Tester sponsors bill to protect more Montana Rivers under the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act

By TERESA BYRD

Hungry Horse News

Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., announced last week his sponsorship of the Montana Headwaters Legacy Act, a bill to designate certain tributaries within the greater Yellowstone ecosystem and the Smith River watershed as part of the National Wild and Scenic River System.

The Act focuses on 336 miles of water from sections of 17 streams mostly located south of the Three Forks and Bozeman area in the upper Yellowstone watershed and Missouri headwaters region.

It also encompasses two outlying river segments south of Great Falls, including a 24 mile section of the Smith River, from Tenderfoot Creek, itself included in the protection, downstream to Deep Creek.

By designating these new sections as Wild and Scenic, the act would be granting them the highest level of protection a river can receive in the United States, most notably the protection against new dam construction.

Other protections include maintaining, or even enhancing, water quality as well as preserving the scenic, recreational, cultural, and fish and wildlife values of the segment, all of which apply to narrow swaths of land on either side of the river, creating on average a half mile-wide protected river corridor.

The bill was celebrated as a “made-in-Montana” piece of legislation by organizations such as American Rivers and the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, who helped draft the bill using over a decade’s worth of input from people in communities across the state.

The concept of the bill, said Charles Drimal, Water Conservation Coordinator for the Greater Yellowstone Coalition and spokesperson for the bill, had been in the works since around 2010 when an upwelling of organizations, now under the title of Montanans for Healthier Rivers, started partnering to explore ways to elevate river conservation in Montana.

This spurred a decade-long public outreach by the organizations that included close to 400 meetings throughout the state, from business roundtables, to public forums, neighborhood meetings, and meetings with tribal councils.

Within that time over 1000 Montana businesses and 3000 Montanans have joined the Montanans for Healthier Rivers coalition, throwing their support behind the Montana Headwaters Legacy Act.

Since the movement took hold at the turn of the decade, several major pieces of conservation have been passed, including the 2014 North Fork Watershed Protection Act on the Flathead River and most recently the 2018 East Rosebud Creek Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. The latter was passed after a surge of local farmers, ranchers and homeowners near the Red Lodge area opposed a proposed dam on East Rosebud Creek and then worked to protect it in perpetuity through a Wild and Scenic designation.

The 20 mile East Rosebud Creek designation in 2018 was the first time in 42 years that Montana had added to its Wild and Scenic River System. The last time was in 1976 when the state’s inaugural river sections were designated --the three forks of the Flathead River and the Missouri River Breaks-- eight years after the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act was passed in 1968.

The Northern Rockies Director for American Rivers, Scott Bosse, who spoke at last Tuesday’s press event, commented that the new legislation honors the legacy of the 1968 Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, the idea of which he said was born in Montana by the Craighead brothers.

In the 1950s, two prominent wildlife biologists doing research out of the upper middle fork of the Flathead, John and Frank Craighead, aware that nearly all wildlife congregates along river corridors, successfully opposed the proposed Spruce Park Dam which would have flooded the Flathead’s upper middle fork, said Bosse in a recent interview with the Hungry Horse News.

Recognizing that another system, analogous to the Wilderness Act-- which was gaining momentum at the time-- but which targeted rivers and not just high mountain peaks was needed, the brothers developed the idea for the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act.

The Craigheads first mentioned the idea for the bill publicly in a conference at Montana State University in 1957, and for the next decade toured the country garnering public and congressional support until it passed.

Sen. Tester plans on introducing the new bill to the floor of the senate this fall, shortly after the legislative body reconvenes following the elections, according to the Senator’s press secretary, Roy Loewenstein.

Both Bosse and Drimal expressed hopes that the new Act would follow in East Rosebud Creek’s footsteps, which was passed in two and a half legislative sessions with overwhelming public and delegate support.

“I think all of us are setting our sights on getting [the Montana Headwaters Legacy Act] passed in the next congressional session, so within the next two years,” said Bosse. “And hopefully we can build the same kind of bipartisan support we saw with the East Rosebud bill, where all three members of Montana’s congressional delegation supported it.”

A statewide natural resource management survey conducted by the University of Montana earlier this spring illustrated that bipartisan delegate support may be likely given the poll’s results, which showed that nearly 80% of Montanans supported the Act.

“The Montana Headwaters Legacy Act is certainly not across the finish line yet,” said Bosse. “The other day was a big milestone for us and we’re going to help shepard it along the way through congress, but like I said, it’s certainly not done yet. We’ve got some work to do.”

Next on Montanans for Healthy Rivers’ agenda, once the Act gets enough traction, is the Crown of the Continent Proposal which would designate 16 more tributaries throughout the three forks of the Flathead River system, as well as six more in the Clark Fork system.

To learn more about the Montana Headwaters Legacy Act as well as the Crown of the Continent Proposal, visit the Montanans for Healthy Rivers website at https://www.healthyriversmt.org/.