12/1/17

'Surplus water' is legal sock puppetry

David Ganje is a Rapid City-based attorney practicing environmental law.

He's concerned with a new law that gives the Army Corps of Engineers purview over so-called "surplus water" in the Missouri River.
By its new proposed regulation the Corps wants to define "surplus water" in order to control and obtain revenue from so-called surplus water in Corps-managed reservoirs. The new proposed rule is objected to and opposed by Indian tribes and several states. The bill’s language was not written by an informed observer. Nor was it written by an informed participant in water rights. The bill’s language accomplishes nothing. Bureaucracies by their nature do not prefer change from the outside.
Read the rest here.

The death of the Missouri River ecosystem in South Dakota began with the European invasion, was accelerated by the Homestake Mining Company and sealed with the construction of the main stem dams.

South Dakota Attorney General Marty Jackley is engaging in legal sock-puppetry.

By suing the corps over surplus water he is forcing We the People to pay for the clean up of a century of mine tailings and organic effluent that has saturated the banks of the Belle Fourche/Cheyenne River system depositing many tons of toxic silt into Lake Oahe and the other downstream dams after 1962 now displacing many acre-feet of water.

More silt means less hydropower.

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