From The Pueblo Chieftain (Chris Woodka):
[Tom Gallagher] is charging that there was a conflict of interest in developing the environmental impact statement, that concerns brought up in the EIS process were ignored and that Reclamation would ignore its own policies if it allows SDS storage in Lake Pueblo…
“I ask you on behalf of myself and my constituents to suspend the current SDS contract negotiations and reopen the SDS National Environmental Policy Act process so that these and other questions can be asked and directly answered,” Gallagher concludes at the end of a 27-page letter he wrote last month to Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar. “If the NEPA process for the SDS proposal has been conducted objectively (rather than as an exercise in engineered outcome), it should be able to withstand the added scrutiny.”[…]
Reclamation Commissioner Michael Connor answered the letter this week by defending the EIS and declining to reopen the NEPA process. “Reclamation believes the NEPA process used during preparation of the SDS Project (final) EIS was analytically and procedurally complete,” Connor wrote. “Your letter states numerous conditions which you believe trigger a need to revise or supplement the FEIS. The issues you raise have been previously considered and responded to by Reclamation.”
Gallagher disagrees, saying concerns he presented at public meetings on the EIS were never answered. In his letter, he adds new issues that have arisen in the last year. Chief among those is the dissolution of the stormwater enterprise by Colorado Springs voters in 2009, which was also brought up by state Rep. Sal Pace, D-Pueblo, in a letter to Reclamation, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers earlier this year. It was assumed in the EIS that the stormwater enterprise would be in place to help address negative impacts from the EIS, Gallagher said.
The EIS also ignored the Arkansas Valley Conduit as a reasonably foreseeable project, even though it is part of the Fryingpan-Arkansas Project, Gallagher said. The conduit this year received funding for the first time, and its storage space in Lake Pueblo, guaranteed under operating principles of the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District, could affect the availability of future storage for SDS, Gallagher said.
Gallagher asserts that the use of MWH, and principal partner Bill Van Derveer, as primary contractor for the EIS was a conflict of interest because the engineering firm at the same time received $5 million in payments for design work related to the Lower Fountain Valley Wastewater Treatment Facility, which has been shelved for now but which was at the time a component of the SDS preferred action. MWH also was hired this year by Colorado Springs to manage construction of the SDS project.
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