I wanted to start by saying thank you.
It's really important that you're all here.
The idea here is that we really need the citizenry to comment to the Department of the Interior on whether this is something,
Dan Remueble is something that serves the public interest, and you are all the citizenry, so we really want you to comment.
We're going to have four amazing presenters today to give you a sense of what's going on in the Klamath upper basin and in the Klamath in general.
There are also several public hearings and meetings scheduled, and we do encourage everybody to go out and attend those.
And I'd like to start by giving you a brief synopsis of that.
October 25th, community in Orleans, October 26th, the Arcata Community Center in Arcata, October 27th, Yurok Tribal Administrative Office.
So those are really the key areas.
If you would like to learn more about it, please do attend those as well.
And thank you again for coming out to this.
Our four presenters tonight, Andrew Orhasky, Conservation Director of EPIC.
He's going to present information to you on the NEPA and CEQA process associated with the draft EIR and EIS.
Next, we're going to have Bob Hunter, Water Watch Board member, Water Watch of Oregon.
He's going to be presenting on some of the biology of the region.
Pat Higgins, Consulting Fisheries Biologist for the Rezeghini Rancheria will also be presenting.
And we are very pleased to have Haley Hutt with us tonight, Hoopa Valley Tribal Council Member.
Ah, yes, me. I am Rae Annanayel.
I am the Executive Director of North Coast Environmental Center.
And I'm just presenting and introducing these people here today.
What we really hope that will come out of this is a better understanding of the very complex Klamath issues for people.
I know that for myself, it's taken many months to even come up to speed on what's going on in the Klamath.
It's a very complex issue.
I would also like to state that everyone in this room who I know and who's presenting tonight is very in favor of dam removal.
It is very important for the ecological restoration of the Klamath Basin.
And I want to encourage you, as I have been encouraged, to remember that when you're making your comments to the Department of the Interior for the Secretarial Determination,
please do start by structuring your comments.
I am either pro-dam removal or not pro-dam or, you know, for dam removal.
Oh, wait.
Wait a minute.
Do I have a bias?
Yes.
Pro-dam removal.
So I'm either pro-dam removal or I am not pro-dam removal.
That's really important.
Beneath that, if you have comments to make about KVRA, KHSA, this problem with, you know, the upper basin irrigation interest,
whatever your other comments are about the draft EIR, EIS, please make them after those broad statements.
I have been encouraged to tell everyone that as a way to increase the organization.
And please do then, if you're not going to do line item by line item comments, please do make them specific with keywords,
because I have been told that that is how they will be best registered and made to make a difference for the citizenry.
So I guess I'd like to start by presenting Andrew.
Andrew will come up and each speaker will speak for 20 minutes.
And at that point, yeah.
So each of the presenters will be speaking for 20 minutes.
After the presentations are done, we will open it up to comment period.
There are some papers with some talking points.
Each organization present, and I should also mention this presentation has been sponsored very generously by the Sierra Club,
North Group Chapter Sierra Club, North Coast Environmental Center, EPIC, Water Watch of Oregon, and I am...
Audubon.
Audubon.
And the Ancient Forest International.
So we're really happy that they sponsored this.
The intent, again, for all of those organizations is to give you a better understanding of what's going on in the Klamath.
Really important because it's a very complex issue.
There are lots of knowledgeable people outside of those groups in the room.
Please avail yourself to discuss.
We have members from the Yurok Tribe.
We have members from Hoopa.
We have members from Karuk.
Please avail yourself to the scientific expertise in the room as well.
And again, thank you all for being here.
We're going to start with Andrew.
After the presentations, we will open it up to a comment period.
It will be a three-minute limit.
There are cards in the back and pencils where you can write your questions or comments to come up and present.
And we have the wonderful honor of having Duncan.
McLaren from Humboldt Mediation Services to serve as our facilitator this evening.
And we're very happy to have him here.
So thank you.
Andrew, if you'd like to start your presentation, thank you again, ladies and gentlemen.
Good evening, everyone.
Thanks for attending this event this evening.
I know lots of folks have traveled further than others and really appreciate having this great turnout.
What we're going to talk about tonight has been an issue that has really divided and brought together various communities in our region over the last decade and plus.
Much of it revolves around this fish and others, the importance of which for this region cannot be understated.
Coho salmon, Chinook salmon, steelhead are the lifeblood of the people on the river and off the river.
Folks are catching fish from the Klamath River up in Oregon.
They probably should be releasing them, but these fish travel very, very long distances.
And we're undertaking a process right now that has the potential to bring them home to places they haven't seen in over a century, sorry, into the headwaters of the Klamath system.
Next.
I just wanted to take a moment to introduce EPIC, the Environmental Protection Information Center.
We're a community-supported member-driven nonprofit.
It's been around since 1977.
Most of our folks are based in southern Humboldt.
And our mission is really focused on protecting the biodiversity, which makes our region so unique.
And we can go to the next.
And as part of our program work over the last few decades, you know, we haven't been directly involved with the process, the Klamath Basin Restoration Agreements and other agreements.
Our organization has been more focused on things going on in the headwaters of these areas.
So folks are going to talk a lot about what's happening in the river or next to the river.
And what our organization is really focused on is protecting forests, old-growth forests for spotted owls and for salmon, and really looking at the headwater region.
So jumping into the DEIS, really what we're presented with right now is a 60-day public comment period that began September 22nd of this year.
And the entire document is enormous, the draft environmental impact statement.
And I would encourage folks to, if possible, get it and download it from the website, which is up there, klamathrestoration.gov.
And read it for yourself, particularly, you know, a quick read is 50 pages of the executive summary.
It's 60 days to comment on this thing is really tough.
It's really tough for an organization and trained individuals, and I think it's even more difficult for the public.
So one of the things we're actually asking during this process is to reopen the comment period,
to extend it and that way have more time to really analyze this extensive document.
I'm going to go back to that other slide.
