WILLIE DAY : How many of you people have been in eastern Montana 

 recently? You know when I came in here yesterday I landed in more rain 

 here at the airport than I'd seen all spring. One of the people here was 

 telling me that somebody down there told them the other day that he got 

 up in the morning and the bushes were chasing his dog. And I can really 

 believe that. I guess I earned the reputation of water nut in 1975 in my 

 freshman leglislative year when I had the pleasure of serving with 

 Representative Bradley. I enjoyed her speech this morning. 



I guess maybe I'll start out on why I feel instream flow is a benefit 

 to agriculture. I should give you a little background on some Montana 

 water law. Montana has been probably the most backward western state in 

 confirming their water rights up until the 70's. But in 1973 they finally 

 passed a good piece of water legislation, the 1973 Water Use Act. Before 

 that there was an attempt to quantify one of the streams in eastern 

 Montana which for as far as water is concerned, is the one that I got most 

 of my information from, and that's the Yellowstone River. The state of 

 North Dakota, Wyoming and Montana did form a compact and Wyoming and 

 Montana quantified certain streams running out of Wyoming into Montana, 

 which showed a lot of foresight I think. I'm sure today you wouldn't 

 stand a prayer of getting that compact approved. It was approved by the 

 three states' legislatures and also ratified by Congress. It's a pretty 

 binding document I think, even though some of the "good old boys" from 

 Texas that come up here are proposing to challenge some sections of it in 

 federal court. But I don't think they think they can win because they 

 have not pursued that. 



In the 1974 session of the legislature there was a tremendous amount 

 of filings after the '73 Water Use Act for water use permits in eastern 

 Montana for industrial use. And I was quite interested in the proposals 

 some of the companies were making for using Yellowstone River water. I 

 was serving on the on the Buffalo Rapid Irrigation Board. There's an 

 irrigation district there that has 25,000 acres with four river pumping 

 plants and I'll get into that a little later on. But I had heard some 

 speeches by various people of the Northcentral Power Study about the 

 Montana-Wyoming aqueduct, the uses of water out of the Yellowstone and 

 the draw-down on the stream. Being an irrigator and serving on the 

 irrigation board involved in delivering water to water users, I knew from 

 experience that this was totally unrealistic. No way that the irrigation 

 districts could work if this was allowed to happen. I'd mentioned that 

 year that we needed something to allow portions of the '73 Water Use Act 

 to be put into effect before these people were allowed to acquire all of the 

 water from permitting. Three different bills were introduced that dealt 

 with various aspects of changes that we supported. They met with a lot 

 of opposition and they were put on the subcommittee and along about this 

 time Getty Oil Company filed for 80, 000... I think it was 80,000 or 

 82,000. . .acre feet of water from the Yellowstone River at Intake. Tenneco 

 or Intake Water Company, a wholly-owned subsidary, had filed for just a 

 little more water than that just across the river, up above the Intake 

 diversion dam. So Governor Judge asked the Senate to suspend the rules 

 (the deadline had passed on introduction of bills) and they introduced the 

 so-called Yellowstone River Moratorium. The opposition to the moratorium 

 tried to lead the people to believe that nobody could file for water rights 



