OPA

A contract to supply 10,000 feet of corrugated metal culver pipe for use in water spreading and drought alleviation work on the Papago Indian Reservation of southern Arizona has been awarded to the

Consolidated Western Steel Division of the United States Steel Corporation in Phoenix, the Department of the Interior announced today. Consolidated Western Steel's bid of $28,485.60 for supplying the 18- and 24- inch pipe was the lowest of four received by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The others ranged from $30,781.80 to $34,917.60.

The pipe will be used in the construction of charcos (deep pit structures with a minimum of exposed surface), flood control detention reservoirs, and water spreading structures as part of the broad reservation development program initiated in 1949.

The range water development phase of this program, scheduled for completion in 1959, has rehabilitated all existing range wells on the reservation and provided an additional 15 deep wells in selected localities.

The water spreading phase, which involves the collection of water in arroyos and its diversion over adjacent flat areas, has already proved its usefulness during drought periods. In many cases the areas so treated have been the only places over broad stretches of the reservation where any green vegetation could be found.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs' advisory committee for exceptional children will meet October 26-27 in Phoenix, Arizona, to examine and discuss unmet needs of exceptional Indian children, the Director of Indian Education Programs, Earl Barlow said today.

The Committee operates in accordance with the requirements of the amended Education of the Handicapped Act.

The meeting, which will be at the Los Olivos Hotel from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., is open to the public.

Notice of the meeting is being published in the Federal Register.

For additional information contact Goodwin Cobb, Bureau of Indian Affairs, 19th and E Streets, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20240 (202-343-5519).

Designation of new Indian Bureau superintendents at the Fort Belknap Agency, Harlem, Mont., and the Uintah and Ouray Agency, Fort Duchesne, Utah, was announced today by the Department of the Interior.

Darrell Fleming, who has been superintendent at Fort Belknap for nearly five years, will take over the Utah post April 13 replacing John O. Crow who transferred to the Bureau’s Washington office as a program officer March 24. At Fort Belknap Mr. Fleming will be succeeded April 5, by Howard Dushane who has been program officer in the area office at Portland, Oreg., since 1955.

All three men are of Indian descent and all received part of their education at the Haskell Indian Institute, Lawrence, Kansas.

Mr. Fleming entered the Indian Service in 1933 as a clerical assistant at the Crow Agency in Montana. Over the years since that time he has served in positions of steadily increasing responsibility at Indian agencies in South Dakota, North Dakota, Florida, Minnesota, Arizona, and Washington. Immediately before taking over as Fort Belknap superintendent in 1952, he was for nine months an accountant at the area office in Billings, Mont. He was born at Bernice, Okla., in 1911.

A veteran of 23 years’ service with the Bureau, Mr. Dushane spent the first 16 years of his career on· assignments in Arizona. After entering the service at Valentine, Ariz., in 1934, he remained in this location in positions of increasing responsibility until 1944 when he transferred to the Fort Apache Agency in the same state as personnel clerk. Five years later he was appointed chief clerk at Hopi Agency, Keams Canyon, Ariz. After one year in this spot he transferred to Hoopa, Calif., as district agent and in 1952 was designated as program officer in the area office at Sacramento where he remained until his assignment to Portland in 1955.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs has established a new agency at Siletz, Oregon to serve the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, Acting Deputy Commissioner Sidney Mills announced today.

The federally recognized status of the Siletz Tribes, ended under the Termination Act of 1954, was restored by an Act of November 18, 1977.

The BIA has had a field office at Siletz under the direction of a field representative, Bernard Topash. He will continue as the officer in charge until further notice. Steps are now being taken to fill the position of agency superintendent, Mills said.

Sproul Construction Company, Albuquerque, N. Mex., has been awarded a $780,500 contract for a major expansion and renovation of the Indian Bureau's boarding school plant at Lukachukai, Ariz., on the Navajo Reservation, the Department of the Interior announced today.

Sproul's bid was the lowest of 11 received. The others ranged from $810,188 to $972,000.

The major purpose of the project is to expand the school, which now has about 160 Navajo children enrolled under overcrowded conditions, so that it will adequately accommodate 256 pupils ranging from 6 to 14. This will involve the construction of two dormitories, a four-classroom building, a kitchen and dining hall building, a plant and storage building and necessary staff quarters and utilities improvements.

The new structures will be of semi-fire-resistant masonry block construction and will replace two quonset hut dormitories which will be used for warehousing, the old dining and kitchen building, and temporary trailer quarters now being used by the staff.

The job, which is part of the Indian Bureau's broad program for expanding and improving school facilities to keep pace with the growing school-age Indian population, is expected to take about 15 or 16 months for completion.

Competitive bidding for oil and gas leases on Indian lands in the "four corners" area of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Colorado has resulted in bonuses for the Indian owners totaling over $45,000,000 in the past six months, the Secretary of the Interior Fred A. Seaton announced today.

By comparison, the combined income realized by all Indian tribal groups and individual Indian landowners from bonuses, rents and royalties on oil and gas leases in the l2-month period which ended last June 30 was approximately $41,000,000.

The latest opening of bids on Indian lands in the four corners area, which boosted the six-month total over $45,000,000, was held at Ignacio, Colorado, March 25 and produced total high bonus offerings of $4,358,040 on 45 tracts comprising 56,336 acres. Of this amount, $4,284,269 was bid for tribal and allotted lands on the Ute Mountain Reservation and the balance for lands on the adjoining Southern Ute Reservation.

