Water Resource Development Part 3. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

The Columbia Basin Project was presented to Congress back in 1945 as a way to provide water for irrigation, producing electricity, controlling floods, providing recreation, and regulating streamflow, in addition to water for cities, industries, navigation, and endangered species. Mike Schwisow is a lobbyist for the Columbia Basin Development League which is helping to promote the project.

SCHWISOW: We are still actually within the originally identified development period for the Columbia Basin Project and our effort has been to support the project generally. Then a suite of activities has emerged. The Odessa Sub-Area Special Study which is a project continuation study that was begun in the fall of 2005.

That is a 50/50 match between the State of Washington and the Bureau of Reclamation.

SCHWISOW: The Development League, we’re the ones that go back and lobby for the federal funds to do this. So our role is a private, third party cheerleader that is back soliciting Congress for appropriations to fund the study and we’ve been successful in doing that to date.

He says they are in the home stretch of that phase.

SCHWISOW: The draft environmental impact statement was issued last October 26th, a comment period ran through January 31st of this year. Reclamation and Ecology are in the process of reviewing those comments and anticipate having a final EIS out right at the end of this year or early in 2012.

That’s today’s Fruit Grower Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.