Judge sets contempt hearing on Missouri River case

An appeals court rebuffed a government effort Friday to halt a lower court's order reducing water levels on the Missouri River, and the lower court scheduled a contempt hearing for Monday morning.

Conservation groups are suing the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers under the Endangered Species Act, saying the river must be restored to more natural spring rise and low summer flows to encourage fish spawning and bird nesting by threatened and endangered species.

A federal judge in Washington granted an injunction seeking low flows beginning last Wednesday on the Missouri.

But the corps refused to comply, saying Tuesday night that reduced water levels would violate an earlier ruling issued by a federal court in Nebraska that requires the Missouri to enough water for barges to navigate and power plants to operate.

On Friday, U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler in Washington scheduled a contempt of court hearing for Monday morning.

And the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia on Friday denied the government's request for an emergency stay pending an appeal of Kessler's ruling.

"It means that the corps can no longer hide, and that they're going to have to comply with the law or face stiff penalties," said Chad Smith, spokesman for American Rivers, one of the groups suing the corps.

While the corps reduced flows slightly after Kessler's July 12 ruling, it refused to budge on Friday.

"There has been no decision on whether we're going to change releases," corps spokesman Paul Johnston in Omaha, Neb., said Friday. "The Army's position is that we're sitting here with conflicting orders."

When the corps announced it would refuse to comply with Kessler's order and instead follow the earlier court order, it also announced plans to finish long-delayed revisions of its "master manual" for operating the river.

Delays have lasted more than a decade because of the battle over returning the Missouri to a more seasonal ebb and flow.

More natural changes would benefit the lake recreation industry upriver in Montana and the Dakotas. But those who live and farm along the lower reaches of the river in Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas and Missouri worry that a spring rise would flood homes and farmland and low summer flows would devastate the barge shipping industry.

Kessler acknowledged in her order that barge companies will lose revenues, water quality may suffer and consumers may pay more for power this summer along the Missouri River.

But she said that injury to wildlife -- the least tern, piping plover and pallid sturgeon -- will be irreparable without curtailing the Missouri's flow.