Yeah, I'm just pointing at the slide.
So what the draft is really taking a look at is this determination by the Secretary of the Interior, who is right now Ken Salazar.
He's going to determine in March, expected in March of next year, whether or not it's in the public's interest
and will restore salmon to the basin to remove these four dams on the mid-Klamath, I like to call it.
There's lower Klamath, upper Klamath, and this is sort of the mid-Klamath dams.
The determination is necessary for several reasons, for federal agencies to be able to move forward
and furthermore for Congress to be able to move forward, which is ultimately what is needed to restore the river is an act of Congress.
You can go to the next one.
I'm sure folks know the region we're talking about, the watersheds, the dams again right in here.
This is what is termed sort of the upper Klamath, lower Klamath Lake, Tule Lake, and upper Klamath Lake, and all of their tributaries.
Generally, once you get down past where the Trinity and the Klamath converge, then you get into the lower Klamath.
These are the major stumbling blocks for the revival of spring Chinook salmon especially, which we've petitioned for listing under the Endangered Species Act.
Removing those dams would allow them to run all the way up.
Some folks think in through upper Klamath Lake and up the Sprague and Williamson Rivers, opening up extensive spawning grounds that are closed and dead to them now.
Because both state and federal agencies are involved in this process, there's a whole litany of requirements under these laws that really it's not necessary,
but it's amazing that we have this many laws involved and that we can get them all to work together.
Ultimately, though, the big one is here.
As you can see, this is not an extensive list.
It doesn't cover everything, but as you can see, everything else kind of is protecting the environment, except this one.
It has some provisions in there to consider the environment, but the Federal Power Act, which authorizes the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to license and relicense hydro dams,
they have ultimate jurisdiction over what happens to these dams.
That agency is not friendly to salmon.
Historically, they've made some very, very bad decisions.
I don't need to get into them now, but the process for relicensing these dams was ongoing.
It began a decade ago and has been put on hold while what I'll talk about next, while the agreements are put in place and analyzed.
The backdrop really to this draft environmental impact statement and the Secretary of the Interior's determination is FERC and the Federal Power Act.
If this process fails and the Secretary for some reason determines not to remove the dams or whatever else happens, we're dumped back into the realm of FERC.
It's really up for grabs as to what would happen there.
Some folks are very just not willing to go back there.
Others think that the agency could be reformed and we would get dam removed a lot of them anyway, but it's really very uncertain as to what will occur there.
The other acts, NEPA really analyzes this process.
There's nothing substantive in NEPA.
At least the California Environmental Quality Act requires process and some mitigation.
The big one I'm going to focus on right now, because I don't have a lot of time to go into all these, is the Endangered Species Act.
I put the federal laws above the state laws because if any of them are in conflict, the federal law wins.
That's part of the Constitution. It's called the Supremacy Clause.
The other thing that is not up here, which is considered part of federal law, is Native American treaty rights.
It's part of a body of law called federal Indian law and it's gone back.
Basically it's based on the treaties and what's going on in the Klamath is the tribes have treaty rights to fish and water for those fish.
Those treaty rights would be probably up here and to a certain extent would outweigh the other federal laws.
It hasn't really been pushed in the courts that far.
Go ahead.
The DEIS that is under review and for public comment right now is analyzing these agreements.
It was this agreement that Pacific Corps, seeing how difficult the FERC process would be, decided that it would be good to enter into this settlement agreement, at least explore dam removal.
It was a watershed moment to have a company that is profiting off these dams turn around and say, oh, we're going to think about removing them.
This process, the KHSA, really was a bright spot in an otherwise at times a dead river.
The DEIS right now is really looking at elements of the Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement.
It includes not just dam removal but other connected actions as they're termed in the DEIS that are both federal, state, and completely private actions.
We can get into the KBRA in another discussion.
I think when the government presents at public forum that are scheduled, they'll dive into that some more.
I didn't really feel, personally, we were not, EPIC was not part of the KBRA process and we've come in sort of after that was all completed.
There are folks in the audience tonight that were integrally involved in that process and would be better individuals to address the elements of the KBRA.
What I do want to point out, again, is that some of the actions under the KBRA are entirely private.
So the DEIS does make an effort to sort of gloss over those.
It's questionable whether they can do that or not, but it's something that I point out is that if it's happening, they should probably be analyzing it.
The real focus for EPIC is on protecting species that both are plentiful and everyone wants to see, but those that are on the brink of extinction.
We're talking about coho salmon throughout California going extinct probably in the next 10 to 20 years in many of the watersheds.
They're functionally extinct in the Matol, for example.
Besides the work that's been done, it's not looking good for coho.
It's likely they'll be uplisted to endangered right now.
They're threatened.
Why this process is so critical for them is under the KBRA and the schedule proposed under the DEIS, we're not going to see dam removal until 2020.
I think that it's probably too late for coho and that a lot of actions are going to need to be taken before then.
The other half of this is a couple of species that live in the upper basin that are listed as endangered.
They are really dependent on the marshes and wetlands that historically fed the Klamath River with clean, cold water throughout the year.
Most of those marshes are gone now.
That's why they're endangered.
It's also why water quality is so poor in certain sections of the river above the mid-Klamath dams, even before it gets to the dams.
Again, the marshes historically covered this entire area and much around upper Klamath Lake, as well as the headwaters of the Sprague and Williamson rivers.
Those marshes were critical to feeding the lower part of the river with clean, cold water that all fish benefited from.
That's a big question because the DEIS is analyzing dam removal.
The other part of the equation for restoration of the river and ultimately the historic salmon runs is the marshes.
That's the part that's really been left out.
Here's the lowest dam, that's Iron Gate. This is a picture from the DEIS.
It looks nice. There's no vegetation on it. It's a really beautiful thing.
You can see the edges of the reservoir behind are very green. That's probably toxic algae.
It's algae, but the next picture shows you what you're going to see there in the dry season.
That's going to kill fish. It's going to kill people. People take their dogs in there and their dogs die.
