Threat to Fish May Put New Mexico Irrigation Project in Hot Water : Environment: Dispute has drawn in federal agencies, Indian tribes and environmentalists. A compromise appears to be in danger.

Federal agencies, fishing enthusiasts, environmentalists and several Indian tribes are at loggerheads over a plan to build a massive river-diversion project in northwestern New Mexico while seeking to save the endangered Colorado squawfish from extinction.

Unless a compromise can be worked out to preserve the water rights of the various groups involved, any move to break ground on the Animas-La Plata Irrigation Project will likely lead to a lawsuit, according to those familiar with the dispute.

And because water-rights cases often drag on for years, a court battle at a time when federal support for water projects in the West is drying up would seemingly spell the end of the project.

The Animas-La Plata project, on the drawing boards since the 1960s, is intended to complete the development of the San Juan River basin, a system of rivers and tributaries that drains the heart of the Four Corners area, where New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Arizona meet.

The Animas and La Plata rivers run out of southern Colorado and empty into the San Juan River near Farmington, N.M. The Animas-La Plata project would divert part of the flow of the Animas across a mountain range into the La Plata to the west to irrigate some 68,000 acres of fertile farmland.

Proponents say the project would benefit farmers and settle century-old water claims by the Southern Ute and Ute Mountain Indian tribes in southwestern Colorado. It would also provide drinking water for the New Mexico communities of Farmington, Bloomfield and Aztec and power a Farmington hydroelectric project.

Years ago, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service poisoned large stretches of the San Juan River to rid it of native fish species in order to introduce species more popular with fishing enthusiasts.

But the service has changed its ways over the years, especially after approval of the federal Endangered Species Act in 1973.

The agency is now concerned about the survival of the squawfish, a large, hardy species that once thrived along the basins of the upper Colorado, San Juan and Green rivers but which since has been placed on the endangered species list.

Biologists cannot fully explain its decline, but they theorize that the fish’s reproduction depends on conditions that prevailed during the spring runoff, when snowmelt from the mountains scoured huge quantities of silt from the riverbeds. Today, with dams and other flood control measures, natural runoff conditions no longer occur.

The Animas-La Plata project was to have gotten under way in 1990, but it was put on hold after biologists unexpectedly found a few squawfish living in the lower San Juan River. The Fish and Wildlife Service issued a “jeopardy” draft opinion, warning that the squawfish would die out if the project were built because flows in the San Juan would be further reduced.

Faced with the prospect of seeing the project canceled, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation proposed a “reasonable and prudent alternative,” calling for the Animas-La Plata project to be scaled back and for water releases from Navajo Dam, an impoundment of the San Juan River upstream from Farmington, to be timed to mimic the natural river flow. To sweeten the deal, the Bureau of Reclamation proposed funding a biological study of the squawfish.

Fish and Wildlife Service regional officials seemed favorably inclined toward the bureau’s scaled-back approach when, a few months ago, a new objection was lodged, this time by the Navajo tribe. Peterson Zah, the tribe’s newly elected president, protested that the Bureau of Reclamation’s plan would endanger the tribe’s efforts to complete the 110,000-acre Navajo Irrigation Project in an area south of Farmington.

“We had to say there’s no such thing as excess water in Navajo Reservoir or the San Juan River,” said Zah’s spokesman, Duane Beyal. “Every drop is spoken for.”

The Navajo project, first proposed in the 1950s, is about half-finished, Beyal said. He acknowledges Navajo objections to the compromise would affect the water rights of the two Ute tribes, as well as the Jicarilla Apache tribe of northern New Mexico.

“We do not oppose our neighbors’ plans,” he said. “However, we have to protect our own rights.”

Zah had approached the other tribes about adopting a united front toward the federal government and non-Indian water users but had been rebuffed, Beyal said. Meanwhile, the tribe has been asking Congress for money to build the rest of its irrigation project.

“Obviously, we would want our irrigation project completed, but as the years pass, that’s becoming unrealistic,” he said. “Indian tribes are always given golden promises, and those promises never come true.”

If the Navajos succeed in holding up the Animas-La Plata compromise, that would likely cheer environmentalists, who oppose further development along the San Juan River, and water users in Arizona and California, who get the use of upstream water that is not already allocated.

Further complicating the controversy is the fact that it involves three agencies of the Interior Department--the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Reclamation and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. So far, Interior Secretary Manuel Lujan Jr. has taken a hands-off approach.