Firing of river experts will be investigated: Baucus among 6 Demo lawmakers who requested probe

Associated Press
Billings Gazette

11/21/03

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. - An investigation will examine a decision by the Bush administration to replace the biologists charged with evaluating Missouri River management, an official said Wednesday.

The inspector general of the U.S. Department of Interior was responding to a request from six upper-basin Democratic lawmakers, including Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., to find out whether politics played a role in that decision.

A new team of scientists already is evaluating a proposal from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that could shape river management for decades.

The old team wrote a biological opinion in 2000 favoring more natural river flows, an opinion Bush and downstream legislators condemned at the time. When the administration replaced the team Nov. 5, it provoked cries that it was putting politics ahead of science.

Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota applauded the investigation and called the decision to replace the old team "wholly without merit."

But the two scientists leading the team insisted Wednesday that their work will be unbiased.

"Everyone on this team has built a reputation of integrity and scientific ethics, so first and foremost we will maintain that," said Dale Hall, a team leader and head of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Southwest region.

He said the team has plenty of experience with other rivers.

"Rivers function very similarly, and so it's not as if experience on the Mississippi or the Columbia or the Rio Grande doesn't qualify for experience on the Missouri," he said.

More important, he said, he and his fellow leader, Robyn Thorson, selected the team of 17 scientists for its experience with other controversial endangered-species cases. At least two were on the old team, and five others now work on the Missouri.

It was unclear whether the investigation would be done by the team's mid-December deadline for writing a new biological opinion.

The biological opinion would dramatically influence the corps' master manual, which guides river management and has remained unchanged since 1979.

Critics charge that the manual is biased toward downstream interests and that its artificial flows hurt endangered species. The corps says the manual balances multiple river uses.

On Monday, the corps released a biological assessment that it says proves the flow changes proposed in 2000 would not help endangered species. It instead proposed building new habitat for the endangered least tern and pallid sturgeon, and the threatened piping plover.