It's very toxic. It's why some folks in the process have thought, there is no way that these dams could get certified for water quality objectives with this stuff floating around.
Absolutely. FERC would have to fix that, but there are ways around it, of course.
The other major thing that I've seen, 2002 is when we had the big fish kill on the Klamath, where upwards of 75 to 100,000 salmon were killed because of toxic conditions and very low flows on the river.
This is from this year, which was a good water year.
What I want to point out is this number, 1,000, and this is the flow at the base of the Irangate Dam.
This is mandated by the biological opinion from the National Marine Fisheries Service.
It's for protecting coho so that they don't die like they did in 2002 along with Chinook.
This is not mandated in the KBRA, the thousand. There is actually no number that is mandated as a minimum flow.
That's a big red flag for us. If the best available science is telling us not to drop the river below 1,000 during the critical period of time, probably the end of July through the middle of October,
why not put that in writing? Why not have the Secretary of Interior mandate that? Or Congress better?
I'm going to wrap up really quick here because I don't want to belabor these points too much.
We think dam removal must happen right now. It should have happened 10 years ago.
But we can't wait until 2020 for this to happen. That's just too long.
The other part of the equation, the marshes. Why are we not restoring more marshes? We have the ability to do so.
Sure, there's a lot of agriculture up there, but much of it is very marginal, highly subsidized.
You would be surprised to see the books for the Klamath project. The irrigation interests up there really, they're subsidized.
It's not a great place to grow things unless you waste a lot of water.
The floor that I talked about earlier, we really can't have the river dropping below 1,000 at Irongate, and it needs to be in the plan.
What I haven't even talked about is all the tributaries that have also really suffered over the last century.
The Scott River runs dry every year. Coho salmon die in the Scott River every year.
You can go up there in August and September and see green alfalfa fields and dry creeks and rivers.
How is that going to recover Coho? That needs to be fixed. That should be part of the package.
Then really, if we're going to call it the Klamath Basin, we can't forget about the Trinity.
As a lot of you know, half of the water from the Trinity River goes into the Sacramento River and then south.
That seems like a pretty big impact that's not even being considered at all.
It's a big document, like I said. We're going to have our comments posted and some more information on our website here, wildcalifornia.org.
That's about what I have for you right now.
I did bring a prop. I wanted to let folks know that what we have right now is an empty net on that entire section of river.
What needs to happen very quickly is fish jumping into these nets.
Thank you very much, Andrew.
Again, as Rain mentioned at the beginning, we'll have the four presentations and then we'll have questions.
We have cards and pencils in the back if you want to just jot a question while it occurs to you or jot on our piece of paper.
Then when during the public comment and question period, we'll ask you to come up to the microphone and identify yourself and ask a question or give a comment.
Thank you very much, Andrew. Our next speaker is Bob.
Hello. I work for Water Watch of Oregon. Water Watch of Oregon has been involved in climate, basin, water, and refuge issues for the last 15 years.
We did participate in the settlement talks. We were involuntarily excluded part way through the talks in part because of our unwillingness to agree to a settlement framework
that required support for commercially farming 22,000 acres of lower Klamath and Tulalake National Wildlife Refuge, which was a precondition for staying in the settlement talks.
I'm going to try to give a little background, talk a little bit about the KBRA. I should mention again that the climate settlement agreements are sort of two parts, but they're linked.
There's the Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement, known as the KBRA, and the Klamath Hydroelectric Settlement Agreement, known as the KHSA.
Anyhow, the history of the basin has been one of conflict for a long time, and it's been a conflict over dams, water, science, and refuges.
The conflicts over science are somewhat related to water because it's been conflict over how much water do fish need, both salmon in the river and threatened suckers in upper Klamath Lake.
So first, the dams. Basically, this is Iron Gate Dam. It was put in 1962, and it's the lowermost dam in the hydroelectric project.
But the first dam that went in was Copco 1, went in in 1918. Go ahead and next slide.
But these four dams basically block salmon from 350 miles of spawning habitat, 60% of the spawning habitat in the basin.
These dams cause incredible problems for the fishery and the system, and certainly removing those dams is imperative and key to one of the main keys to restoring the Klamath River Basin.
I'll talk a little bit about kind of what the basin was like prior to 1905 and some of the landscape changes.
I think, again, one of the big impacts were the dams. But just as big impact on the landscape was the development of the Klamath Irrigation Project,
which was one of the first Bureau reclamation projects, and it was initiated in 1905.
I'm going to show a little bit here. Prior to the initiation of the Klamath Irrigation Project, the upper basin, which we see here,
you have Upper Klamath Lake, the largest freshwater lake in Oregon, about 80,000 acres.
You also had Lower Klamath Lake, which was about 88,000 acres, which was tied to the Klamath River.
The Klamath River came out of Upper Klamath Lake, flowed through the top end of Lower Klamath Lake, and then on down.
This was basically a shallow lake full of wetlands and marsh habitat.
It was really a buffer against droughts and floods on the river, and also the wetlands performed a cleansing function.
In addition, there were wetlands all around Upper Klamath Lake connected to the lake.
Basically, you have Clear Lake down here, and out of Clear Lake flows the Lost River, starting in California, flows into Oregon,
and then back into California in Tule Lake. This is a closed river basin, though sometimes connected to the Klamath and high water years.
Basically, a closed river basin. Tule Lake at the end of the lake was a lake that fluctuated from between 50,000 and 100,000 acres every year.
These were tremendous wetland areas. With initiation of the Klamath Project, the point of the Klamath Project was actually to come in and drain these two lakes,
and then bring irrigation water from Upper Klamath Lake to irrigate the lands that were made available for farming by draining these lakes.
In 1908, there was a big move by people to say, wait a minute, we've got this incredible natural amenity here,
Lower Klamath Lake, which was this incredible wetlands, homes to all kinds of birds, and so on and so forth.
