Word: tellico
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...bane of Tennessee politicians and the butt of barroom jokes. For four years the lowly snail darter, a finger-size species of perch, blocked completion of the $116 million Tellico Dam project on the Little Tennessee River. Because the creature was found only in these waters, it was entitled to protection under the 1973 Endangered Species Act. But it also provided legal leverage for environmentalists who saw the dam as a pork barrel that would deluge 16,000 acres of fertile farm land and wipe out Indian historical sites...
Last week the snail darter met defeat. Congress had already voted to allow exceptions to the Endangered Species Act because of "irresolvable conflict," and Republican Howard H. Baker of Tennessee moved to apply this gambit to the snail darter. When that failed, Baker resolutely pushed again, and Tellico was tacked onto a $10.8 billion energy and water appropriations bill. President Carter, on record as opposing the dam, faced a bitter choice. The bill reportedly contained no other pork barrels that he had fought, and it kept alive his Water Resources Council, an independent body that judges future projects. Moreover...
...Fish and Wildlife Service, which helped transplant much of the snail darter population to the nearby Hiwassee River, says that while their future is not yet assured, the fish are doing well so far. But the dam itself may not have a happy ending. Though Mayor Charles Hall of Tellico Plains (pop. 1,000) predicts the project will create 10,000 jobs over the next two decades, a new report by the Tennessee Valley Authority and the U.S. Department of the Interior concludes that the river and the farm land untouched would have brought even more jobs...
...committee was created to balance economic factors against environmental concerns when dams and other projects conflict with the Endangered Species Act, which protects birds, fish and animals that are threatened with extinction. Congress directed the agency to decide within four months whether work can proceed on the $120 million Tellico dam in Tennessee, despite its threat to survival of the three-inch snail darter...
...week failed to renew funding for the act, thus idling the 195 Interior Department bureaucrats and field agents who enforce it and leaving the snail darter, American bald eagle, grizzly bear and 700 other troubled creatures with near toothless federal protection. Some parties to the funding fight cited the Tellico Dam incident as cause. Concluded Keith Schreiner, the Interior Department official in charge of enforcing the act: "Congress is scared. They don't want bureaucrats to have this kind of authority...