Governor Parson: Basin States Need to Speak With Unified Voice on Missouri River Management
(JEFFERSON CITY, MO) – The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers manages the Missouri River through the Master Manual, a 432-page document that lays out eight congressionally authorized purposes: flood control, river navigation, hydroelectric power, irrigation, water supply, water quality, recreation, and fish and wildlife (including preservation of endangered species).
Congress authorized flood control and navigation as the dominant project purposes for the Missouri River system. However, during a 2004 update of the Master Manual, the Corps shifted the prioritization of these purposes to hold water higher in the reservoir system to benefit fisheries – an action that effectively reduced flood control.
For decades, the State of Missouri has strongly argued flood control must be the Corps’ top priority and that reducing flood impacts is the dominant project purpose that Congress authorized to guide the Corps’ management of the Missouri River. The Midwest is now bearing witness to the devastating results when those eight purposes are not appropriately prioritized.
The Corps maintains one of the nation’s largest flood control systems on the Missouri river main-stem, but the devastating flooding we are experiencing and the previous record 2011 flooding have demonstrated the current system is insufficient to protect us. The majority of the runoff causing the flooding in the Missouri River basin this week came either from unregulated tributaries to the Missouri River without a Corps reservoir or in tributaries to the Corps’ most downstream reservoir, Lewis and Clark Reservoir above Gavins Point Dam – a reservoir with very little flood storage. The Corps should be considering expanding Lewis and Clark Reservoir, adding more flood control reservoirs on the tributaries in the lower Missouri River, or implementing other strategies to expand flood storage, instead of being distracted by protracted debates about endangered species.
https://www.therolladailynews.com/news/20190328/governor-parson-basin-states-need-to-speak-with-unified-voice-on-missouri-river-management