In a remarkable win for Spokane-based environmental group, the federal Bureau of Reclamation turns thumbs down on Yakima River storage project.
In the early, colorful history of western water projects and battles, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation was usually cast as a reliable proponent and enabler of new dams and irrigation projects that drowned wild rivers and delivered heavily subsidized water to farmers and ranchers.
“The Bureau of Reclamation engineers are like beavers,” the legendary environmentalist David Brower groused to writer John McPhee, for a 1971 New Yorker article. “They can’t stand the sight of running water.”
If Brower were alive today (he died eight years ago) he might have a different take. Because today the Bureau just said no to Black Rock Dam, the much-hyped Yakima valley water storage project that, according to the Seattle Times would have towered as high as the Space Needle and been as wide as Grand Coulee Dam. In a press release from its Boise office today, the Bureau flatly declared that it could not support Black Rock Dam and two other water storage options because they “did not provide positive benefit-cost ratios required to be considered economically justified.”
The Bureau’s announcement was greeted like an early Christmas present by Rachael Paschal Osborn and the Center for Environmental Law and Policy (CELP), a Spokane-based organization (and regular Center for Justice client) that describes its missions as being a “water watchdog” to protect Washington state waterways and water resources. Although CELP has gained a high profile on Spokane River issues, and in recent fights to protect aquifers in the Palouse and Pasco Basin, today’s decision by the Bureau may be hard to top given how clearly it vindicates CELP’s pointed criticisms of the Black Rock Dam project over the past several years.
“It’s a good day at Black Rock,” Paschal Osborn said today, upon learning of the news. “We have squandered $18 million and 14 years of studying storage proposals that were sheer folly,” she added. “With a history of over-appropriation and a future of climate change, it is time to seriously address water issues in a cost-effective manner.”
She had praise for the Bureau’s Black Rock decision, but also a plea for the agency to not to go forward with a proposal to enlarge Bumping Lake dam adjacent to the William O. Douglass Wilderness.
The Black Rock Dam project has been the darling of lower Yakima Valley economic interests and political leaders from both parties, including Fourth District Congressman Doc Hastings, and Washington Governor Chris Gregoire. But CELP, despite its relatively small size, has proven to be a formidably effective environmental group, even at a time when federal policies have shifted to favor industry. CELP made state headlines in 2007 when it discovered a $2 billion error in the revenue projections that the Yakima Basin Storage Alliance was touting for the Black Rock project. The Alliance was forced to publicly admit the mistake. More recently, CELP pointed to evidence that the proposed dam site was located on a fault in a seismically active area, and that leakage from the dam or the reservoir could shove groundwater into contaminated soils at the nearby Hanford Nuclear Reservation.
Today, in the Bureau’s view, the primary issue was money. Federal law now requires that water projects funded with federal dollars (and Black Rock Dam and the other two storage projects addressed would have required between $1 billion and $7.7 billion, according to the Bureau) have to return at least a dollar of economic benefit for every federal dollar spent. But the proposed projects were not just economical, the Bureau found, they also came up short in other areas, including having a benefit for salmon. According to the Bureau’s calculations, the return to taxpayers on the Black Rock project would only have been 13 cents on the dollar.
Today’s decision by the Bureau is also, in a way, a vindication of the usefulness to citizens of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). NEPA requires agencies to use environmental impact statements to not only address the environmental and economic consequences of proposed actions, but also to clearly lay out and analyze “No Action” alternatives so that, at a minimum, the ecological and aesthetic qualities of the undisturbed site or resource are identified. “No action” alternatives rarely turn out to be the “preferred alternative” for agencies because they obviously can’t fulfill the “need” for the actions being proposed for the analysis. But today, in black and white, the Bureau of Reclamation reported that it “selected the No Action alternative as the preferred alternative” based on its evaluation.
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