The House tomorrow is scheduled to vote on bills to allocate more water to an Oregon town aiming to draw technology companies, protect a salmon-rich Washington creek and clean up a Nevada mine, among other measures.

All nine of the bills will receive votes under suspension of the rules, meaning they cannot be amended and must garner a two-thirds majority to pass.

Among the measures is H.R. 2060 by Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.), which would allow the release of an additional 5,100 acre-feet of water from the Prineville Reservoir on the nearby Crooked River in central Oregon.

Officials from Prineville, a rural, recession-racked town, said additional water would help attract technology companies interested in building water-hungry data centers (E&E Daily, June 24, 2011).

Facebook Inc. recently opened a $188 million data center in Prineville that helped drive unemployment down from a recent high of 20 percent.

"For Prineville and the surrounding areas, these types of projects are good news because it means jobs. Good, family wage jobs," Dan Gardner, a representative of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, whose Local 280 union covers workers in Prineville, said last summer.

Critics of the bill, including the conservation group Trout Unlimited and the Bureau of Reclamation, say that trouble could arise in times of drought, leading to conflicts between users and harm to fish and wildlife if the town continued to draw its enlarged share of water without restriction. Both Reclamation and Trout Unlimited stopped short of opposing the bill outright.

The bill passed the Natural Resources Committee last October on a voice vote.

The chamber will also vote on a bill by Rep. Rick Larsen (D-Wash.) to designate more than a dozen miles of Illabot Creek as a wild and scenic river. The measure would protect the high-elevation creek from dams or other disturbances, safeguarding habitat for threatened chinook salmon, steelhead, bull trout and other wildlife, Larsen said.

The bill (H.R. 1740) was amended by Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah) at a markup last October to exclude private lands and prohibit land acquisitions by condemnation. The bill passed on a voice vote.

Other bills up for a vote include S. 292, by Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), which would resolve the claims of the Bering Straits Native Corp. and the state of Alaska to land adjacent to Salmon Lake in Alaska, among other measures.

Another measure on the agenda, H.R. 2512, enjoys strong bipartisan support, particularly from the Nevada delegation.

Cleaning up the abandoned Three Kids manganese mine in Henderson has long been a priority for the state's lawmakers in Washington, D.C. The bill would allow the federal government to sell its plots on the site to a local redevelopment agency.

The Obama administration and some Democrats have expressed concerns about long-term liability issues if the cleanup project were to fail (E&E Daily, Dec. 14, 2011). But backers, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), call the language a good compromise to a pressing issue.

"The site today contains unstable open pits as deep as 400 feet, large volumes of mine overburden and tailings, and mill facility foundations," Henderson Mayor Andy Hafen said during a hearing in December. "Contaminants of concern include arsenic, lead and petroleum compounds."

Other bills on the agenda:

• H.R. 2336, by Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine), to amend the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act to designate segments of the York River and associated tributaries for study for potential inclusion in the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System.

• H.R. 3263, by Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), to authorize the Interior secretary to allow the storage and conveyance of non-project water at the Norman project in Oklahoma.

• H.R. 241, by Rep. Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Calif.), to authorize the conveyance of certain national forest lands in the Los Padres National Forest in California.

• H.R. 4222, by Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.), to provide for the conveyance of certain land inholdings owned by the United States to the Tucson Unified School District and to the Pascua Yaqui Tribe of Arizona.

• S. 363, by Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), to authorize the Commerce secretary to convey property of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to the city of Pascagoula, Miss.