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No. 1 objective," Blunt said Tuesday while he and Hoeven toured the Garrison Dam in North Dakota, where about $52 million in repairs are scheduled to be done by the end of the year. "This funding is to be ready for the next flood.
• "We appear to be fortunate this year that we're not having to deal with water that was well outside the norm last year," he said. "That year's coming again. We just don't know when."
• The 2,341-mile Missouri River flows from Montana through the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa and Missouri. It is managed by the corps, which estimates that flooding last year due to excessive spring snowmelt and rain caused $630 million in damage to levees, dams and channels built to control the river.
• Hoeven and Blunt said a better understanding by Congress and the corps of how the river system's components work together can help river managers meet the challenges of flooding and the needs of residents both upstream and downstream. Besides recreation and barge navigation, river uses include everything from irrigation to hydroelectric power generation.
• "What Sen. Blunt and I are trying to do is create better coordination and a better relationship between the upstream and downstream states," Hoeven said.
• Top corps officials accompanied the senators on the tour, which took officials to Montana later Tuesday and to sites in the lower basin on Wednesday.
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• ABERDEEN, S.D. (AP) -- A man accused of driving from Ellsworth Air Force Base near Rapid City to Aberdeen to have sex with a 13-year-old girl has been sentenced to a few months in prison and 10 years of probation.
• Twenty-one-year-old Samuel Seeley pleaded guilty to sexually soliciting and exploiting a minor, and prosecutors dropped other charges. The former airman was sentenced to serve about six months in jail and given credit for three months already served.
• Authorities say Seeley admitted exposing himself to the girl online and later booking a motel room in Aberdeen before driving to the city. He was arrested Jan. 12 at the girl's home.
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• SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) -- South Dakota farmers are wrapping up their spring planting, and ranchers in the state are almost done moving cattle to pasture.
• The Agriculture Department says in its weekly crop and weather report that the

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