The current drought plan is backwards from the way the real world operates. The Corps is worrying about and specifying how much water needs to be released downstream with out looking at how much water is available. This is like managing your finances from the stand point of what you want rather than what you can afford. Eventually you will bankrupt your finances or in the case of a lake deplete all the useable water out of the lake.
The difference in what we are recommending is to look at the amount of water available and specify release rates that won't deplete the lakes of useable water. Our recommendation comes from two observations:
1) the amount of water entering the lakes from rain during the worst droughts on record is the same as the amount the Corps has been releasing for the past 18 or so months (3600cfs).
2) the release rate the Corps has been using for the past 18 or so months has not caused any problems downstream
The benefits of following our recommendation would be to avoid the destruction experienced in past droughts to upstream economies and recreation and to guard against reaching the bottom of the conservation pool for the lakes where predictable release rates could no longer be maintained downstream.
It should be obvious to anyone looking at the lakes that there are two concerns that should govern release rates. One is the effect on downstream stakeholders and the second is the effect on upstream stakeholders. The Corps does lip service to protecting upstream interests but in reality only accepts responsibility for downstream effects. So far as instructions to the corps by congress they were formally instructed to protect upstream recreational interests but upstream economies were not mentioned. Our recommendations take care of all downstream concerns and all upstream concerns including upstream economics. As a result our drought control plan is superior to the current corps drought plan.
Based on a review of all comments to the Corps about their drought control plan upstream stakeholders are very disatisfied with the way the Corps is managing the lakes while the only downstream group unhappy is Fish and Wildlife. They expressed all kinds of possible problems while not mentioning any real problem. We wonder why then the Corps is scrambling to increase release rates rather than sticking with a much better plan that is working? Could it be they fear the Fish and Wildlife commission?
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