PNP comment: Flawed science is being used to promote dam removal. Outrageous. — Editor Liz Bowen

Environmentalists have persuaded the Department of the Interior to remove four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River. These dams not only provide clean, green energy to the Klamath community, they sustain area ranches and farms with continual access to water. An environmentalist’s dream, right?

But the fish! We must always put fish ahead of people!

It seems that once upon a time, salmon would migrate upstream the Klamath River to spawn, a process that has become interrupted by the dams. For several decades, ranching and farming families have relied upon the steady stream of not only water, but also renewable energy provided by the dams. Destroying the dams would destroy these people’s livelihoods.

Grace Bennett, the board chair for the Siskiyou County Board of Supervisors, says:

“With the dams gone, it will impact our area … because there won’t be enough water in our river. It will not be a matter of when you irrigate, or how much you irrigate; it’ll be a matter of can you irrigate? Can you do these things? And if we don’t have the dams in, to give the water for the fish that return, and we’re taking that water from our farmers and ranchers, we won’t have any farmers and ranchers.”

What is the government’s obsession with prioritizing fish over people? This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this sort of thing in California. The Delta Smelt has destroyed much of the farming community in central California, because the ugly bugger ended up on the endangered species list and politicians decided to cut off the water from the San Joaquin Valley to the farmlands in order to ‘save’ it.

Now the salmon need saving too. Except maybe they don’t. It’s hard to tell, with all the twisted ‘evidence’ going into the decision-making process over the removal of the dams. Professor Paul Houser was a science advisor to the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation before he was fired for alleging “that the Obama administration intentionally falsified scientific fact in a proposal for dam removal in the Klamath River.”

Debbie Bacigalupi, a 5th generation rancher whose family depends on the dams to sustain their ranch, says, “The reason they want to take out the dams, the Klamath River dams, is because they claim, the government and special interest groups claim that the Coho salmon is an endangered species and that it’s indigenous, even though we have Department of Fish and Game records saying that the fish is non-native. It doesn’t even belong here.”

So much for progress.

Klamath legislation jeopardizes rights and resources – Times-Standard Online

http://www.times-standard.com/guest_opinion/ci_19884573

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First in series of adjudication talks tonight at OIT union   

Herald and News

January 19, 2012

   The Oregon Water Resources Department and a panel of water stakeholders will discuss Klamath Basin adjudication and the implications of adjudication decisions at 6:30 p.m. today during the first Klamath Conversations, a series of talks held by PROSPER.

   “The purpose of the evening is to educate,” organizers said in a press release. “In that spirit we’ll encourage panelists to stick to the facts of their position so other landowners are aware that there is more than one approach to managing the process and outcomes of adjudication, while still respecting Oregon law.”

   At today’s talk, “Klamath Adjudication: What does it mean and what happens now?” in the Mt. Mazama Room in OIT’s college union, representatives from the Oregon Water Resources Department will give a half-hour presentation on the basics of Oregon’s adjudication process and Klamath Basin adjudication.

   Then a panel of stakeholders — representatives from the Klamath Tribes, Upper Klamath Water Users Association, Klamath Water Users Association, and the Upper Basin contestants — will talk for 10 minutes each about their perspectives on the process, followed by a question-and-answer period with the audience.

   PROSPER, a partnership that aims to promote economic prosperity through sustainable use of natural resources in the Klamath Basin, held the same monthly series last year.

   This year, its partners include Shaw Historical Library, the Klamath County Chamber of Commerce, Klamath Water Users Association, Upper Klamath Water Users Association, and the Klamath Tribes, according to a press release.

http://pioneer.olivesoftware.com/Olive/ODE/HeraldandNews/

Object lessons

KLAMATH INDIAN RIFLE 

Etching dates rifle to time of tribal police 

By ELON GLUCKLICH

H&N Staff Reporter

January 13, 2012

Museum officials are unsure how old this Remington Rolling Block rifle is.

     One of the Klamath County Museum’s newest acquisitions still baffles its staff.

   It’s a Remington Rolling Block rifle with a wooden exterior, covered in marks and scratches that suggest it dates back more than 100 years.

   Of most interest to museum manager Todd Kepple is an etching near the rifle’s shoulder stock. It reads: “Klamath Indian Reservation.”

   “We don’t know much about this gun, or how it was used,” Kepple said, adding he couldn’t even provide a ballpark guess on its age.

   But it did make its way into the hands of a retired Grants Pass rifle enthusiast, Tony Heitz. And Heitz believes he knows its age.

   “It would be from the 1880s, maybe the 1890s,” Heitz said.

   Heitz bought the rifle from a dealer in New York in the early 1990s.

   His intention was to strip the rifle and use its parts, potentially in other rifles that needed fixing. But when he spotted the faded Klamath Indian Reservation mark, he knew he had an artifact on his hands.

   “I said, ‘I can’t ruin a historic gun,’ ” Heitz recalled.

   So he drove to the Klamath County Museum and showed the rifle to Kepple, offering to give it to the museum on a long-term loan.

   Heitz knows the approximate date because of its model, and the fact that it’s a black powder model of the Remington Rolling Block brand. The company switched from black powder to smokeless powder in 1897.

   And the date is consistent with the time period in which Klamath Indian Tribal Police force members used the guns to enforce laws.

   “We presumed this gun was used for the law enforcement patrols on this reserve,” Kepple said.

