FWP Fresno fishery advisory committee moves forward

Despite the weather, ongoing system repair and maintenance projects affecting the waterway, and having to meet remotely, the Fresno Reservoir Fisheries Management Plan Advisory Committee is forging ahead with their task to create a five-year management plan for the popular lake.

Steve Dalby, the Region 6 fisheries manager for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks and the department's coordinator with the advisory committee, said the nine-member committee should have a first draft for internal review after the upcoming May meeting and then have a draft available for public comment sometime in July or August.

"(The management plan) will give some direction to the Fresno fisheries management and decisions that will be made on Fresno relative to the fisheries for the next five to 10 years," Dalby said.

The committee's nine members are all stakeholders in the reservoir's success, representing local walleye anglers, out-of-area walleye anglers, general and youth anglers, local business, and local government.

The committee's charter, which is linked on the group's website https://fwp.mt.gov/aboutfwp/fresno-cac , says, "the workgroup will provide recommendations to FWP and assist with developing guidelines for management of the Fresno Reservoir fishery. Primary issues include but are not limited to walleye stocking strategies; non-walleye fish stocking strategies; fishing regulations; bait use regulations; habitat enhancement; angling tournaments; Milk River water designation and reservoir water level management, and research needs."

Dalby said the committee will be working through questions such as, if stocking walleye, how many should be added and how often? And concerning fishery habitat or forage management projects, how big should they be? How often maintained? Where will the money come from?

Along with other freshwater creatures like crawdads, the reservoir holds several fish species, including walleye, yellow perch, black crappie, northern pike, lake whitefish and others, such as the rainbow trout that the website says have been occasionally stocked, including in October 2020.

The management plan also has to address the needs, concerns and input of all the stakeholder groups, Dalby said.

Further complicating any future fisheries plans for Fresno, Dalby added, is the fact that the reservoir exists nearly 100 percent for irrigation purposes, with a relatively small amount of municipal usage such as for Havre, Chinook and Harlem. Additional benefit comes from providing flood control for the Milk River Valley.

"Milk River water is 100 percent congressionally authorized for irrigation with a little bit for municipal needs," he said. "... So the water in Fresno, although it has tremendous ancillary benefits for fish and wildlife, the water is there to provide for irrigation."

That made 2020 an especially contentious year for recreational and agricultural users of Fresno waters after the failure in May of a portion of the diversion system that uses a series of canals to feed water from the St. Mary River along the Rocky Mountain Front into the Milk River.

The canals are linked through a series of drops, ramp-like sections that allow for steeper elevation changes, and while Drop 2 was scheduled for replacement after the first seasonal draw down of water for irrigation, Drop 5 unexpectedly failed and without the boost from St. Mary, the water level in Fresno dropped excessively low. Emergency federal funding had to be secured to repair this drop, as well, while surviving fish had to crowd into increasingly shallow waters.

Chris Gomer, facility operations and maintenance division manager for the Montana area office of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, said the two diversion drops were completed and able to hold water by early October, and when water started running through St. Mary Diversion Oct. 8 the water level in Fresno was down to about 30 percent of average.

  BOR moved 15,000 acre feet of water down the diversion last fall, bumping the reservoir's water storage up to the 60-70 percent range before shutting down for winter, he added.

Startup this spring on St. Mary is going well, up to maximum canal capacity of 600 cubic feet per second of water pushing water into Fresno for the past several weeks for irrigation purposes. he said.

While this is good news for now, drought in the area is forecast to start affecting water levels again.

"The state as a whole is transitioning into drought, as it looks. Granted there is a fair amount of rain forecast for later this week so hopefully that helps. But looking forward ... we're probably near our maximum reservoir elevation at Fresno today," Gomer said Wednesday. "It's roughly 2,570, which is roughly 5 feet from full, and we are drafting due to irrigation demands. We'll probably see a little bit of that back off due to the rain. But you know all the outlooks are trending drier across the state."

The storm predicted for this weekend could bring up to an inch of moisture across most of the state, he said, and that will help considerably with water issues, but he added that "we're looking for a pretty hard draft on Fresno as we currently see it today."

Beyond the weather, the maintenance and repair needs of the water system could affect the fisheries committee's future plans as well.

A longstanding need to replace the diversion dam and headworks due to infrastructure aging and Endangered Species Act requirements for the canal will disrupt water flow in the near future, Gomer said. The estimated cost of the project is $60 million, though, and since the irrigation users are accountable for 73.96 percent of maintenance on the system, alternate sources of funding will have to be found to complete this phase, he said.

"It's always been an issue in getting funding in place that is affordable and doable by the irrigators to pay for it," he said.

But Reclamation got sued over the threatened species bull trout going through the diversion and their extension on meeting that obligation only lasts to 2025, so there are several irons in the fire to get funding, he added. While some initial push was made after the Drop 5 failure to change the St. Mary Diversion agreement to shift the 73.96 percent of financial responsibility from the irrigators to the federal government, that effort seems to have died down, Gomer said.

The current effort is for stakeholders to find alternate funding, possibly even ARPA dollars, to lessen the impact to irrigators and make it affordable to move forward, he added.

Funding has been secured for current, ongoing dam safety modification efforts at Fresno. While the dam is not in danger of failure, Gomer said, decades of foundation settling at the dam have caused it to reach Reclamation's public protection guidelines for taking action.

The project is in the design phase, which should be finished late this year, he said, then the contract will be awarded early 2023 and construction started not long after that with a 2026 completion date.

As the plan sits now, during the year the left spillway is repaired, there will be only one draw-down for irrigators at the beginning of the season, and fall water level is projected to be 2,555, which is within normal draw down for work, he said. The rest of the work on the dam does not require a reservoir draw down, Gomer said.

"That's kind of why this design was chosen," he added.

But the disruptions to the reservoir level, whether man-made or caused by nature, all affect the fisheries at Fresno and pose a challenge on a management level. The hope is that following a set plan will help provide stability for Fresno fisheries, Dalby said.

"It's a highly uncertain environment to work in," he said about trying to maintain healthy fisheries, "and so what you have to do is set your course and recognized that within that time period, 5 to 10 years, there will be ups and downs in terms of water level management and you hope the system is resilient enough to bounce back from those impacts."

The committee is working at a strong pace to get a plan in place to help the fisheries prosper, no matter was issues arise.

"The community of Havre and all these members have been awesome in terms of providing input, giving guidance on what their stakeholder groups want to see on this fishery," Dalby said, "and I think they've been very clear and so that's helped us develop a draft plan. So kudos to this group."