It looks like Basin got a break on water supply

April 13, 2008

Klamath Falls Herald and News Editorial  

There are a lot of water issues Klamath County has to deal with in the near future, but having enough water to go around this summer is unlikely be one of them.

There will be no 2001 this year. That’s the year irrigation water was shut off in the Klamath Reclamation Project for the first time ever. There probably won’t even be a 2007,  a year when a shutoff came close — and that’s happened more than once.

You could call a plentiful water supply a good payback for dealing with the snowstorms last winter that left the Basin struggling to cope. But the importance of the snow and the water it will produce far outweighs what Basin residents endured.

With all that, though, there are no guarantees. The current situation reflects how complex water decisions are in the Klamath Basin , even when it appears there will be enough to go around. 

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service released a biological opinion last week that for the first time in nearly 20 years said that operations of the Klamath Reclamation Project  “were not likely to jeopardize the continued existence of endangered suckers.”

It was the first of two biological opinions to be issued by federal agencies that deal with water, irrigation and fish. The second will be more concerned with downstream fish species — salmon. It’ll come from the National Marine Fisheries Services.

That opinion will be based on outflow from Iron Gate Dam, the lowest of the series of dams belonging to PacifiCorp. The dams straddle the Klamath River on the Oregon-California border south of Klamath Falls .

Another piece of good news that came with the biological opinion was that one of the factors that went into the decision was the restoration and conservation projects done in the Upper Klamath Basin .

Thousands of acres of once-active farmland have been converted to wetlands and storage in recent years. Landowners in those areas, though, have had difficulty getting “credit” for such things in the continuing controversies over water use.

That’s also a factor in the debates over the proposed Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement as people directly involved  decide where their long-term best interests lie.

If the next biological opinion is as good as the first one, they should be able to do so without the additional stress of dealing with a water shortage this summer. That’s a tremendous plus. 

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Source:  http://www.heraldandnews.com/articles/2008/04/13/viewpoints/

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