Theodore Roosevelt, in 1908, protected the whole lake as the nation's first national wildlife refuge for waterfowl.
Unfortunately, it was created within the boundaries of the Klamath Irrigation Project.
In 1917, the Bureau of Reclamation worked with a railroad company to build a dike off Upper Klamath Lake from the Klamath River.
That happened in 1917. Basically, it dried up the entire lake. The entire lake went bone dry for basically 25 years.
Part of the motivation for draining it was so then settlers could move in and start homesteading on the refuge land,
which they did under the Swamp Act and some other acts, and started a homestead on the upper part of the lake.
Subsequent administrations reduced the size of the refuge to accommodate the privatization that occurred.
That's what was going on at Lower Klamath. At the same time, what they did on the Lost Riverside is they put a dam on Clear Lake
to enlarge it to evaporate water so less water would flow to Tule Lake so they could start to drain Tule Lake and start to farm on Tule Lake,
which they started to do. In 1928, they couldn't get all the water out. In 1928, they basically created a refuge
to sort of store the waters and drain off the private lands onto the refuge lands.
But then they came up with an idea in 1942 to put a tunnel through a ridge that separated the Lost River Basin from Klamath Basin.
They put a tunnel through in 1942 through Sheepee Ridge. That allowed them to further drain Tule Lake.
That's what brought water back to Lower Klamath Lake in a convoluted way in 1942, after 25 years.
Basically, the irrigation reclamation project was to drain these lakes. Eventually, Tule Lake was drained down,
except for a couple of sumps here left on the National Wildlife Refuge and Lower Klamath Lake was also drained.
But to bring water then down here, and what you see shaded is the irrigated land within the Klamath irrigation project.
But to irrigate this land, now that you've drained the wetland so you could farm it, they went over to Upper Klamath Lake
and breached a natural reef that was there so they could drain this natural lake below natural levels.
And Link River Dam was put in to control the lake level elevations.
Prior to that, the lake basically elevation-wise fluctuated between 4,140 feet and 1,141 feet.
When you take the lake down below an elevation of 4,140, it starts to drain all the wetlands around the lake.
And when you get down to 4,139, all the wetlands around Upper Klamath Lake are bone dry,
including all 14,000 acres of Upper Klamath Lake National Wildlife Refuges.
So, go ahead, next slide. So, the agriculture in the project, you know, it wasn't all irrigated at once.
We kind of grew it out to about 100,000 acres being irrigated in the 1940s.
And then basically with the drainage of Tule Lake, were they able to farm more.
There was a bump in irrigation and basically the project was grown out to basically 200,000, 235,000 acres that are now irrigated.
Go ahead. And so you can see there, it's a huge part of the landscape, this irrigation project, where it's irrigated.
Now, not only are we irrigating the Klamath Irrigation Project, this federal project lands here,
but there's also a lot of irrigation in the upper basin along the Williamson, Sikans, Sprague, Wood River Valley,
and down here in California on the Shasta and Scott.
Well, we're irrigating about 500,000 acres overall and you just can't take that much water out of the system
and have a healthy Klamath River and a healthy Klamath Lake and have healthy wetlands in the National Wildlife Refuge.
And not only do you have a problem with taking that much water out,
but the return flow from operating this system and from all the agriculture going on creates a huge water quality problem for the system,
and that's kind of the problem.
So this is Upper Klamath Lake, which gets drained out.
This is all wetlands here, and part of the refuge area in the north gets drained dry.
Under the KBRA, we can expect the lake to go dry about 82 percent of the time in the fall months for the fall-ups,
at least start going dry and be bone dry for part of the year.
So that's going to be our legacy with the KBRA.
One thing I should mention, these marshes up here are very important to the threatened and endangered short-nosed
and lost river suckers that inhabit the lake.
Also, the wetlands produce tannins, which are algicides, which keep the algae down in the lake.
And so when you don't have these wetlands, when you drain them down, you also release a lot of nutrients,
which adds to it, and you don't have the tannins that are basically killing the algae.
And here's sort of return flow coming in from the project.
So you have, as I mentioned, water shortage problems, and you have water quality problems.
And along with that, you know, the suckers in the lake were listed in 1988.
We had the Coho salmon listed as threatened in the Klamath River in 1997.
The Klamath River was once the third most productive salmon steelhead fishery in the west.
And there were, at one point in time, hundreds of thousands of suckers in the upper Klamath Lake and the upper basin.
They were just really prodigious. They grow, they live really long.
They grow really big, and they're considered more edible in choice than salmon by early settlers.
In 2002, we had fish kill, and this is in part gets down to this is the precipitating cause of this was low flow.
Stacking up the fish in the lower basin, along with a lot of fish coming in to stack up, and then diseases killed them.
Basically, that was with ESA regulation.
However, it was the one year that sort of the manipulation of science by the Bush administration
was allowed to occur before court cases reinstated protective flows for fish.
So again, in terms of the refuge controversy, so we still have refuges Tule Lake and lower Klamath,
but there was a lot of pressure to homestead those.
And finally, the Kekal Act in the 50s was enacted where, well, we'll not allow homesteading in the refuges,
but we still allow commercial farming, which is different than cooperative farming that also serves a refuge purpose.
So you have the Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge, where about half of the 26,000 acres in the refuge are commercially farmed,
and you've got about another 6,000, 7,000 on lower Klamath that are commercially farmed as well.
This is the Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge.
As you can see, it's basically two farm ponds and commercial agriculture going on.
There's a little walking wetlands here, which is a program that's ongoing now.
So this is the National Wildlife Refuge, growing a lot of row crops and crops that do not provide food for waterfowl.
So we have to ask, are these refuges for waterfowl, which they were originally intended, or are they for potatoes?
So I want to now kind of go to what we believe are the essential elements of climate-based restoration
and then measure that against the KBRA and talk about what's going on.
So certainly we need to remove the four Pacific Core dams.
