Water Management Committee Meeting

The Water Management Committee (Committee) meeting began at 1:00 p.m. at the Fish and Wildlife Service's Office in Denver. While waiting for other members to arrive, the Committee reviewed the Consultant Contract for Services and Scope of Work and identified grammatical errors.

Alan Berryman, Jim Lutey, and Curt Brown need to be added to the Committee's mailing list.

After the agenda for the meeting had been reviewed, the Committee discussed Milestone W14-1. The first bullet item under this Milestone references existing flow conditions at the Wyoming-Nebraska, Colorado-Nebraska, and Colorado-Wyoming state lines. The question was raised as to what the existing flow information would be used for. The existing flow information will be used to establish periods of excess and shortage, identify water above the targets that is available for future development, identify conservation/supply opportunities that would improve the timing of flow, and provide a starting point to develop means to measure the effectiveness of the Program.

Each state and the Department of Interior (DOI) needs to begin assembling a notebook that contains water conservation related material. The notebooks should consist of the chapters below. The draft notebooks will be reviewed at the next Committee meeting.

Chapter 1 - Policies

Chapter 2 - Statutes

Chapter 3 - Limitation due to Policies and Statutes

Chapter 3 - Bibliography of Conservation Reports

Chapter 4 - Conclusions of Conservation Reports

Chapter 5 - List of Phone Contacts

The Committee then reviewed their schedule. It was evident from this review that the Committee needs to seek further instruction/authorization from the Governance Committee to maintain their current schedule. The Committee Chairman, John Lawson, will address the Governance Committee on November 4, 1997, about the following items.

Item #1. In accordance with the water conservation/supply component (Attachment II of the Cooperative Agreement) the Governance Committee has directed the Committee to develop a Scope of Work to hire a hydrologic engineering firm to do a water conservation study and an action plan.

Recommendation #1: The Committee recommends including this in one advertisement because of the extreme short time frame we have to provide this information to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) Compliance Study Group, and the cost savings.

Item #2. By the time of award of the contract, additional information must be developed and decided upon by the Governance Committee as to what guidance the Committee is to provide the selected consultant regarding the items in milestone W14-1. Briefly this includes:

- Existing flow conditions;

- lag and gain/loss factors; and

- definition of hydrologically connected groundwater.

Recommendation #2: The Committee recommends that the Governance Committee assign these tasks to the Committee to do the following:

(a) Develop the information needed by the Governance Committee to make such determination

(b) outline the positions (possibly there may be two or more positions); and

(c) provide any recommendations that the Committee may want to provide to the Governance Committee for their decision.

Item #3. The Committee needs to know the contracting entity for the Reconnaissance Study and Action Plan. This decision is required as soon as possible. It is difficult to develop a contracting process without knowing the contracting entity rules.

Recommendation #3: The Committee recommends that the three states be the contracting entity. Possibly they could agree which state would be the contract administrator and then follow that state's procedures.

Item #4. The last decision needed by the Governance Committee is a clarification of the Program's water conservation/supply goal. The Committee had considerable discussion regarding the goals of the Conservation Plan. The Attachment II states, "Goals and time lines to conserve and supply water that would result in a quantifiable net water benefit for target species (net reduction in shortage to target flows) to be applied to the overall water goals of the Program." This has been assumed by many members that this means that there is a need of at least 60,000 acre feet of wet water to provide that net reduction, which is similar to the other 70,000 acre feet provided by Kingsley, Pathfinder modification, and Tamarac. Others have suggested that through the use of possibly pumping water in the wet meadow area that the goal could be achieved without necessarily 60,000 acre-feet of new wet water providing reduction in shortage to target flows.

Recommendation #4: Discuss with the Governance Committee and proceed in accordance to the wishes of the Governance Committee.

Additional items discussed included the following:

1. The due date for the conservation notebooks has been set for January 1, 1998;

2. a single preproposal meeting with the shortlisted consultants is scheduled for mid-January;

3. the proposal preparation time for the shortlisted consultants has been shortened to six weeks, since the consultants will attend only one preproposal meeting to ask questions and review the conservation notebooks; and

4. the time between receiving the draft report and the final report of one month was questioned.

The remainder of the meeting focused on reviewing the draft Scope of Work and making editorial changes to the content. The content changes and grammatical corrections will be made by Lyle Myler and sent to the Committee on November 7, 1997. The Committee members will fax any comments regarding the revised Scope of Work to the attention of Mr. John Lawson at (307) 261-5683 on Thursday, November 13, 1997. A conference call will be held on November 14, 1997, at 9:00 a.m. Mountain Standard Time to discuss the Scope of Work.

Mike Purcell mentioned that the State of Wyoming has developed procedures on proposal preparation for Request for Proposal (RFP) packets. Becky Mathisen will provide a copy of the procedures to Mr. Myler.

By consensus, the Committee selected Mike Drain to be the Water Committee's member on the Selection Committee. The Section Committee Members are listed below.

1. Alan Berryman

2. Ann Bleed

3. Mark Butler

4. Mike Drain

5. John Lawson

6. Dan Luecke

7. Becky Mathisen

The next meeting will be held at the State of Nebraska Office building in Lincoln, Nebraska, on December 3, 1997. The meeting will begin at 1:30 p.m. and end at 5:30 p.m. Further information regarding the meeting will be provided in the cover letter to the minutes. The meeting adjourned shortly after 5:00 p.m.