These stakeholders are working to protect their property, water rights and livelihoods

By GARRETT ROSEBERRY

Guest writer

Herald and News, Klamath Falls, Oregon

December 22, 2011

     A series of guest columns in the Herald and News and the Capital Press have made unfounded attacks on upper Klamath Basin agricultural leaders, with reference to the recent decision by the hearings officer in the Klamath Basin adjudication.

   The Klamath Tribes had filed massive claims in the Klamath adjudication for most of the surface water, with a priority date of time immemorial. Time immemorial means the Klamath Tribes’ water right priority will trump all other surface water rights. The adjudication is outlined in state law as a complaint-driven process, meaning if irrigators had not challenged these Tribal claims, they would more than likely have been granted.

   Much of the area outside the Klamath Project in the Klamath Basin is made up of private irrigators. Unlike irrigation districts, irrigators cannot be forced to pay for the common defense of their rights. As a result, many private irrigators and a few off-Project irrigation districts joined together and elected leaders to challenge the Tribal and other claims adverse to their interests.

   Some irrigators chose not to challenge the claims, and did not file legal contests to prevent these claims from being granted. They chose to let their neighbors pay the legal fees, and attend the meetings, and do the leg work necessary to try and protect their water rights.

   Armchair quarterbacking

   These armchair quarterbacks now have lots of advice for what should have been done differently, namely, that the Upper Basin irrigators should have negotiated. This ignores the fact that negotiations have been ongoing for the last 15 years. It also ignores the fact that if it had been left up to the armchair quarterbacks, there   would have been nothing left to negotiate. These claims would have been granted, sailing through unchallenged. (Remember, the adjudication is a complaint driven process.)

   By challenging these claims and pointing out the enormity of them, upper Basin leaders have already obtained substantial reductions by getting Tribal experts to admit to lower claim levels. For example, on the Sprague River in August, the Tribal habitat maintenance claim No. 642, prior to the hearing, was 406 cubic feet per second. The advisory ruling in claim No. 642 was reduced to 174 cfs.

   Another bankrupt argument is that irrigators should have supported the Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement (KBRA).

   Final offer made

   The final offer made to the Upper Basin irrigators in the KBRA permanently set many of the Tribal instream claims at substantially higher rates than the Tribes were granted in the recent hearing, and irrigators would have surrendered their right to appeal these claims.

   Upper Basin irrigators rejected this offer. The KBRA now states that irrigators who sign on to the agreement have to support all facets of the agreement, including the acquisition of the 92,000-acre Mazama Tree Farm for the Klamath Tribes, removal of four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River, and all other provisions in the KBRA. Then, and only then, after you sign, can you attempt to negotiate a position for survival.

   Upper Basin leaders have been tremendously successful in saving Klamath Basin agriculture. In fact, they have settled all the contests against the Forest Service in the adjudication, claims which, like the Tribal claims, would have threatened irrigation. Don’t forget the more than $30 million saved by all Klamath irrigators through   the off-Project rate shock bill.

   It is unfortunate that there seems to be an urge to attack the upper Basin contestants. Their intentions have been to protect and defend their private property, their water rights, and their livelihoods.

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PNP comment:  If “working together” means compromise — then there must be compromise from the Klamath Tribe, Greenies and government agencies, which is REAL. Those groups point fingers at agriculture and demand “working together”, when they are unwilling to compromise. Hyprocrisy runs rampant. — Editor Liz Bowen

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Klamath Tribes want a future for entire community

We have a golden opportunity to bring long-lasting stability to the Klamath Basin

By DON GENTRY, JEFF MITCHELL, WILL HATCHER, BUD ULLMAN and LARRY DUNSMOOR

Guest Writers

Herald and News

December 14, 2011

     The Klamath Tribes want a future for themselves, and for the entire surrounding community, centered on cultural, social, and economic stability. We entered into a treaty with the United States to permanently preserve resources and rights that shaped and maintained our cultural integrity for thousands of years.

   The Tribes will never stop valuing c’waam and koptu (the endangered suckers), c’iyaals (salmon), meyas (resident trout and steelhead), wocus (pond lily), the water that sustains these resources, or myriad other aquatic and terrestrial resources.

   Because we enormously value these things, we will never stop seeking ways to ensure their continued existence and availability to tribal members. We also will continue to strive for healthy economies, good jobs, and a safe place in which to raise our families, just like everybody else.

   The past decades have made it pretty clear that stability does not emerge from litigation, government regulatory oversight, or public infighting among neighbors.

   Recent experiences with the Endangered Species Act have offered some hard lessons on this fact, and the Klamath Basin water adjudication promises to do the same.

   A golden opportunity

   We have a golden opportunity to bring long-lasting stability to the Klamath Basin by way of the Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement (KBRA), which will settle the water rights litigation between the Klamath Reclamation Project irrigators and the Klamath Tribes.

   Provisions of the KBRA also provide interested off-Project irrigators the opportunity for a similar settlement outcome, which we are working on with the Upper Klamath Water Users Association.

   We have demonstrated with our actions that we see our best future emerging from the KBRA, and that we stand ready to enter into fair agreements that will benefit the overall community and economy.

   Our communities stand at a crossroads. Either we work together to build something through the KBRA that will benefit us all, or we can fight it out in the courts to see who wins, and who loses. We hope people will choose to work together for a settlement that benefits the overall community and local economy.