The decision of a state administrative agency recently went a long way toward mitigating the worst of the environmental impacts associated with the New Melones Dam on the Stanislaus River in California. The decision by the California Water Resources Control Board gives a much-needed shot in the arm to litigation on the project in federal district court. The controversy illustrates how environmental protection efforts, even for a large federal project, may often proceed as energetically and forcefully on the state level as on the federal. The result here must be contrasted to the less successful efforts of parties in the long-lived Storm King litigation to achieve a more searching state review of the merits of the pumped storage project at issue in that case, via the state certification of water quality required by §21(b) of the Water Quality Improvement Act of 1970.¹

On April 4, 1973, the California Water Resources Control Board issued Decision 1422, which adjudicated the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation's applications for water rights permits to the Stanislaus River. Its order contains 25 conditions, the net effect of which is to allow New Melones Reservoir to be filled less than halfway (1.1 million of 2.4 million acre-feet storage) and to protect almost all of the whitewater reach of the Stanislaus, which the Board found to be a "unique asset to the state and the nation."