BOARD01764

• Board Meeting Date: 2/16/1960
• Description: Minutes
• Board Meetings - Doc Type: Meeting

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MR. CONOUR:
MR. SPARKS:
MR. STAPLETON:

MR. KIMBALL:

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all this legislation authorizes in any event."
"Whose idea was the 10,000 acre-feet?"

"I'm not sure where that came from."

"Could the Fish and Game give us any idea
on that?"

"r~ name is Kimball and I am the Director
of the Game and Fish Department. I might say to
begin with that this problem of a pool originated
with the people in the Arkansas Valley. They are
the ones that were most concerned when the reser-
voir was drained and we lose all the fish and
then the minute we get water back in the reser-
voir, they are after us to stock it again so
they will have some fishing in the reservoir
there. So they are the ones that approached us
originally on the basis of arriving at some way
where we might maintain a pool of water in John
Martin and preserve these facilities.

Let me say first in connection with water
rights, as far as our Department is concerned,
we have been dependent upon the Water Conserva-
tion Board, r~. Sparks and his engineers, to tell
us what we need in the way of water rights to
protect a pool of 10,000 or 20,000 acre-feet of
water there and it would be our intention as a
department to acquire whatever rights were neces-
sary to take care of this allocation. We don't
intend to try and steal the water from anybody.
The only thing we reserve the right to is to say,
once we are told what it is going to take and
we try and go out and buy it somewhere, whether
or not that cost is going to be justified for
what we are getting. In other words, our Game
and Fish Commission sets a limitation of about
$I,OOO a surface acre of good, productive water
from the standpoint of fish production. Now
if, when we get the final bill for this particu-
lar water, it is going to be more than that,
there's a good possibility that the Game and
Fish Commission is going to take their money
and spend it where they can get the most for it
which might be in some other area.

Insofar as this 10,000 acre-feet limitation
is concerned, that's true that our biologists
have reported to us that for optimum conditions