WASHINGTON (AP) – The Army Corps of Engineers issued a new Missouri River plan Friday that would allow continued barge traffic between Sioux City, Iowa, and St. Louis, perpetuating a 15-year battle between environmentalists and businesses.

Corps officials said the new plan anticipates steady levels for barge shipping, enough water for power generation and considerably more water in big reservoirs in Montana and the Dakotas.

Conservationists have long argued that the Missouri should be returned to its natural state, before it was dammed and channeled beginning in the 1940s, with a spring rise and shallow summer flow to aid endangered species.

“They’re proposing just to make it an industrial ditch, and to hell with everything else,” said Chad Smith, spokesman for American Rivers, a conservation group that is suing the corps.

Sen. Max Baucus, a Democrat from upriver Montana, said the agency “draped a fancy new plan around the status quo” and threw “a watered-down bone to upstream states while giving continued preference to the barge industry.”

On the other side, Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., an advocate for downriver farmers and shippers, complained the decision “fails to protect the priorities of Missouri and other downstream states.”

The corps is trying to update river operations that have gone virtually unchanged for more than four decades. They were put in place long before the pallid sturgeon and two shorebirds – the interior least tern and the piping plover – were listed as endangered and threatened.

A federal judge has set a March 19 deadline for putting the agency’s plan in place.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ordered the corps more than three years ago to boost spring flows and reduce summer water levels to save the fish and birds.

Under the Bush administration, however, service biologists backed off, saying in December that summer water levels can be kept high enough for barge shipping if the corps will build new habitat for the sturgeon. The service also said the birds can survive without the changes and that only the pallid sturgeon is at issue.

The corps said it intends to create 1,200 acres of new shallow-water habitat for the sturgeon by July 1. Eventually, it plans to build 20,000 acres of new habitat.

Brig. Gen. William T. Grisoli, the corps’ division commander for the Missouri River region, could not pinpoint where 1,200 acres of new wetlands would be, but he said the focus is on about 200 miles between Sioux City and the Osage River in mid-Missouri. In all, the river flows 2,341 miles from Montana to St. Louis.

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On the Net:

Army Corps of Engineers: http://www.usace.army.mil/

Fish and Wildlife Service: http://www.fws.gov

American Rivers: http://www.americanrivers.org

AP-ES-02-27-04 1646EST