Corps of Engineers issues Missouri River plan

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on Friday issued a new plan for Missouri River operations that does not call for a more natural ebb and flow, avoiding the subject of nearly 15 years of conflict along the nation's longest waterway.

Corps officials said the new plan will provide steady depths for barge shipping, enough water for power generation and considerably more water in big reservoirs in Montana and the Dakotas. A federal judge has ordered it finalized by March 19.

But rather than ending the conflict, the agency's draft plan drew new criticism from stakeholders up and down the river.

Conservationists have long advocated a spring rise and shallow summer flow, which would aid endangered species by mimicking the Missouri's flow before it was dammed and channelized beginning in the 1940s.

Those upstream like the idea because it would boost a growing boating and fishing industry. Downstream, the idea is despised because it would halt barge shipping and because it raises worries about flooding.

"They're proposing just to make it an industrial ditch, and to hell with everything else," said Chad Smith, a spokesman for American Rivers, a conservation group that is suing the corps.

Sen. Max Baucus, a Democrat from upriver Montana, said the agency "draped a fancy new plan around the status quo" and threw a "bone to upstream states while giving continued preference to the barge industry."

At the same time, a downriver barge industry champion, Missouri GOP Sen. Kit Bond, said: "It fails to protect the priorities of Missouri and other downstream states."

The corps is trying to update river operations that have gone virtually unchanged for more than four decades and were put in place long before the pallid sturgeon and two shorebirds, the interior least tern and piping plover, were listed as endangered and threatened.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ordered the corps more than three years ago to boost spring flows and reduce summer water levels to help save the fish and birds.

But under the Bush administration, service biologists backed off, saying in December that summer water levels can be kept high enough for barge shipping if the corps also builds new habitat for the sturgeon. The service also said the birds can survive without the changes and that only the pallid sturgeon is at issue.

The corps said it intends to create 1,200 acres of new shallow-water habitat for the sturgeon by July 1. Under the plan, if the agency fails, it will drop water levels and halt shipping.

"We're working very closely with Fish and Wildlife to do that," said Brig. Gen. William T. Grisoli, the corps' division commander for the Missouri River region. "There has to be new habitat, opening up chutes, taking care of areas that have land in the river and opening that up."

Eventually, the corps plans to build 20,000 acres of new habitat. Grisoli said the corps can't say right now where this year's 1,200 acres would be, but he said the focus is on about 200 miles between Sioux City, Iowa, and the Osage River in mid-Missouri. In all, the river flows 2,341 miles from Montana to St. Louis.

The corps earlier sought a reprieve from the March deadline, but the federal judge overseeing the many Missouri River lawsuits refused late Thursday.

"The court takes serious issue with the corps' repeated failures to issue a new master manual, and is unpersuaded by its renewed request for further delay," U.S. District Judge Paul A. Magnuson in Minneapolis wrote in his order. "The court cannot permit the corps to hide behind its illusory promises."