Tam
Moore
Capital Press Staff Writer
 |
| Heading into the irrigation season that begins April 1, Upper Klamath Lake and about every wetland around it is full to the brim. |
The U.S. Bureau of
Reclamation’s Dave Sabo, Klamath area manager since February 2002, is on his
way to Salt Lake City, where he’ll be assistant director of the agency’s
Upper Colorado Region. There’s more available water as Sabo leaves the
Klamath Basin than any of the years he’s been here.
“We’ve stuffed water everywhere,” Sabo said as he settled down to an
interview on his tenure with the Klamath Project. He reports for duty in Salt
Lake City April 5.
The most recent U.S. Natural Resource Conservation Agency figures predict 1
million acre feet of water will flow from the Upper Klamath Basin in the March
through September period. That’s 142 percent of the 30-year average.
In all the time that Sabo’s been here, the February streamflow outlook was
below average. Sabo arrived just after 2001, when the Klamath Project gained
national notoriety.
Seasonal flows in 2001 were 59 percent of average, and Reclamation reneged on
its delivery contracts to 1,100 of the project’s 1,360 farmers. Water stored
in Upper Klamath Lake, the project’s primary reservoir, was reserved as
habitat for three fish under protection of the Endangered Species Act. The
result was a fractured community, economic hardship and distrust of
government.
Just as Sabo took the Klamath job, a National Academy of Science review
committee found no scientific basis for neither the Upper Klamath Lake minimal
elevations in a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biological opinion nor the
minimum discharges a National Marine Fisheries Service opinion set for the
main-stem Klamath.
Reclamation and the two fish agencies – NMFS has since restyled its name as
NOAA Fisheries – were scrambling to write 2002 biological opinions that
reflected concerns of the National Academy science review team.
“So I had to weigh in, not knowing a lot about what … the justifications
were from the crew here, and the administration, and everyone else,” Sabo
said.
He came away from the deal “with heartburn,” feeling that Reclamation had
promised more water than the upper basin can produce in many years.
Ironically, Judge Saundra Brown Armstrong – whose federal court has been
hearing a long-running lawsuit over what’s in the 2002 biological opinions
– on March 27 ordered Reclamation to deliver downstream flow regimes
scheduled for year 2010 and afterward. On top of that, regardless of the
basin’s water production, Armstrong mandated an additional 100,000 acre feet
of “water bank” be set aside annually as a cushion against seasonal
changes in actual water delivery.
“There’s not enough water in the basin to provide the kind of flows that
we obligated to ourselves,” Sabo said before Brown’s injunction was
issued.
That said, for 2006 at least, there’s enough water.
But redoing the biological opinion that just about every stakeholder agrees
needs modification will happen on a different watch. As Sabo leaves, the
government’s thinking was that data from a variety of scientific studies and
hydrological modeling will be in shape to bring reconsultation with USFWS and
NOAA Fisheries in 2008. Armstrong’s court order said to start consultations
– now.
Sabo’s other big project, launching what’s called the Conservation
Implementation Plan, is closer. But it is months away from seeing which
stakeholders decide to join it and which opt out. What has happened during
Sabo’s tenure is that bad feelings brought on by the 2001 water cutoff
mellowed into willingness to listen to other viewpoints.
“Healing,” Sabo said, “is human nature.” Besides that, he said,
there’s the optimism that in the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission
relicensing of PacifiCorp’s Klamath hydroelectric plans “people think they
will get something” out of settlement talks.
He leaves hoping that through the basin-wide conservation implementation
planning process, those same stakeholders will join together in going to
Washington, D.C., lobbying for federal funds to restore what has been a
resource in trouble.
“When you are all together, you are incredibly powerful,” Sabo said.
He takes with him to Salt Lake City three visible reminders of his Klamath
tenure.
One is a table of numbers drawn about this time in 2002 that he thought was
the deal on Klamath River flows that never happened. Another is an anonymous
note from a farmer angry over Reclamation’s policy.
The third is a note from a downriver American Indian tribal elder, written in
July 2002, promising to “deliver the dead fish” that would result from
that year’s operating policy. By late September the dead fish arrived in the
Klamath Falls parking lot that fronts Sabo’s office; they were victims of
the largest fish kill on record in the lower Klamath River.
“I have to look back on this. It keeps me humble,” Sabo said.
Tam Moore is based in Medford, Ore. His e-mail address is tmoore@capitalpress.com.
| Fishermen switch attention to dams |
| This
week, the Pacific Coast Fish Management Council counted down to an April
5 decision that will probably mean further commercial and sport salmon
closures along the 700-mile stretch of coastline that marks migration
patterns of Klamath River chinook and coho salmon. Data from biologists
indicate fewer than the agreed-on minimum of 35,000 adult salmon will
return to the Klamath. That floor is designed to avoid a population
crash among salmon runs that have been in difficulty off and on for the
past three decades. The Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations said it is making common cause with downriver Klamath American Indian tribes to call for removal of hydroelectric dams that have blocked spawning salmon at 175 miles inland from the Pacific Ocean. They planned a dam-busting rally March 28 when the council held a regional hearing at Santa Rosa, Calif. The problems, PCFFA argued, are in the river, not in ocean habitat where their commercial trollers get a shot at salmon before entering the big stream shared by California and Oregon. |