The letter states that the Corps is violating the Endangered Species Act, the Flood Control Act of 1942 and the Administrative Procedures Act by the way it operates the six main stem dams on the Missouri River upstream of Nebraska and Iowa. A suit will be filed to force new management operations for the dams. They say the current Operating Plan is causing continued ecological decline, and imposing economic hardships on some riverfront communities. Federal law requires anyone wishing to file suit over endangered species to first give 60 days' notice. 

The move is the latest in a long-running fight among environmental groups, barge interests, farmers and other economic interests over water releases on the Missouri River.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers currently releases water from its dams on a schedule intended to maximize the length of the commercial shipping on the lower third of the river. These unnatural flows have driven three species to the brink of extinction. The group is relying on the results of the independent Missouri River ecology study conducted by the National Academy of Sciences presented in 2002 for it's argument justifying the river's ecological degradation in which the report declares is "the loss of natural flood pulses [and] the loss of natural flows". 

Corps accused of breaking the law 

Two years ago, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service submitted a Missouri River Draft Biological Opinion study to the Corps. The Corps was told that if it does not regulate dam releases to promote more natural river flows, (Hydrograph) two species of endangered shorebirds (Least Tern, Piping Plover) and an endangered fish (Pallid Sturgeon) will disappear from the Missouri River basin. The Service, which enforces the Endangered Species Act of 1973, had given the Corps until 2003 to come up with a new Operating Plan. The Corps announced this year that it was going into extended talks with the wildlife service over the opinion and would not meet the 2003 deadline. The extension to the deadline was endorsed by the Bush administration this last Summer. The conservation organizations contend that these actions constitute a violation of the Endangered Species Act. 

For more than a decade, environmental groups and recreation interests have pushed for a more natural river, with a high-water rise in the spring and lower flows in the summer, to support wildlife and raise water levels in the upstream dams. 

The groups also accuse the Corps of violating the Flood Control Act of 1942 by prioritizing the barge industry, worth at best $7 million annually, over the recreation industry, worth at least $90 annually. The law stipulates that if several functions of water control and utilization are in direct conflict, preference must be given toward those areas and interests affected which make the greatest contribution to the demographic areas of greatest need.

Lastly, the Corps is accused of stalling development of a modern dam operation schedule for over a  decade, leading the plaintiffs to charge that the agency is violating the prohibition against "unreasonable delay" as outlined in the Administrative Procedures Act.

The eight organizations backing the suit are American Rivers, Izaak Walton League of America, the National Wildlife Federation and Missouri River Basin states' Wildlife Federation groups from Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota. They are being represented in Washington, D.C. by lawyer David Hayes (former Clinton administration Deputy Interior Secretary) of the law firm Latham & Watkins. In an interview with the press on November 7, he stated, "The Army Corps is clinging to the status quo in defiance of the law, clear science, and sound economics."