We need assured minimum flows in quantities of water for fish based on best of ill science,
and also some adaptive management program to determine whether or not that's working, where the burden of proof is not on the fish.
We've always had a system in the Clamath Basin where when people get around, the late Ronnie Pierce used to tell the story,
is people get around together and try to figure out how much water fish needed every now and then.
And lo and behold, every time they got together, all fish needed was what was left over from all their uses.
And really what we have today is the same thing with KBRA, because the KBRA does not guarantee any flows for fish.
It guarantees a certain amount of water deliveries back to the project, the Clamath Irrigation Project, and the fish get what's left over again.
And I'm going to have to speed things up here a little bit.
So anyhow, we need those minimum flows, which the KBRA does not provide.
We need to bring things back into balance because they're out of balance.
We need a federally funded, willing seller buyout program to reduce irrigation demand in the basin.
And we also need to phase out the farming on the 22,000 acres in the refuges, where we can reduce irrigation season demand,
store water, and also restore wetland habitat and improve water quality.
And of course, we need funding for restoration. Go ahead.
So we believe the KBRA actually sets back climate restoration because it flipped it back again where there's water guarantees for irrigators and none for fish.
It intends to remove the ESA and tribal right obstacles to irrigation deliveries at a certain set of levels.
And again, it starts to politicize science to justify this type of arrangement.
We know that the predicted flows, though unprotected, but the predicted flows don't even meet the hardy phase two flows or current ESA, flows currently required in ESA.
And we know that the wetlands around the lake are going to be hit really hard and dewatered frequently under the KBRA.
Ninety-two million dollars is going to irrigators to develop their own water plan without any sideboards or real transparency in what they develop.
And we fear a lot of that will go into unsustainable groundwater development and that the Lost River Basin is probably going to be hit the hardest from that
because there's no protections from groundwater development there and that will further hurt the suckers there in the refuges.
And it's very interesting, part of the KBRA really acknowledges the problem is going to be in the Lost River Basin because what they do is they have a provision
which basically indicates that California will look into amending the California Endangered Species Act
because they basically allow take of golden eagles, bald eagles, peregrine falcons, greater sandhill cranes, and lost and short river suckers,
if needed because of the impacts that are going to happen.
And instead of reducing demand, we're just shifting the demand from surface flow to the other.
And then there's power subsidies that discourage water conservation.
I'm just going to go by this, but basically the limitations, the KBRA is touted as providing basically limitations on water use.
And it basically starts out at 330 and moves up to 340 when dams are out in dry years and kind of moves up like this.
What these dots are are historical water use of the basin.
The dots with circles are water use after I think 86, which they increased their water use after that because the Klamath Basin adjudication process started
and they had to show they were using the water to be able to make a claim for it and it kind of bumped things up.
It's been touted as they've reduced their demand by 100,000 acre feet.
That's certainly from the highest point they did, but not basically normal.
And wet water years are actually getting more water than they generally used.
Go ahead.
So it also supports, the KBRA supports commercial farming in the refuges.
It's being touted as providing water security for the refuges.
But in fact, if you really look at it hard, if they actually do end up getting the water allocation,
you only get that if a whole bunch of very hard to satisfy conditions are satisfied,
which is giving ESA regulatory assurances to the farmers at their diversion limitations,
which basically means the refuges will only get water if you basically subjugate the ESA, undermine the ESA and hurt flows for salmon.
And even if they got that, there's a lot of provisions in there that take it back away, especially in dry years again.
It also continues to cut water for refuge purposes before cutting water to irrigate refuge land.
It uses, and here's the great thing now, is you can lease this farming that's everyone supporting,
and 80 percent of the proceeds from this leasing go back to subsidize the management of the irrigation project for the irrigators.
Plus, they get $41 million of power subsidies, which allows them to continue to drain the refuge wetlands for commercial farming.
It wouldn't be economical if they weren't subsidized.
And there's a whole bunch of other special contracts and things happening too.
So ESA support removal of the four dams.
But we need to analyze an alternative where you don't tie dam removal of this harmful provisions to the KBRA, which they note but refuse to do.
They also really, again, don't analyze what it means to not have protected flows for fish.
They don't analyze the impacts of the subsidies or the drought provisions that cut water there.
And they don't look at alternatives such as alternatives of restoring wetlands on the refuges and phasing out stuff.
The last comment I want to make is there is now draft legislation to implement the KBRA and KHSA.
And that's out there.
It basically approves the KBRA, authorizes and directs federal agencies to sign this 50-year contract and become bound by it.
It has some many bad provisions in it.
We've got a little summary in the back and stuff like that.
I'm not going to get into it all because I think I'm running out of time here.
But it also, one thing I know Haley's going to get to, but it's got some issues in there too, social justice issues to deal with on non-party tribes.
Let's see if I might have one more slide.
On the KHSA side, I haven't talked about many things.
I mean, dam removal is great, but we put it out to 2020.
We don't have, it authorizes and the legislation authorizes, unlimited annual licenses and it stays the first process.
And there's really no drop dead date to go back if dams aren't removed because the KHSA does allow somebody to terminate it if the dams haven't come out.
But it doesn't say when they have to do it.
So you could drag this process on and on.
In the meantime, the draft legislation just says you get, Pacific Corps gets annual licenses until the dams are turned over for someone to removal.
Well, if that doesn't happen, you've got legislation saying they've got to get these annual licenses.
It really, I think, creates a situation.
I think the KHSA is for Pacific Corps and the interim here for the next decade.
They basically business as usual with some minor interim conditions with not necessarily having to remove the dams at the end of it.
So anyhow, I'm going to stop here, urge you all to get involved, comment.
And also there's some handouts and stuff in the back.
Thank you.
Thank you, Bob.
Again, if you would please, questions at the end.
Hi.
We are going to hold questions to the end.
We'll be happy to hear that.
I will just say that we do have several comments coming up in the community.
And this is an opportunity for some dissenting voice.
I have made that clear to the community.
