A federal agency’s endorsement of a plan to divert Missouri River water, to meet the needs of North Dakota’s Red River Valley of the North, has some Show-Me State officials seeing red. Again.
“For my entire career, I have opposed upstream intervention with the Missouri River which puts in jeopardy the use and enjoyment of that great river by Missourians,” Gov. Jay Nixon said in a news release last week.
He opposed the plan in a letter sent to U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. In the two-page letter, Nixon wrote: “Any alternative that proposes to use Missouri River water adds environmental impacts and risks (and has) greater adverse environmental impacts than in-basin alternatives.”
Earlier this month, U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill told Salazar in a letter: “The proposal is ill-advised for many reasons. According to the (federal) Office of Management and Budget, it would cost over $200 million more than an in-basin alternative, without producing any additional benefits.”
And Missouri’s senior senator, Republican Kit Bond, said last week: “Over the last three Administrations, I’ve fought the diversion of the Missouri River which is vital to Missouri’s farmers and businesses whose livelihoods depend on the river to get their goods to market.”
The federal Bureau of Reclamation backs a $660 million plan to use a pipeline, canal and existing lakes and rivers to transfer water from the Missouri River system to the Red River Valley.
North Dakota officials also think that plan finally keeps promises made to the region when the Garrison Dam was being planned as one of six Corps of Engineers dams in the upper Missouri River basin.
“To compensate the State of North Dakota for substantial economic losses due to the construction of Garrison Dam, the federal government promised North Dakota the ability to divert Missouri River water for 1.25 million acres of irrigation,” wrote Merri Mooridian, the Garrison Diversion project’s Communications director.
“That promise was never fulfilled.”
Instead, she said, the Dakota Water Resources Act of 2000 “includes only 75,480 acres of authorized irrigation” — and “authorization for the Red River Valley Water Supply Project.”
North Dakota’s Gov. John Hoeven and Lt. Gov. Wayne Stenejhem told Salazar in an April 23, 2009, letter: “This Project is desperately needed since a 1930s type drought could once again leave the Red River dry for months at a time, depriving the Red River Valley of its drinking water supply (and) is cost-effective and environmentally sound.”
A one-page fact sheet produced by the Garrison Diversion project says the Missouri River is 95 percent of North Dakota’s surface water, but the state “currently utilizes slightly over 1 percent” of that water.
A separate promotional pamphlet for the project says: “We send one of our most valuable natural resources downstream to other states.”
The Red River of the North flows north along the North DakotanMinnesota border, then into Canada, emptying into Lake Winnipeg and, ultimately, into Hudson Bay.
In 2004, the group “Friends of the Earth Canada” told the U.S. Reclamation Bureau all options for providing more water to the Red River Valley “raise a number of issues of international concern.”
But the project’s supporters note that outgoing Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne said in a Jan. 15, 2009, memorandum that the diversion plan complies with the provisions of the 1909 U.S.-Canada Boundary Waters Treaty.
Nixon told Salazar: “Be assured that the Missouri River alternative will be challenged by Missouri, Manitoba and environmental groups.”
And, Bond noted, Congress must approve both the project and its funding, if the Missouri River diversion is the final proposal — and he’ll fight it.
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Source: newstribune.com, KFGO News Center
