St. Mary rehabilitation group to draft detailed work plan

The group working to find ways to plan and fund rehabilitation of a mainstay of north-central Montana — an irrigation project that provides 50 to 95 percent of the water in the Milk River each year — unanimously voted Wednesday to hire a consultant to draft a detailed work plan for the group.

The St. Mary Diversion Rehabilitation Working Group voted to approve a suggestion from the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation to use the last of a state grant to hire a facilitator to draft the plan.

Government officials at the meeting also said work on a related project could be contracted early next year, in a project to mitigate the diversion's impact on the native brown trout, listed as a threatened species.

Mike Dailey of DNRC said he would schedule a meeting in the next couple of weeks with a committee, appointed Wednesday by the working group, to start drafting a request for a proposal from companies to prepare the work plan.

Dailey said such a plan would typically include vision and mission statements, plans of action, timelines and milestones, giving the group goals and visible achievements once those goals are achieved. DNRC will continue to assist the working group, he said.

"We're hoping (the work plan will allow) the working group to take more control over its own destiny … ," Dailey said, adding, "We want the solution to be local."

He said $41,000 remaining of a state grant to the working group needs to be used, or at least committed, by the end of this year or it would revert back to the state. Those funds will be used for preparing the work plan.

The diversion was one of the first projects authorized for the Bureau of Reclamation to construct after the bureau was created in 1902. It is part of the Milk River Project, an irrigation project that also includes Fresno Reservoir west of Havre and Nelson Reservoir near Malta.

The diversion and storage system, which starts with Sherburne Reservoir on the edge of Glacier National Park and stretches for 29 miles of dams, dikes and siphons across the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, diverts water from St. Mary River into the North Fork of the Milk River. It then runs through Canada before re-entering Montana.

The system was built as a single-use system, to provide irrigation water, although it has since provided water for municipalities — Havre, Chinook and Harlem — as well as recreation opportunities.

The funding for the system, including repairs, is billed to the users each year, primarily paid for by the irrigators. The diversion, some of which is more than 100 years old, has been "Band-Aided" together through the years, and a grassroots effort started about 2000 to find ways to fund a major rehabilitation before a catastrophic failure occurred.

A related project — on which officials originally said construction could start in 2012 — could finally begin next year, Len Duberstein of BOR said.

The plan to mitigate the impact on the brown trout, which is separate from the rehabilitation effort itself, originally was hoped to begin last year. In 2011, a BOR official said that, at that time primarily due to federal budget issues, it would be pushed back.

Duberstein said several issues are being resolved on that, and additional planning and studies on the project should be completed soon. He said that, if funding is available, it could go out for contract as early as February 2014.

That project would work on the primary diversion dam and on canals, including using systems to prevent the trout from being diverted down from their native St. Mary River to the Milk River and using fish ladders to aid their going upstream to spawn.

The group agreed that that project likely should be their top early focus in the work plan and would give the working group and the agencies involved something to point to as a success.

"That's something that really would be a deliverable to the water users," said working group co-chair Randy Reed of Blaine County.