But you are welcome, in no way do I necessarily take that opinion, but you are welcome to engage in a discussion at the end.
And we will have to hold all questions just till we get through the presenters and then we can engage in.
And I don't know if you've seen it, but again, I distributed talking points around that give some of the best arguments for proponents of the KBRA, KHSA,
and then a dissenting view.
And that's part of the process of informing the public about it.
So we're going to go.
All right.
We're going to hold off on comments and we're going to go ahead and continue with presentations.
We would like to welcome Pat Higgins.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.
The case for the KBRA and the KHSA will be made by the government in their meetings next week.
And so since opposing views have had some trouble in getting into the public eye and the public mind,
the purpose of this forum is to let you know about some of the things that the federal government is in fact ignoring.
And so my talk this evening, I'm a consulting fisheries biologist with 20 years of history of studying the Klamath River.
I help with the long-range plan for the Klamath under the Klamath Task Force and the Mid-Program Review.
And I've also put out a comprehensive information system on the Klamath, chrisweb.com, which you can surf information on the Klamath.
I'm a consultant at present to the Rezeguini Rancheria.
It's a small independent tribe in the lower Klamath Basin, and they are just above the Klamath Estuary.
And I'm going to touch on ecosystem function in the Klamath, and it's a very, very sore spot with both the federal secretary's decision, DEIS, DEIR,
as well as the KBRA itself.
And the Klamath in its heyday, crossing three geologic provinces from the Cascades through the Klamath Mountains to the coast,
is actually comprised of many sub-ecosystems.
And I want to talk to you now about what goes on with the functionality of those various systems and the problems going forward if some of those do not function
in terms of the overall objectives of Klamath restoration.
Because the Klamath in its heyday was one of the richest salmon ecosystems in the world.
It's a lot of PowerPoint slides, Bob, so stay on top of it.
This is ecological restoration. Bisson et al., Pete Bisson is one of the big dogs of anatomist fish sciences.
And management of freshwater habitat of Pacific salmon should focus on natural processes and variability,
rather than to attempt to maintain or engineer the desired set of conditions through time.
The KBRA and the secretary's decision as a consequence, and the TMBLs,
which are non-point source pollution abatement programs in the basin, are heavily reliant on technical fixes
because they haven't been able to get the political agreement to get the marshes back in place to get ecosystem function.
Technical fixes are experimental, they're costly, and likely will not work, in my estimate.
We must restore impaired ecosystems if we're ever to regain natural capital necessary to prevent economic and social decay
and to approach economic and ecological health and sustainability.
And that's a society for ecological restoration. These are very, very well researched ecological principles.
And the Everglades program is like this. How do you stop toxic algae in the sea off of Florida?
You add more freshwater and you add more marsh. If you've still got toxic algae, what do you do?
You add more water and you add more marsh. There isn't even that discussion going on in the Klamath.
The secretary's decision only covers the KHSA. They say that the KBRA is a connected action,
but in fact it's only connected politically because the parties crafted it in concert with the settlement agreement as a vehicle of convenience.
But then it turns right back around and says that the KBRA is so poorly defined that it can't actually be analyzed in the current environmental document.
And in fact it allocates a minimum of 330,000 acre feet. Bob talked about that and the problems in the trades for refuges endangered species.
It subsidizes power costs for agriculture in the high desert in the face of climate change. Not a rational policy from my view.
Klamath project extent remains at 200,000 acres, including Tule Lake and Lower Klamath Lake National Wildlife Refugees for 50 years.
Flows under the KBRA, Appendix E-5, the only thing defined says that in serious drought years like 92 and 94,
the river was at 440 cubic feet per second when 752 killed almost all the salmon in the river in September 2002.
And Kino Reservoir is going to be managed the same way it has and it's a huge problem. It's an anoxic dead zone in the Klamath River.
And as Jim Lincatowich said about salmon rivers, it's like a string of pearls. You take one out, they roll all around on the floor.
You can't get ecosystem function if you have a dead reach in the Klamath. And the DEIS, DEIR, does not even cover all of these various subjects in the KBRA,
which is piecemealing under NEPA. I think they're dead in the water coming out of the box. It's also deficient under the California Environmental Quality Act.
Cumulative effects area of analysis, water quality, not lost river in Tule Lake. Well, when you hook the exhaust up from lost river in Tule Lake to the Klamath
and you push it past the tipping point, you got yourself a mess on your hands. And you can't just be fixed with a washing machine or any kind of technical fix.
Aquatic resources excludes lost river in Tule Lake. Algae excludes lost river in Tule Lake. Big cause of the algae is the nutrients coming out of those systems.
Flood hydrology leaves out the discussion of filling lower Klamath Lake, which is also very important for maintaining flood and summer historically.
And groundwater doesn't even touch the lost river. And there's a USGS flow study, groundwater study that shows that the groundwaters dropped 15 to 25 feet in the lost river basin
since 2001 to the detriment of surface flows, both for suckers and concentration of nutrient flow back into the Klamath.
The Chinook and Chinook juveniles have to live in the main stem. Summer steelhead, winter steelhead trout, coho.
Coming out of the Cascades, volcanoes give off phosphorus. Phosphorus stimulates plant growth.
And amazing lake systems that were full of sucker fish that lived to be 50 years old, trout that lived to be up to 20 pounds.
But the waters were tea colored and the early settlers had a hard time getting their horses to drink it. But boy did it produce fish.
And the reason is it was surrounded by marshes. The marshes stripped the nutrients. They created a chemistry that essentially killed the algae.
And we've now discovered that. Then there's all the cold, clean water coming out of the cliffs below Kino in the canyons.
Then there was the Shasta, this amazing spring creek. Then there was the scott fed by snowmelt.
Then there was the salmon, still in its historic condition or close to it. And the Trinity.
And in aggregate, this is the river of renewal. The river was able to take on nutrients at its source and yet maintain its balance and kick out fish, a wildlife species galore.
