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P a r t V I Reaching Sufficiency Wrestling with Skunks On Wednesday, February 19, 2003, soon after the Governance Committee gathered in a motel conference room near Denver International Airport, the leader of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) team stepped up to a flip chart. He listed in two or three words each item that had to be addressed if there were to be any hope of putting together a successful reasonable and prudent alternative. Each item had been lurking around the negotiating table in unresolved form for years. The long-postponed searches for solutions to critical problems had to be meaningfully addressed in ways that would give substance to an eventual environmental impact statement and a biological opinion. r ea chIn g Suff Ic Ien cy : W r eSt lIn g W It h Sk un kS 198 The list included protection of peak flows on the Colorado South Platte, the necessity of building pulse flows on the central Platte for habitat restoration and maintenance, the challenge of addressing “choke point” restrictions on North Platte flows that threatened to compromise the delivery of environmental account water to the habitat as well as pulse building, the needs of the pallid sturgeon, and the importance of giving substance to an amorphous adaptive management plan. In addition, everyone knew that state and federal future depletions (post–June 30, 1997) offset plans needed to be completed and endorsed. Therein lay deeply troubling issues. After some discussion, a state representative rose from the table and declared , “The skunks are on the table now.” From 2003 to 2006, problems mounted seemingly faster than negotiators were able to cope with them. The federal regulatory process required that federal and state authorities find a way to embrace each other, but how? How would negotiators find ways to deflower a pack of skunks? Prior to an examination of the particulars, however, it is important to establish the context within which negotiators were struggling. Through 2000, during the Clinton administration, the Department of the Interior was led by political appointees friendly to large-scale voluntary cooperative habitat restoration programs, as evidenced in the Florida Everglades, the Chesapeake Bay, Upper Colorado, the San Francisco Bay/Sacramento San Joaquin Delta (CALFED Bay Delta) Program, and the Platte River Basin effort (Doyle and Drew 2008). It was also a time of federal budget surpluses. Furthermore, the 1990s were characterized by above-average Platte River Basin flows. Then, the context of the negotiations shifted significantly, as traced in Chapter 18. ...

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