By CYNDY COLE Sun Staff Reporter Thursday, May 28, 2009
A federal judge has delivered a notable legal victory to the Flagstaff-based Grand Canyon Trust and Earthjustice in a yearslong dispute over how best to manage the Colorado River below Glen Canyon Dam.
If upheld, the ruling could lead to conditions on the Colorado that more closely follow seasonal snowmelt and summer dryness -- and reduce electricity generation in seasons when it is currently most demanded. At present, releases from the dam increase and decrease, within some limits, based on how much electricity is needed by customers in the Southwest.
The agency charged with telling the Interior Department how to operate Glen Canyon Dam to promote the recovery of endangered fish species in the Colorado last year reversed its longstanding recommendations with little explanation, the judge found.
Now the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service must explain by October how it concluded in 2008 that more than a decade of research establishing dam operations were eroding beaches and harming habitat was wrong.
Just one year earlier, the same agency had concluded that the science showed current dam operations were harmful to beaches and ecosystems downstream. It had said since the mid-1990s that operating the dam to mimic natural seasons was best for endangered fish.
Federal lawyers were unable to prove otherwise in oral arguments, the judge wrote.
"...an agency cannot entirely fail to consider an important aspect of a problem, nor can it offer an explanation for its decision that runs counter to the evidence before it," U.S. District Judge in Arizona David Campbell wrote in a ruling issued Tuesday.
The Grand Canyon Trust has argued that the politics of keeping one's job under the Bush Administration forced Fish and Wildlife personnel to reconsider their long-held scientific advice on the Colorado River last year.
Ultimately, it is up to the Interior Secretary to set operations at Glen Canyon Dam.
The Trust is calling recent management decisions a waste of more than $100 million in taxpayer-funded research over more than a decade on the Colorado River through Grand Canyon.
"The Bureau of Reclamation has done a very good job in misleading the public about what they're doing at Glen Canyon Dam," said Nikolai Lash, of the Grand Canyon Trust. "... They have been aware of science over and over saying things need to change at Glen Canyon Dam, and they have ignored that science."
Glen Canyon Dam generated enough power in 2008 to supply more than 300,000 homes.
The changes the Trust is proposing would cost one-third of the ratepayers about a nickel per month, and two-thirds of them nothing, Lash said.
PROTECTION FOR HUMPBACK CHUB
The Grand Canyon Trust filed the lawsuit against the Bureau of Reclamation in 2007, arguing that federal agencies weren't doing all they were legally obligated to do to restore a federally-listed endangered fish, the humpback chub.
The chub is a fish originating in the Colorado River 3 million to 5 million years ago. It lives in six spots on the Colorado River, with one downstream of Glen Canyon Dam near the Little Colorado River.
The fish's population has fluctuated from an estimated 2,400 to 4,400 fish in 2001 to an estimated 7,650 last year, with multiple factors possibly contributing to the rise, including a trout removal project and warmer river temperatures.
Its populations were estimated at 10,000 to 11,000 in 1989, according to the ruling and U.S. Geological Survey science.
Disputes over how best to manage Glen Canyon Dam began with construction of the dam.
From 1963 to 1991, the dam was operated for maximum power generation, with daily fluctuations that resulted in river levels that sometimes rose and fell 13 feet in a day.
In 1996, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt set limits on how much releases from the dam could fluctuate in a day, and those limits are in place most of the time today.
In 1994, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recommended releases from the dam change with the seasons. That would lead to a spring flood and smaller flows in summer.
While the Bureau of Reclamation did implement many other recommendations intended to improve life for the humpback chub, it did not change dam operations as prescribed.
One question, wrote Judge Campbell, is whether changing dam operations to make the river calmer in summer and wilder in winter could also make it more hospitable to non-native fish that prey on the chub.
Another is whether any solution will work, given that 84 percent of the sediment that once flowed into the Grand Canyon is now trapped behind the dam.
A Fish and Wildlife spokeswoman said the agency was reviewing the case and would respond to the judge's questions.
Cyndy Cole can be reached at 913-8607 or at ccole@azdailysun.com.