And so in the natural world, in Aboriginal time, man was one with nature. It's a harmony based culture.
So man has a right to exist, the sucker, the salmon, the bald eagle. And all of these things need to thrive if we're to really thrive into the future.
And the tribes in the Klamath were some of the richest in California. And the Indian people and the fish were part of a living Klamath riverscape.
But now, juvenile salmon and steelhead go to the nursery of the Klamath River and they find it toxic.
We're talking about hundreds of thousands of juvenile salmon routinely dying in dry years with equal effect, according to the scientists, to the adult fish kill.
It's just that they're small and they get eaten. And so you don't notice. But it's huge and it's not sustainable ecologically.
High temperature, elevated pH, depressed dissolved oxygen, elevated ammonia, those are all things driven by nutrient pollution.
And they're not going to get solved by the secretary's decision. And in the lower basin, it's the salmon.
In the upper basin, it's a fish whose only a mother could love its face.
But now really the sucker is a magnificently adapted creature for shallow lakes of upper Klamath, which would periodically go dry or nearly so.
They can live in dissolved oxygen and of three. It would kill you. It would kill a trout.
They can basically take pH of 10. You know, seven's coming out of the tap.
The only thing you can do to kill these fish is dry it up because they haven't evolved tennis shoes yet.
So now we're going to go top to bottom just for ecosystem function, a quick check.
Sprague Williamson. Williamson is fine. It pops up out of the ground about six miles from the lake.
It's cold as gin or clear as gin and, you know, colder than a cocktail.
But the Sprague, on the other hand, and the Saikan, they come out of eastern Oregon.
They're dried up. They're nutrient enriched. Their banks are bare. And really, there's no willingness for cooperation.
They turned back restoration money lately for a restoration plan about five years ago because the guys all had their shotguns out.
And so everything in terms of complicity with the TMDL in Oregon up there, it's based on voluntary measures.
And then they put the Oregon Department of Agriculture, which I think has a conflict,
in terms of being in charge for water flows and also for nutrient abatement.
So that's a non-starter. I don't think it's going to get a lot better.
This is the big enchilada. This is Upper Klamath Lake. The stuff that looks like Anderson split pea soup.
That is a phantazoma non-flos aqua. That thing can take nitrogen out of the air.
We're breathing 80 percent nitrogen. It's short. That's what stops plant growth.
And when the marshes got taken away from around the edges of Upper Klamath Lake,
it went from this tea-colored brown to this green, and then it went to super green.
And this is 2.5 times more nitrogen go out of Upper Klamath Lake than come in.
So it was a fish factory, and now it's a pollution factory.
And right there in that red circle, I'm going to show you the next two slides, what it looks like around the edge there.
That's a marsh on the east side of 140 on the way to Klamath Falls, and that's what used to be the marsh on the other side.
The dike, the road actually is conveniently served as a dike.
And it's many miles from there to Upper Klamath Lake, which is just short of the ridge there.
We had it already, otherwise.
So we turned ground that was a nutrient sink, and that created alga-cylal effects that buffered the lake
into nutrient sources that are really a major, major problem now because of the ecological tipping point.
You didn't mean?
And Upper Klamath Lake is not going to be functional after the secretary's decision.
In response to comments I put in, they said they're not even considering the ecosystem function of Upper Klamath Lake.
Their dams have nothing to do with it.
Marsh restoration needed to kill blue, really green algae.
Well, watch the bouncing ball.
They're going, we need marsh restoration, we need marsh restoration.
But after you take the marshes and you convert them to farming, they subside from the back of where the dike is, where the lake is.
And so now they've just pulled the dikes, they've got more deep water habitat, and they said, look at that, 30,000 acre feet.
The problem is the deep water, the algae loves it, and there's no marsh, so the algae is going to proliferate.
So they got more dirty water.
And it's just kind of, it's troubling as a scientist to see them set a course and then get halfway through it
and figure, you know, oh well, that's more water.
Water spilling into Keno is going to continue to be toxic or create toxic conditions,
and the lower Klamath River is going to be, continue to be polluted with nutrients spiraling that's causing fish diseases.
The Upper Klamath Project, this is a great historical photo from Klamath County, Oregon, and you know, it's a tremendous technological feat.
They drained the swamp.
They got water.
They expanded agriculture.
So this is Link River Dam.
It will be operated by the Bureau for lake levels.
It's been a power dam.
It will be no longer, and it operates also to back the lake up so you can go through the A Canal.
The Lost River and Tule Lake, as Bob mentioned, were a sink.
So now we have polluted the bejeebers out of them and hooked up their exhaust to the Klamath.
So you've got Upper Klamath Lakes turned into a nutrient factory,
and then you've got all of this exhaust water from the Lost River, Tule Lake, and also Lower Klamath Lake bed.
And when you put that into the Keno Reservoir, it's a very deadly cocktail.
And it's the Chinook experts say that they won't jump through there,
and you won't get salmon after you take the dams out.
And you used to be able to take a ferry boat 52 miles in Upper Klamath Lake
and basically go across the entire lake, and now it's 14,000 acres, and as you'll see, it isn't even usually wet.
This is the Lost River.
That's an old oxbow there where the river used to flow and used to fill this whole floodplain.
Now it's an irrigation ditch.
It has no Lost River suckers spawning in it.
It has no short-nosed suckers.
This is what it looks like.
There's no riparian zone.
There's no ecosystem function.
And so the TMDL in this basin, they say, well, we'll just like make a little bit of reduction in each field,
and then everything will be fine.
Wrong.
You need the marsh or it's going to continue to be nutrient polluted.
This is Tule Sump, formerly Tule Lake, and then they basically just take this water and they pump it through the hill.
And this is industrial agriculture.
Native frogs once created a den at night with their songs on its shores, but now there's silence.
This is what it looked like Bob showed you before.
This is Water Watch of Oregon's website photos.
That's what it looks like now.
Keep going.
