. They reminded the Fish
and Game man that his agency was not terribly popular in many
rural areas of Montana and that this unpopularity made it much
harder for the agency to carry its resource management plans into
effect. But there was another side to that same coin. If the
agency developed resource management policies in cooperation with
a grassroots organization like the conservation district, then
the policies would have the local support that could turn them
into something more than plans on a shelf in an agency office.
In this case, it could turn them into fish.
Whether that conversation was the beginning of a different
approach to managing the Bitterroot or not, the fact is that
change was brewing. For the last two summers, farmers and
fishermen on the river have agreed to an allocation of the
river's water designed to meet the needs of irrigators without
leaving the fish high and dry.
Part of the solution has been a 10,000 acre foot allotment
of state-owned water from Painted Rocks, an off-stream reservoir
in the upper valley. For years, that water had been a source of
controversy, eyed thirstily by irrigators, guarded jealously by
anglers. But neither party has had enough water under their own
control to meet their needs, especially in dry years. Irrigators
need more water than the river offers in June and July, but the
fish don't start suffering until August. This deadlock began to
break one steamy July evening when Jim Flynn, Director of the
Department of Fish, wildlife and Parks, told a room full of
irrigators, "I'll give you all the water you want in June if
you'll give it back in August." That, in effect, was the formula
for the agreement they eventually reached. But it could only be
reached by each side relaxing its jealous hold on the particular
part of the river they claimed as their own. In the process,
they made the river go further for both of their needs. By
releasing some of their precious ten thousand acre feet earlier
than the fish really needed it, the anglers could help the
farmers in their most crucial season. In turn, the irrigators
could offer to leave more water in the river later in the summer,
even though they legally had a right to divert it.
There was more to the agreement than this, of course.
Rivers are never that simple. But the details of the solution
are less important than the circumstances which make a solution
possible. Tom Ruffano remembers how some of the old-timers
finally saw that they just weren't going to get enough water if