Capital Press: Budget cut crimps monitoring of Klamath water releases

Budget cut crimps monitoring of Klamath water releases

Tam Moore
Oregon Staff Writer

Capital Press - October 28, 2005

KLAMATH FALLS, Ore. – It’s a new federal fiscal year, with budgets yet to be adopted by Congress, but what stakeholders in the Klamath Basin are hearing isn’t good. Tight times could mean a reduction in fisheries data critical to how water is managed for farmers.

Mike Orcutt, fisheries manager for the Hoopa Valley Tribal Council, last week told the Klamath Fisheries Management Council that juggling of U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Funds on the Trinity River – the largest tributary of the Klamath – is a recipe for data shortage.

The government is working with a tentative $11.2 million allocation on the Trinity for this fiscal year. That’s down about $700,000 from the year ended Sept. 30. Most of the Trinity money goes for construction in a series of river restoration projects that got their first live test during a planned May water release. The Trinity Adaptive Management Group, which advises BuRec on the experiment, meets Nov. 4 in Weaverville to work on 2006 plans.

“A lot of the monitoring that this council depends on is under-funded,” Orcutt told the Klamath Council. The council is are charged with setting quotas and recommending fishing seasons for offshore, sport and tribal fisheries in the Klamath and Trinity system.

Data errors or gaps, council members said in a lengthy discussion, can lead to wrong calls on fish quotas with far-reaching economic impact.

Other issues tied to budgets include the status of California Department of Fish and Game’s program to identify at least a portion of hatchery salmon released into the Klamath from Iron Gate Hatchery. The council wants an increase in the number of coded wire tags to increase statistical records of how hatchery and wild fish interact. In past years it has shifted federal funds to keep work going when state funds are tight.

The upstream Klamath Reclamation Project’s operations are dictated in part by protection of coho salmon, listed as threatened with extinction under the Endangered Species Act. A court-ordered revision to that coho plan is in progress, and as a result of a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision last week, the timetable for assuring water for salmon is expected to be pushed up a couple of years.

The Trinity’s headwaters are stored by BuRec and piped to the Sacramento River, where they become a significant part of the irrigation allocation for the sprawling Westlands Irrigation District, west of Fresno in the Central Valley. Experimental “restoration” releases downstream on the Trinity make use of water that, in years past, had been available to Central Valley Project farms.

While the Klamath Council waits for finalization of the federal budgets, it faces another look at viability of both California coastal Chinook salmon populations and the Southern Oregon and Northern California runs of coho salmon. Eric Chavez of NOAA Fisheries’ Long Beach office said those reviews come after courts ordered consideration of all salmon, both wild and hatchery.

“The wild fish rule is unlikely” to change status of either fish population, he said.

Tam Moore is based in Medford, Ore. His e-mail address is tmoore@capitalpress.com.