The highest bid per acre was $262.77 offered by Superior Oil Company for one tract which brought a total bonus offering of $537,890.

A similar sale of oil and gas leases on the Ute lands of Colorado last October brought high bonus bids totaling $7,600,891. In November three bid openings on Navajo Reservation lands in New Mexico and Utah near the "four corners" area produced $33,686,362.

Secretary of the Interior Fred A. Seaton called attention today to the publication of a proposed membership roll of the Wyandotte Indian Tribe of Oklahoma which appeared in the Federal Register of April 6.

The roll was prepared by the tribe under terms of a 1956 congressional law which provides for termination of Federal supervision over the property of the tribe by 1958.

Under the law any person claiming membership in the tribe or an interest in its assets may file with the Secretary an appeal contesting the omission of a name from the roll or the inclusion of one on it. Such appeals must be filed within 60 days after the date of the rolls publication in the Federal Register.

Award of a $64,322.48 contract for construction of 2.508 miles of bituminous paved highway on the Fort Yuma Indian Reservation, Imperial County, California, to Basich Brothers Construction Company and N. L. Basich, South San Gabriel, California, was announced today by the Department of the Interior.

The Basichs were the low bidder. Seven other bids were received, ranging from $78,322.48 to $116,857.20.

The job is being undertaken as part of the Indian Bureau's broad program of bringing reservation roads up to approved standards so that they can be transferred to county highway systems. The new stretch of highway will round out a loop of roads serving the western part of the reservation and, upon completion, will be transferred to the Imperial County system. This will relieve the Bureau of all further road responsibilities on the Fort Yuma Reservation.

The project will involve approximately 31,400 cubic yards of borrow, 63,400 cubic yards of mixed special overhaul, 11,750 tons of crushed gravel base course, 5,200 tons of road mix aggregate, and 250 tons of cut-back asphalt.

Award of a $96,262 contract for remodeling the Bullhead Day School on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation approximately 16 miles west of McLaughlin, South Dakota, to Sogge Construction Company, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, was announced by the Department of the Interior today.

The Sogge bid was the lowest of seven received. Other bids for the work ranged from $99,790 to $129,400.

Primary purpose of the remodeling is to relieve serious overcrowding in the existing two-classroom school which now accommodates an average of 75 students. The contract provides for an additional classroom, a kitchen and dining hall wing, a sanitary sewer system, and a new steam heating system.

Interior Solicitor Leo M. Krulitz said today that any water needed for mineral development on western public lands will have to be acquired by developers through states systems and under applicable state law and not through the assertion by the United States of a federal water right.

Krulitz, speaking to the annual convention of the Wyoming Water Development Association in Casper, said it has been and continues to be the policy of the Carter Administration that the states must be allowed to allocate their water resources in their own way.

"President Carter's statement in Albuquerque earlier this month on state management of water resources left ID room for doubt about how this Administration feels on the question," said Krulitz. "The President pointed out that Western states' systems for allocating and

Managing water resources have evolved over decades, recognizing the high value and relative scarcity of the resource and must be protected."

Krulitz said another example of this administration's support for state water systems is the Interior Department's position on coal slurry pipelines. He said he recently testified before the House Interior Committee on a bill to authorize federal certification of such lines. In that testimony he supported a number of provisions aimed specifically at ensuring state water laws will not be circumvented. In addition, he urged the committee to adopt another provision to further toughen the language.

"The amendment I proposed ti.0uld make the matter absolutely clear," he said. "It would provide that all water rights needed for any coal slurry pipeline proposed under the bill must be acquired pursuant to state law--both procedural and substantive--before the

Secretary of the Interior may grant a certificate to build the line.

The same support for state systems was one of the major guidelines Interior attorneys used when drafting the Solicitor's Opinion on federal reserved and non-reserved water rights, Krulitz said.

"We knew that the states must be at the very center of the process, that the President wanted us to move as quickly as possible to eliminate the uncertainty about how much water the federal government was entitled to and to construe federal water rights in responsible way, rather than to advance highly speculative legal theories, " said the Solicitor. "I believe we achieved that. The conclusions in my opinion are logically consistent and are supported by the holdings of the Supreme Court."

Krulitz said that the Supreme Court's decision in the case of United States v. New Mexico forced federal land management agencies to re-examine federal water rights. Before that decision, federal agencies had assumed they could get 1IDSt of the water they needed to

carry out the mandates of Congress under the reserved rights doctrine. Dating from the landmark 1908 case of Winters v. United States, the doctrine holds that in setting aside federal lands for specific purpose, the Congress also set aside enough water to carry out those purposes. Though the original case involved an Indian reservation, the Supreme Court applied the same principle to all federal reservations in the 1963 case, Arizona v. California.

"With the New Mexico case, we had to decide how we could obtain the water we needed," Krulitz said. "We rejected the creation of new federal reserves and new federal reserved rights. The federal reserved right is loaded with uncertainty. It is open-ended.

"The states have been complaining--justifiably, I think- for years about precisely these characteristics of the federal reserved water right. That's why we rejected this alternative. The one we finally decided to emphasize was the non-reserved right, perfected

under state procedures, for the water we need to carry out congressionally-mandated purposes."

Krulitz said the mu-reserved right fits easily into Western states' appropriative system for acquiring and perfecting water rights. The federal non-reserved right is dependent upon actual use. It is not open-ended and it cannot unexpectedly extinguish state water rights acquired after the federal claim is made. Under non-reserved rights, the federal government stands in line like all other water users and can claim, from unappropriated water only, no more that it needs to manage the public lands as the Congress has directed.