Water Wrongs

"Fisheries are not built around minimum flows but around favorable flows," remarks David Nickum, director of Colorado Trout Unlimited. "A minimum flow will typically get you a minimum fishery. That's not what we have today in the Black Canyon of the Gunnison and the Gunnison Gorge [a Bureau of Lands Management wilderness area directly downstream]. I'm very concerned that it may be what we see in the future if steps aren't taken to protect the resource."

Melinda Kassen, who directs TU's Colorado Water Project, adds this: "If we have 300 cfs year after year, there will be no gold-medal fishery in the Gunnison River. Trout need that base flow but they also need those shoulder flows and peak flows." Because of the drought, the Bureau of Reclamation released only 250 cfs from Aspinall during the winter of 2002-03.

The park's proposal wasn't perfect. For example, Nickum and Kassen worried that quick drawdowns after the scouring flows might leave trout stranded. But the park had a good attitude and let all hands know it would be happy to work out the kinks. It let the downstream town of Delta know it didn't want to flood the buildings that had mushroomed in the floodplain since Blue Mesa Dam started holding back spring runoff in 1965. It let upstream hay growers, about half of whom have water rights junior to, and therefore subordinate to, the park's, know that it had no wish to cut into their profits. After all, the feds had not claimed any of the water that was legally theirs since FDR established the monument in 1933. They expressed a willingness to work with irrigators and to spare them economic hardship. It wouldn't have been difficult.

Still, the state, irrigators and developers threw a hissy fit. In Colorado, as elsewhere in the West, federal reserved water rights are considered an attack on states' rights. People who live in New Jersey and California, for example, who own the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, who love it and thank God for it, even though they might never get to it—are presumed to have no rights. The park's filing for its court-approved water right prompted 383 statements of opposition at state Water Court. "There is undeveloped water in the Colorado Basin," declares Rod Kuharich, director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board. "And we don't want to see the federal government come in and lay claim to water that could be used for the benefit of people in the state of Colorado."

As Bush was moving into the White House the state began a shrill lobbying campaign in DC, then presented the new administration with a list of demands. Spooked by the yelling, the Bush team rolled over, and on September 30, 2002 the Justice Department issued a "settlement communication" to disputing parties, announcing that the federal government would: ensure "that the park's water right will not impact private water rights that are senior to the Aspinall Unit; ensure that the park's water right does not interfere with the development of the 60,000 acre-feet of Upper Gunnison basin water development to which the Aspinall Unit is already subordinate . . . and work with the City of Delta to devise a mechanism to ensure that a flow regime is developed that will adequately protect the park without contributing to flooding Delta."

The park and advocates of fish, wildlife and natural processes had expected and wanted nothing less. But, in the same document, Justice also promised that any water taken by the park would not "impact the yield of water from the Aspinall Unit" even though the unit can take the whole river and even though its yield hasn't been entirely spoken for.

What this was really about was Colorado's grandiose plans for metro Denver. Developers inside and outside state government have long dreamed of diverting the Gunnison over the Continental Divide in a multi-billion-dollar complex of reservoirs, pumps and pipes, the better to fuel speculative development on the Front Range. Basically, the Bush Administration is sacrificing the property of the American people as well as the needs of fish, wildlife and a national park for projects that are only gleams in greedy eyes.

"Reducing the water right for the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park takes the heart out of the park," says TU's national president and CEO Charles Gauvin. "It will be devastating for both the park and its fishery. No one would think of sucking the Colorado River dry just before it enters the Grand Canyon, or putting a shopping mall in the middle of the Gettysburg battlefield or allowing the development of a hard rock mine at the base of Mount Rushmore. Failing to protect healthy water flows through the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park--the water that made the canyon the unique resource it is today—is no different."

The abdication of the Bush Administration only begins with the Gunnison River. In California, at virtually the moment of the Gunnison giveaway, the last of about 33,000 adult salmonids—mostly chinooks, but also steelheads and cohos (the last of these listed as threatened)—were turning belly up. As a result, the chinook run in the Trinity River, a major Klamath tributary in California, was down by about 75 percent. The previous March, having decided that salmon didn't need water, the Bush Administration had suppressed the warnings of its own biologists and allocated an unprecedented portion of the flow to valley irrigators. Now Bush officials are shrugging off the die-off as just another bad roll in the no-win crap game they play, with America's fish and wildlife as the stakes.

"There will always be setbacks because we don't have an ultimate authority on how natural systems work," James Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality and the president's top advisor on environmental issues, explained to the press. "The trick is to manage risk in a way that minimizes and localizes and creates limited opportunities of time for those setbacks to occur." No previous administration in the memory of living Americans was willing to take these kinds of risks. And, when these risks involve threatened or endangered species, as in the Klamath and Gunnison, they're illegal.