Public Law 85–112

That, except as provided in section 2 of this Act, the excess land provisions of the Federal reclamation laws shall not apply to lands in the Beaverhead Valley, Montana, lying below the proposed Clark Canyon Dam of the East Bench unit of the Missouri River Basin project, authorized in section 9 (a) of Public Law 534, Seventy-eighth Congress, approved December 22, 1944 (58 Stat. 887), that are irrigated under existing Stat. water rights, whether the waters used for their irrigation are passed through, regulated by, or stored in the Clark Canyon Reservoir by the United States.

Sec. 2.

Any lands of the East Bench unit which are held in private ownership by a person whose holdings of bench lands alone or of bench and valley lands combined exceed the equivalent of one hundred and thirty acres of class 1 lands shall, to the extent they exceed that acreage, be deemed excess lands. No water shall be furnished to such excess lands from, through, or by means of East Bench unit works unless (1) the owner’s total holdings do not exceed one hundred and sixty irrigable acres or (2) said owner shall have executed a valid recordable contract with respect to the excess in like manner as provided in the third sentence of section 46 of the Act of May 25, 1926 (44 Stat. 636, 649, 43 U. S. C., sec. 423e). In computing “the equivalent of one hundred and thirty acres of class 1 land” under the first sentence of this section, each acre of class 2 land shall lie counted as thirteen-fourteenths of an acre if in the valley and as thirteen-sixteenth of an acre if on the bench, each acre of class 3 land shall be counted as thirteen-seventeenths of an acre if in the valley and as thirteen-twenty-seconds of an acre if on the bench, and each acre of class 4-P land shall be counted as thirteen-forty-fourths of an acre.