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| Alice
Kilham, chairwoman of the Klamath Compact Commission,
warns stakeholders that time is running out to craft a
multi-state grassroots organization. At right is Bill
Brown, a county commissioner from Klamath County,
where water conflicts have centered since 2001. |
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Klamath races clock for water
solution
Tam
Moore
Oregon Staff Writer
Capital Press - November 11, 2005
YREKA, Calif. – Standing in a circle, taking
roles of major players in the Klamath Basin’s ongoing crisis over
allocation of sometimes scarce and polluted water supplies, 32
volunteers last week reached near agreement.
Their challenge, as part of a group of nearly 150 persons meeting over
the past two years, is whether the resulting organizational charts for
a four-layered system can be sold to thousands of people living in the
basin shared by California and Oregon and to bureaucrats at government
agencies not participating in the process.
“I think this group, really, is the only game in town,” said Allen
Foreman, chairman of the tribal council for three American Indian
tribes who call the upper basin their homeland.
On the other side, when facilitator Bob Chadwick, a retired U.S.
Forest Service executive, asked for reasons the ideas wouldn’t fly,
someone on Nov. 1 put it bluntly in a written comment: “99 percent
of the (Klamath Reclamation) Project irrigators haven’t been heard.
Without them this is not viable.”
The Klamath River Compact Commission, created in 1957 by Oregon,
California and federal law, initiated the talks. The U.S. Bureau of
Reclamation started preparation of a basin “conservation
implementation program” in 2003, and later it joined in sponsoring
the stakeholder group.
It’s an effort to bring together communities hurt by the 2001 cutoff
of federal irrigation water to about 1,400 Klamath Project farms and
by massive fish kills of migrating salmon in two out of the past four
years.
Alice Kilham, the compact chairwoman, told stakeholders there’s both
an opportunity and urgency in getting the structure wrapped up.
Pressure is on BuRec to get the CIP, as participants call the
conservation program, in place. The plan’s third draft goes out for
public comment – including thoughts on how it is administered – in
December. Talks between top officials of the two states and U.S.
Department of Interior apparently are awaiting emergence of the CIP
and recommendations from stakeholders.
“We can ask them to advance this to Congress,” said Foreman.
Then he added that the Bush administration has a short time period to
carry out its promises of help, and “a lot of people (in government)
familiar with the basin are moving on to other positions” or leaving
the administration.
Reality, said Phil Detrich, supervisor of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service office that supports Klamath restoration work, is that the $1
million a year appropriated by a 1986 law has been allocated for the
last time. Without a new law “that flow of money is going away.”
“My conclusion is we (stakeholders) are in a tenuous position as far
as the financial resources we have been using to get things done,”
said Detrich.
Tam Moore is based in Medford, Ore. His e-mail address is tmoore@capitalpress.com.
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