mahaRiverFront.com was at the annual Missouri River Navigator's meeting, held in Kansas City earlier this month. 

Proposed 2003 Missouri River Annual Operating Plan discussed

The Army Corps of Engineers is required by law to balance all the uses of the Missouri River system, including downstream navigation, and also must take into account threatened bird species such as the piping plover. This means they must balance the many uses of dwindling Missouri River water - irrigation, recreation, power generation, barge transportation and supplementing city water supplies. 

The Corps is looking at a proposal that could save 250,000 acre-feet of water combined in Lake Oahe, Lake Sakakawea and Fort Peck. By starting with slower releases in spring and then gradually increasing to higher flows in late spring and summer, the plan could meet 90 percent of the commercial navigation needs on the Missouri. 

The announced Missouri River Annual Operating Plan calls for drawing down the reservoirs to provide most of the eight-month lower-river commercial navigation season, with a possible reduction of five to 12 days, depending water levels by July 1. This flow-to-target plan would maintain minimum water level flows downstream from Sioux City for barge traffic from May to early June, then gradually increase the amount of water released over the summer to meet navigation targets as tributaries dry up. In addition, the navigation season would be decreased by five days, with an option to shorten it by seven more days if drought conditions worsen. 

The plan may not comply with the Endangered Species Act, which is enforced by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. 

River management is complicated by an ongoing review of the Master Manual for managing the Missouri that has stretched to 13 years, and by a 2-year-old U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Biological Opinion that ordered the corps to protect threatened species. 

Presently, the Master Manual favors navigation and calls for a steady release of water from storage reservoirs through the spring and summer. That conflicts with the Fish and Wildlife Service opinion that the river must be managed to accommodate the needs of the endangered pallid sturgeon, least tern and piping plover. It directs the corps to make the Missouri simulate 
its natural spring rise and low summer flows. Doing so would require water to be held in the reservoirs in summer to create low flows downstream.

Missouri River Endangered Species Report

The Corps of Engineers biologists at Gavins Point Dam in South Dakota manage year-round projects to protect two species of shorebirds, the interior least tern and the piping plover, and a fish, the pallid sturgeon, under state and federal Endangered Species Act. 

The project started in 1995 when high water flows from Gavins Point Dam that year prompted the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to approved a corps request to either move plover and tern nests or remove eggs for incubation and hatching to prevent them from washing away in the rising river. It continued in subsequent high-water years. 

Casey Kruse, the Corps' project chief, said he knows of no other research site in the nation that can match the Gavins Point undertaking in magnitude and success with the two bird species. 

The plovers and terns nest together and raise their young on bare sandbars along the Missouri River and other streams. They lay two to four eggs in shallow scrapes in the sand. 

The birds' river habitat has become an issue affecting how the corps hopes to manage releases from its dams as a way to save water in the drought-stricken reservoirs. Rather than release a steady amount of water from Gavins Point during the nesting season, the corps wants to start at a lower point and gradually increase flows. 

Nests threatened by rising water or erosion would be moved to higher ground when possible. Threatened chicks and eggs would be collected by biologists for captive rearing at a Gavins Point bird house and subsequently released. 

The Fish and Wildlife Service, however, prefers a steady flow that establishes a constant shoreline for nesting birds. The corps and the wildlife agency are meeting to try to resolve their differences before the migratory birds return to the river to nest in mid-May. 

Hatching rates in the controlled setting are more than 22 percent higher for terns and more than 19 percent higher for plovers than their wild counterparts, according to corps statistics. During last year's nesting season, a record 1,134 piping plover adults were found on the Missouri River system. They produced a record number of fledged chicks. 

Final Annual Operating Plan Decision

The Corps said it cannot adopt the flow-to-target method unless it gets approval from the Fish and Wildlife Service. To comply with the Endangered Species Act, nests of the endangered birds would have to be moved out of the way of rising water. 

The chicks would be raised in captivity and released. The Corps has used the relocation method several times since 1995. In a letter to the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Missouri River Basin Association and the Coalition to Protect the Missouri River stated that population numbers for both birds has increased in the last few years. "The two coalitions believe it is reasonable to authorize relocation in 2003 to assure more water is available for basin use," the letter states. 

Representatives of the Corps and the Fish and Wildlife Service are consulting about the proposal, but a decision will not be reached until spring. At that time, the annual operating plan could be revised.