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By JOE GROSSMAN, UPI Science News

Aug. 8 (UPI) - - Last Thursday the Army Corps of Engineers announced that it would not give preference to a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plan to save two endangered species on the Missouri River.

The controversial plan to save the interior least tern and the pallid sturgeon requires that additional water be released from dams on the Missouri River in the spring and that flows be reduced during the summer. Opponents of the plan say that crop yields will be reduced, river barge traffic will be halted for months, water for cooling electricity generating plants will be less available and that drinking water for some municipalities will require more costly treatment.

The Endangered Species Act of 1973 requires all federal agencies to consult with the Fish and Wildlife Service to ensure that their actions do not jeopardize an endangered species. Fish and Wildlife have formally concluded in a biological opinion that the Corps' water management on the Missouri must change if the two endangered species are not to be jeopardized by the Corps' actions.

The Army Corps decision sparked pointed criticism from Senator Tom Daschle's office and support from Senator Christopher Bond.

A spokesperson for Daschle, D-SD, told United Press International, "They have turned a 12-year public process on its head. Senator Daschle is worried that if we continue down this course we're going to end up with the management of the Missouri River in the courts and a federal judge is going to be managing the Missouri River. This is an abdication of responsibility on the part of the Army Corps of Engineers." Daschle's spokesperson, Jay Carson, said that Senator Daschle believes that, "this is yet another, in a laundry list of events, that seem to show that there may be a need for Corps reform legislation."

But Senator Christopher Bond, R-MO, issued a statement strongly supporting the Corps. "I applaud today's decision by the Corps of Engineers to consider equally a number of ways to save endangered species while still allowing for effective and safe management of the Missouri River. This decision to not rig the outcome with a ‘preferred' alternative is good news for all of us. . . . With this new-found flexibility, the public will finally get a genuine chance to comment on how the Missouri River is preserved, thereby breaking the Fish and Wildlife Service's monopoly on options," Bond said.

The Missouri River, the Big Muddy, cascades, meanders, gurgles and sits almost still in reservoirs as it runs 2300 miles (3700 km) through seven states. Snowmelt from the Rockies picks up volume from a thousand tributaries in a half-million square mile basin as it flows through Montana, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas and Missouri to join up with Old Man River, the mighty Mississippi, at St. Louis, then flowing on to the Gulf of Mexico.

According to Mike Olson, the biologist with Fish and Wildlife Service, who was the lead author on the Services' biological opinion, there are about 9000 interior least terns remaining in the world, with about 15 percent of them on the Missouri River. The population of the pallid sturgeon is more difficult to assess, with somewhere between 1000 and 10,000 remaining and with almost no reproduction occurring in the wild. Another bird, the piping plover, is affected by Missouri River water flows and is listed as threatened with about 3300 members in the great plains population.

Fish and Wildlife state that a spring release of water, usually called a spring rise, will provide a spawning cue to the sturgeon and will also scour vegetation off sandbars that the two bird species use for nesting. Lower flows in the summer will allow more sand bar area to emerge, providing increased habitat for the birds and provide a greater opportunity for the birds to protect their nests from predators. The massively engineered and channelized Missouri River has lost most of its sand bar habitat and six huge dams have impeded natural water flow cycles.

Biologist Olson was disappointed by the Corps decision to not identify a preferred course of action now. According to Olson, the Army Corps staff that run the Missouri River at the district level stated at number of recent meetings that they were going to come out now with a preferred alternative that increased spring flows.

"While we would have liked to have seen a preferred alternative, if the Corps presents a range of alternatives to the public, including the Fish and Wildlife Service proposal, which is the spring rise, we're still trying to remain confident that we can get there, basically have a healthier river, by the final environmental impact study step, although this might have been a small step backward," Olson told UPI.

The regional office of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Denver and the district headquarters of the Army Corps of Engineers in Portland, Oregon agreed on Fish and Wildlife's plan as the preferred alternative, according to Olson. Then came the recent sudden shift in direction last week, Olson said. "Obviously the disagreement came at a higher level," Olson added.
The Corps decision to not pick Fish and Wildlife's recommendation as the preferred alternative didn't surprise just Olson. Fish and Wildlife's deputy regional director John A. Blankenship told UPI that Fish and Wildlife got a phone call from the Corps about the decision just one day before the public announcement.

A spokesperson for the Army Corps of Engineers, Paul Johnston, told UPI, "We had been thinking about presenting our revised draft environmental impact statement with a preferred alternative but those things are always under review. And we just decided that rather than coming out with a single preferred alternative we should present an array so that folks can take a look at all the impacts - - that's really the centerpiece of this environmental impact study, the impacts analysis - - so that people can identify what are the impacts and what are the tradeoffs."

The chain of command for the Army Corps runs up through the assistant secretary of the Army for civil works, Lawrence Izzo. The issue of whether or not to present various options versus presenting the Fish and Wildlife plan as the preferred alternative was discussed by Izzo and his staff, according to Army spokesperson Nancy Ray.

White House spokesperson Scott Stanzel told UPI that both President Bush and Vice President Cheney had opposed to the increased spring release of water on the Missouri, and reduced flows in the summer, while on the campaign trail last fall but had not commented publically on the issue since the election.

The Corps may ultimately not have much choice. Scott Farber, an attorney with Environmental Defense, told UPI, "Unless the Corps of Engineers can come up with a scientifically valid alterative to these (water release) dam reforms, the Corps will have to implement the reforms recommended by the Fish and Wildlife Service in its final biological opinion, according to federal law, the Endangered Species Act. . . . This was an easy way for the Bush administration to throw a bone to the barge industry and Senator Bond."

It's probably fair to say that the barge industry, which says it would be shut down for months by a summer water flow reduction, hopes it's more than just a bone.

Chris Brescia, the executive director the Midwest Area River Coalition 2000, representing barge and agricultural interests along the Missouri, says that the public rejected the idea of the spring water increase and the summer slowdown in public hearings in 1994 and welcomes the Corps' decision to list a group of alternatives. "Providing alternatives to the public, especially ones that have gone through an extensive review process already, is far better than providing one that's been rejected by the public in the previous round of comments," Brescia told UPI.