Transcript

John Keys: We can craft how we move water

I have never seen the relationship between the federal government and the state government as one that is not working together. In other words, to us, we have to have state water rights for our projects and we have to operate within them. That has been a benefit to us over the years that reclamation has been around, and certainly it is a way to protect the users and their ability to have the water under the contracts and the ability to pay for them. Now, can we come up with some extra water sometimes? Yes we can. To us, the way to do it is re-operations. In other words, when we are moving water from one place to the other, talk to folks about how is the best time. Let me give you an example. In Jackson, Wyoming, every year, we have a thing called the snow survey and other than being a good trip for some folks to go over and visit the cowboy bar in Jackson, they get together every year and have a say in how water is moved from Jackson Lake into Palisades in American Falls because of the water rights there. And those people can sit down and say, the fisherman will say, we want the good flows in this month or that month; the rafters will say that we want the good flows in this month and that other month; and we can actually craft how we move that water. And yes, Jeff's people were always very cooperative in doing that. We can move it in one big slug in June, we can dribble it out over the whole summer, or we can up and down however, but our purpose is to get the water from one place to the other and we can accommodate that. To us, that is how we like to work with the instream flows and we have been very successful at it in some places.

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