The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will hold a second Bismarck meeting on its plan for creating more Missouri River sandbars to foster the recovery of two bird species.

The meeting will be at 6:30 p.m. Jan. 20 at the Bismarck Civic Center Exhibit Hall, Room 105, the corps said Tuesday. Corps officials will make a presentation, and a comment and question period will follow. Its aim is to collect more public comment on a project that has spurred criticism by various groups and agencies.

"I welcome the meeting," said Andy Mork, chairman of the BOMMM Joint Water Resource Board, one of the groups concerned by the project.

Mork is among many people who want details on the corps' plan.

"We need to know what they are doing and the cost," he said.

The BOMMM Board, which includes Burleigh, Oliver, Morton, Mercer and McLean counties, points to the corps' intention to increase sandbar acreage from 121/2 acres per mile to 50 acres per mile.

The increase would produce a number of negatives for area residents, including limiting sandbar access, creating hazardous boating conditions, causing bank erosion and potential delta flooding and jeopardizing municipal water supply intakes, BOMMM said.

Other worries include potential impacts to a variety of other species that also are part of the river. Another potential pitfall is that the state of North Dakota claims sovereignty over the river's sandbars.

The corps says all concerns are premature. Its immediate goal is to apply herbicides to vegetation on existing sandbars, said Kelly Crane, the corps' emergent sandbar program manager. Barren sandbars are preferred nesting sites for the endangered interior least terns and threatened piping plovers.

The sandbar work is needed, the corps said, because the ongoing drought has dropped water levels in the Missouri River system and opened up more sandbars, which plovers are taking advantage of. When the Missouri's water levels return to normal, that habitat will be lost, the corps said.

The project, which stretches from Fort Peck, Mont., to Ponca, Neb., is intended to comply with one alternative in the 2003 amended biological opinion issued by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which oversees species protected under the Endangered Species Act, including the sandbar-dwelling terns, plovers and the river-dwelling and endangered pallid sturgeon.

The corps' timetable for creating 50 acres of sandbar per mile is 2015, Crane said, and the corps' goal is to take the least intrusive approach.

That would be applying herbicide, which is on a fast track for a possible start this spring or summer.

Other options, which would be covered by a slower tracked biological assessment, include reshaping sandbars by dredging or backhoeing.

The corps held a Bismarck meeting on sandbar development Oct. 19, but few people knew about the meeting and attendance was sparse. The corps was criticized for failing to properly announce that meeting.

Mork hopes this meeting draws better. "I hope it's well publicized so people who might be interested in sandbars will know about it."

(Reach reporter Richard Hinton at 250-8256 or outdoors@bismarcktribune.net.)