Daines calls for hydropower on waterways, including Milk River Project

Montana's freshman U.S. representative is looking to overturn a 1936 rule, an action that would allow generating electricity from federal water projects including the Milk River Project.

Rep. Steve Daines, R-Mont., introduced a bill Tuesday striking the 1939 requirement that the U.S. government retain all rights to hydroelectric power on all U.S. Bureau of Reclamation canals, ditches and conduits.

The bill requires the Department of Interior to first offer leases for producing hydropower to irrigation districts or water users associations operating the canals or receiving water through it. If those entities decline the leases, the department would offer the leases to other entities, the bill says.

"This common-sense legislation will immediately put people back to work in rural communities developing clean, renewable hydropower at no cost to taxpayers, while helping lower energy costs for Montanans," Daines said Wednesday in a press release. "Montana's irrigation districts provide valuable sources of water for our state's pastures and farmland, but also hold tremendous potential for serving our state's energy needs. It's time for these outdated and senseless federal barriers to be removed so that this renewable energy source can be developed."

Daines said the bill would apply immediately to 11 federal water projects, including four in Montana. One of those is the Milk River Project, one of the first projects on which BOR was authorized to work when it was created early last century.

The Milk River Project stretches from the edge of Glacier National Park, where the St. Mary Diversion transfers water into the Milk River, to the Milk's confluence with the Missouri River. It provides irrigation for about 121,000 acres of land in Montana along 165 miles from near Havre to Nashua by the Milk-Missouri confluence.

The project includes three storage dams, including Fresno west of Havre and Nelson east of Malta, and diversion dams including at Chinook, Dodson and Vandalia, and 200 miles of canals.