Tellico Triumph

Defeat for the snail darter

It was the 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, the Endangered Species Act was due for congressional review, and a Tellico veto might leave it endangered. Carter also felt a need to build good will for upcoming legislative battles. So he signed the bill, saying: "I accept, with regret, this action as expressing the will of the Congress."

Ironically, the snail darter may not be doomed after all. The U.S. 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.

The study also finds that the dam's projected output of 23 megawatts of electricity will be offset by operational costs and rack up an annual $750,000 deficit. And the TVA, which lobbied vehemently for the dam throughout the 1960s and '70s, now admits that the project will not even provide the power for which it was built. But as bulldozers returned to the dam site for a last month of construction before the reservoir is filled, practicality seemed to have lost a last round to politics.

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