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<br />DRAFT -- August 11, 1999 <br /> <br />water rights for "wet" water. One example is the effort to settle the reserved water right <br />claims of the Shivwits Band of Paiute Indians in the Virgin River general stream adjudication <br />in southern Utah. In the settlement negotiations the parties have placed significant reliance on <br />the construction of a reuse facility to provide "new" water for settlement of the Band's claims. <br />However, the reuse facility would result in significant depletions to the Virgin River stream <br />flow, and thereby affect three native fish', because the reuse water that is currently discharged <br />from the sewage treatment into the river would be used for other consumptive uses. Whether <br />the reuse facility will be a viable component of the Band's water settlement budget depends <br />largely on the ESA recovery program currently being developed by FWS, the State of Utah, <br />and the non-Indian water interests in the Virgin River Basin, and the extent to which <br />mitigation measures are identified to justify the depletions associated with the reuse project. <br /> <br />More conflicts are anticipated. Indian Pueblos in the Middle Rio Grande in New Mexico <br />worry that Section 7 consultations on federal agency actions related to urban water resource <br />development will ignore Pueblo water rights, both those rights established by statute and <br />future reserved right claims. But the presence of the endangered Rio Grande silvery minnow <br />will probably mean that a certain amount of water must stay in the river. <br /> <br />In 1997 drought conditions in the upper Gila River Basin in Arizona and the exercise of <br />federal decreed water rights by the Gila River Indian Community and non-Indian irrigation <br />districts threatened to drain the San Carlos Reservoir, which is owned and operated by the <br />BrA on the San Carlos apache Indian Reservation for the benefit of those downstream decreed <br />water users. The San Carlos Apache Tribe is concerned that reservoir oprations in dry years <br />will result in economic harm to the Tribe's recreation and game fishery concession at the <br />reservoir, and may adversely affect species listed as threatened or endangered under the ESA. <br />The crisis was avoided that year when Congress and the Department identified funds that <br /> <br />1 <br />Two of the fish are listed species, the woundfin and the Virgin River <br />chub. The other, the Virgin River spindedace, was proposed for listing and is <br />now the subject of a conservation agreement. <br /> <br />15 <br />