SierraScape February - March 2005
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by Leslie Lihou

This September in St. Louis the Missouri Department of Natural Resources hosted the Transboundary Water Issues Group. Representatives from Canada, Minnesota, Native American tribes, and conservation groups formulated a defense against North Dakota's new push to divert the Missouri River across the continental divide to a different watershed. Manitoba and Minnesota are alarmed by potential contamination of the Red River with pollutants and invasive species from another watershed. The Native American tribes object to the destruction of cultural and fishery resources, as well as to the violation of treaty obligations. Missouri criticizes the siphoning of water that would deprive downstream states, which depend on it not only for household and industrial water needs, but also for barge navigation. Conservationists perceive a threat to natural processes and ecosystems that can have dire environmental consequences. Legal questions arise: How will North Dakota's diversion of Missouri River water affect the prior rights of other water consumers?

North Dakota proclaimed irrigation, water shortages and estimated growth in water demand as justification for the diversion. In a recent Devils Lake Outlet proposal, the North Dakota government and its ally, the Garrison Diversion Conservancy District, plan to channel the Missouri River through a chain of completed channels, pipes and reservoirs to Devils Lake, then out of basin to the Sheyenne River and downstream to land and cities in the Red River Valley. The Bureau of Land Reclamation is now completing an EIS on a Devils Lake intake project under the pseudonym Red River Valley Water Supply Needs Project which will require Congressional authorization of the Bureau's recommendations. Scientific studies have rejected the out-of-basin transfer of Missouri water as economically unfeasible and environmentally disastrous. Furthermore, the statistics indicate that the irrigation project would benefit few farmers and would concentrate land ownership.

However, a lack of water is not the only concern that the North Dakotans wish to address. Lately parts of North Dakota have experienced unusually heavy rainfall. Under the pretext of releasing water from the overflowing Devils Lake, next spring the state wants to begin delivering water through the last link over the continental divide to the Sheyenne River. However, in dry years the vast infrastructure of pumps and channels comprising the Devils Lake Outlet and the proposed Devil's Lake intake can disperse flow out of the Missouri basin into the Red River system and flush invasive species from the Missouri downstream into Canada. Although months ago Canada requested that the International Joint Commission convene to investigate the consequences of the Devils Lake Outlet, Secretary of State, Colin Powell, has not yet responded.

Since its 1889 Constitutional Conventional, North Dakota has pressed Congress to build an irrigation canal from the Missouri River to the Red River Valley. In spite of rejections by Congress and Administrations of Presidents Carter, Reagan, George Bush and Clinton, North Dakota has doggedly pursued this discredited and wasteful diversion. To perpetuate this project, North Dakota has grossly inflated population growth and exaggerated irrigation and industrial needs, surmounted the unenthusiastic response of its citizens, seduced conservation groups with promises of wetland preserves which never materialized, resisted legal challenges, evaded permitting procedures, dismissed the concerns of Canada, Missouri, Minnesota land owners and conservationists, and squelched alternatives which would provide water to the Red River Valley from sources within the watershed.

To win approval the North Dakota government has devised a series of interrelated schemes stringing together piecemeal water projects. Devils Lake Outlet and proposed Devil's Lake intake will make the last connections to this serpentine water diversion. The proponents have even marketed the scheme under a more alluring label, Dakota Water Supply Project. But the project is still the Garrison Diversion, an attempt by a local interest group to ignore the concerns and needs of downstream users and to control the Missouri water for unsubstantiated needs.

The relentlessness of the North Dakota Congressional delegation assures that this issue will clamp onto the political and regulatory processes in the future. During the present transition to a new government, citizens, lawmakers and government officials must be vigilant. North Dakota's Senators, Dorgan and Conrad, have already slipped an amendment authorizing the Devils Lake Outlet into an Omnibus Appropriations Bill. Now the North Dakota Senators are seeking funding for this part of the diversion project. When the Bureau of Land Reclamation makes recommendations on the intake project, the Senators will probably maneuver to secure Congressional authorization for that segment.

You may write or call your U.S. Senators, your Representatives and incoming Governor Blunt. Remind them to be alert to ND delegation's manipulations and prevent the passage of legislation that would facilitate diversion of the Missouri River. The sooner you contact your leaders, the quicker they can mount an effective response to this threat.