at that time and this was not true. The moratorium was a moratorium on 

 any application over 20 cubic feet per second or 20,000 acre feet storage 

 per year. There are not too many agricultural applications that are close 

 to th^large unless they are developing an irrigation project. 



Mr. Josephy this morning mentioned the fact of protecting Montana 

 agriculture rights or protecting Montana water rights and i guess if the 

 moderator will allow me I would like to go down the line and mention to 

 you some of the bills and some of the amendments to the 1973 Water Use 

 Act that I have sponsored since I have been in the legislature that I feel 

 did help protect the water rights. 



The first bill that I introduced was to not allow the transfer of an 

 agricultural right to an industrial use and that's in the statutes today. 

 Now it was mentioned by Mr. Baughman that something to that effect can 

 occur in Wyoming, and unless they change the statute in Montana, you 

 can't do that. 



One other bill that I thought would help the development--and I think 

 this more or less forces some type of steward for targe uses of watei — is 

 that an applicant for a water use permit with over 15 cubic feet per 

 second diversion or 15,000 acre feet per year storage, must prove clear 

 and convincingly that they will not effect the prior user's right. And 

 that's in the water law today, it's part of the statutes. 



I also introduced a bill that called for a comprehensive ground water 

 study in the Fort Union coal-bearing formation, to make a determination of 

 the effects of strip mining on acquifers. We had an amendment that was 

 put on that bill that also included the Fox Hills Acquifer in eastern 

 Montana that is being used at this time by Shell Oil Company for water 

 flooding and this study should be pretty near complete. It's being done 

 by the School of Mines here in Butte and we did have additional money 

 appropriated to that this session of the legislature to finish the study. 

 The so-called Yellowstone River Moratorium that Governor Judge asked for 

 ran for three years. It took the Department of Natural Resources 

 considerable time to adopt administrative rules on what would have to be 

 complied with to file for a reservation of water that was allowed under the 

 '73 Water Use Act. The applications were all filed and there was court 

 action implemented against this and the moratorium would have expired in 

 March of 1977 while the legislature was in session. I carried a bill to 

 extend that and that was one of the harder battles that I fought in the 

 legislature. If you are not too familiar with the political process, it's too 

 bad you weren't there to observe the way the Senate played politics with 

 that bill. And there could have been a little politics played in the House 

 with it too, but it mostly was in the Senate. We were finally successful in 

 getting that extended. The reservations for the instream flow, the 

 reservations for the conservation districts and the municipalities and 

 irrigation districts were finally acted upon by the Board of Natural 

 Resources. I even carried a bill the last session for Tenneco. Now some 

 people brand me as being anti-industry and I don't see how they could do 

 that because I carried a bill for Gulf, the seventh largest conglomerate in 

 the world. It was a good bill. And the bill did just exactly what I told 

 them it would do before I agreed to introduce it. But because I wouldn't 



