First, we welcome some new members. We now have members in North Dakota and South Dakota, with more meetings planned with various cities, tribes and government agencies. Interest in and support for our efforts is growing.

We have had meetings with Col. Jeffrey Bedey, District Engineer for the Corps of Engineers in Omaha, and his boss, Col. Greg Martin, Regional Engineer out of Portland, both of whom expressed strong support for our efforts. We have received strong messages of support from congressional office aides from Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska and Minnesota during meetings with them, and they have stated their concerns, and their employers’ concerns, about the sediment problems. We will maintain those contacts, and push hard for federal action through those congressional offices.

Our effort to get an appropriation of $800,000 in the Dept. of Agriculture’s budget for a study by NRCS of the location of origination of sediment in all tributaries of the Missouri River above Gavins Point Dam in the four states of Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota and Montana failed in the House and Senate Agriculture Appropriation Subcommittees, due to the tight federal budget. We will attempt to get this accomplished in Conference Committee action. This effort is important, as land and watershed management can reduce the amount of sediment getting into the reservoirs. Finally, you may have read about the efforts by the Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to work with a group of very diverse interests to reach a consensus on how to conduct a spring rise to restore the pallid sturgeon spawning areas in the Missouri River below Gavins Point Dam. The courts have stated that there will be a spring rise below the dam in accordance with the Biological Opinion issued in 2003. I was a member of the Plenary Group, which used information developed by technical working groups, to try to arrive at some consensus recommendations to the Corps and USFWS on how to conduct a spring rise in the river with a minimum of disruption and damage to down stream interests. A lot of very hard work by many people went into this effort, and they are to be congratulated for those efforts. While the results were not as good as we had hoped, Col. Bedey stated that the Corps will make a lot of use out of the information developed and the recommendations made. Our congratulations to all of the participants in this very difficult work.

Again, on behalf of the Board of Directors, our thanks for your continued support. While progress is sometimes hard to measure, we are making progress. Not as fast as we would like, and sometimes the frustrations are huge, but we are making the problems known, and we are seeing an increased awareness and concern about those problems. We will ultimately prevail, but it will take time. The results will be worth the effort.