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193 By the summer of 2002, the construction of a reasonable and prudent alternative was well under way. A water action plan had been outlined, a terrestrial habitat plan had been sketched, and protocols for research and monitoring efforts were being put in place. If the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) would accept a general conceptual plan that left much to be negotiated in the first program increment and if Nebraska could resolve its internal problems, it was possible for water users to imagine that the prospect for a thirteen-year period of regulatory certainty was tantalizingly close. Victory? On July 17, 2002, in a motel conference room in Kearney, Nebraska, negotiators and other participants in a U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (USBR)–environmental impact statement (EIS) team workshop heard the results of an analysis performed using the team’s enhanced sedimentation-vegetation model. The news was good. A way had been found to make the water action plan work by decreasing the frequency of low flows, increasing the frequency of pulse flows, increasing springsummer base flows for species, and reducing winter flows. The upgraded model of the river showed that a revised set of program flows could pass muster if they were properly integrated with clearing and leveling 750 acres of wooded islands within the areas of five river bridge segments during the first program increment. The model produced numbers that showed that island “squishing,” along with other practices, would mitigate and reverse clear water channel incision. C h a p t e r 1 7 Scent of Victory and impasse SC en t of V iCt or y a n d im paSS e 194 Furthermore, the model showed pulse flows building low sandbars not yet inundated by summer peak flows, something important for plover and tern nesting. Bird sight distances had increased to acceptable values. Cross-sections of the river that would receive the proposed program treatments for thirteen years would be sustainable for over forty-eight years, with much less vegetation management in the second and subsequent program increments. The essential geomorphological results could pass muster for whooping crane habitat. More work would have to be done, however, to get program flows right for least terns and piping plovers. There was also a need to address the situation regarding the pallid sturgeon. After at least five years of pulling and hauling, the negotiations had produced a proposed program, major components of which would serve as the greater part of what could eventually become a reasonable and prudent alternative . It could be the source of relief from jeopardy and for regulatory certainty. Yet the state delegations took the good news with no visible display of joy or any other emotion: no laughter, no handshakes, no relieved congratulations. Stoic silence governed the moment. Why? the Federal QueStion The problem was that the EIS team had just presented a positive evaluation of an important proposed program component. But the proposed program itself and what it would require next were a source of serious divisions within Colorado, Nebraska, and Wyoming. Negotiators representing the three states faced the awkward prospect that their “preferred alternative” had significant opposition back home. Nobody in the room found it pleasant to contemplate putting an EIS on the street without full good-faith backing of the program in central Nebraska as well as in Lincoln, in Bill Owens’s administration in Denver, and among all North Platte constituencies in Wyoming. A federal leader asked, “Does anybody really want an EIS on the street that has states disavowing it?” Silence. Federal voices then expressed a wish to know when the three states would be able to declare agreement with the proposed program and actively move ahead to finish addressing issues, the details of which would have to be put in place so the three governors could sign off on the plan in less than a year, by June 2003. Federal voice: “We are at our wits’ end trying to figure out how to drive this process forward.” Silence. At that moment, there was no easy answer to the federal question. Victory of a sort was at hand. But even the scent of victory threatened to deny Nebraska time. Victory would force unwanted confrontations within Colorado and between Colorado and federal negotiators over the division of peak flows and between the three states and the USFWS regarding the organization of pulse flows. It would compel difficult talks about the regime of the river between the [3...

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