This is an infrared photo.
And again, so what we have here is Tule Sump, almost solid in the corner, and then Lower Clamath Lake,
only a few of these polygons wet, all of this industrial ag.
And we must pay close attention to the ratio of spatial configuration of natural to degraded permanently transformed lands.
Some of them have to go back to swam.
And this is what Bob was showing.
These are industrially farmed lands within wildlife refuges, 50 years more of it.
Largest amount of pesticides in Siskiyou County, up to 7,500 pounds per acre per year.
Nothing in the KBRA, nothing in the DEIS, DEIR, and yet more and more we're finding out there's a synergy
between these pesticides and their deadly to Pacific salmon.
Where's our organic Clamath option?
Ecosystem function at the Lawson Tule Lake won't be restored under these deals.
And so that's going to have negative implications, including suckers and water quality.
And this is what it looks like.
This is not Photoshop.
I mean, this is what's coming out of that basin, and it's going into the Clamath.
And you shouldn't expect anything other than ecological dysfunction.
This is what it looks like.
I was standing here about a month ago with a couple of kids from the Resigini Rancheria on a field trip.
This is the water that sucks from here into the Kino Reservoir.
And that costs a lot of money, 92 million in subsidies.
And it's really, it blows my mind that it's even being proposed.
This is where Lower Clamath Lake was diked off.
It was completely dry by 1925.
This is what Lower Clamath Lake marshes look like now, less than three feet of water.
Both the National Science Foundation, National Academy of Sciences,
and the expert panels recommended that Lower Clamath Lake be considered for refilling,
both to restore populations of suckers that are buffered from extinction,
and for flows that are more normal.
This is where Lower Clamath Lake used to be.
And now essentially it's a dry basin that's intensively farmed.
This was all a connected wetland, and now it's farmed right up to the edges.
This is Kino Dam.
And so now this will be the headwaters of the Clamath River.
And yet it's got ecological function problems that are epic.
No pun intended, Andrew.
But here's, thank you, here's a straight strain.
And sometimes a straight strain comes in clear as gin,
because that's such a high concentration of ammonia.
But this is upwards of 50 percent of the flow on Kino Reservoir.
Kino Reservoir began to show some signs of ecological problems in the mid-60s
when every fish in the reservoir died.
And this was right after they dredged it deeper to increase storage
and basically tightened up the dikes around it.
There's no ecosystem function here. It's got to change.
This is dissolved oxygen that would kill a salmonid from July 1 to November 1.
This is a dead zone. We're not whistling Dixie.
You don't fix this. No salmon's going to jump through there.
That's the Chinook Panel experts who said that.
And this is what it looks like.
This is the marsh that would be storing cold water and filtering nutrients.
This is the field that would be pumping nutrients in,
shutting down ecological function, taking water instead of storing water.
And the Bureau of Reclamation is going to operate this dam,
as well as the one at the outlet of Upper Klamath Lake,
and they're going to manage in the same way since 1956.
It's very unwise.
And what kind of liability is the government going to have taking that dam over?
And that's part of this deal, and it's one to watch.
So Lower Klamath Lake's not going to be refilled for water storage or filtration
or for sucker habitat.
Kino's going to continue to be overloaded.
The salmon won't make it through Kino.
And there it is.
Without solving the water quality problems,
a fully self-sustaining run of Chinook to the upper basin is unlikely.
Listen to what the government says about that next week.
They're going to tell you everything's fine,
and they're going to pick the one sentence in that report that says that, too.
The reservoirs, I want them out now.
I think 2020 is risky.
We're going to go into a switch of the Pacific Decadal Isolation Cycle.
A lot of things are going to change.
But good things will happen.
Regardless, fish passage will be opened up.
More than 40 miles of the free-flowing river will be restored.
That will expunge some nitrogen, but not enough,
because it's going to continue to be overloaded.
But toxic algae problems will go away.
But there's problems where right below Iron Gate right now,
there's super thick algae beds, and they have flatworms in them, polychaetes,
that essentially harbor the intermediate disease organism for ceratomics,
Ashasta that kills all these fish.
That is just going to move.
That's the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's final EIS,
which is a pretty good science document, and it says just expect it to move upstream.
This is what it looks like coming out of Iron Gate now.
Studies show that 45 to 58 percent increase in nitrogen will occur after dams are removed,
because the dams, and this is July through September, the most biologically active period.
So what's it going to do if you increase nitrogen by 50 percent and it's already killing fish?
Undam the Shasta.
It's one of the broken cylinders in the Klamath's engine.
Here's the next picture from the Klamath Riverkeeper, August 21, 2009, 16 CFS,
who wants to go for a swim.
Who thinks a fish lives in there?
What's up with this?
And this is what it does to the Klamath.
So when the fish kill happened, they were drying up the Shasta,
and they were drying up the Scott, and they were putting in water that was foul.
So what's that doing versus if they were big, huge, cold water engines pumping the Klamath?
And ever since this deal started happening, all of these things in Siskiyou County,
the agencies just started capitulating.
Scott, next.
Salmon, functional habitat.
But the problem is in some years, the salmon from the Salmon River can't get to the ocean
because they're dying of disease in the main stem Klamath.
Trinity, the Trinity River, it says functional habitat up there against the sky.
Missed my color on that one.
But the Trinity River restoration flows mimic the natural hydrograph,
and we don't see anything about that on the other side.
And these are the flows.
There's 440.
That's in the KBRA, Appendix E5, and then people say, oh, no, no, that's not going to happen.
We're meeting all the time behind closed doors, and we're not going to let that happen.
I'm not satisfied.
And if the flow is down in this range and it's half effluent, you've got an ecological train wreck.
These are the numbers.
You can go look them up, Appendix E5.
750 killed the salmon.
Everything in yellow here is things under 750.
Next.
And then they're going to flatten the hydrograph, basically not run much water from October through February.
This is like Brave New World.
This is like nothing's happened like this before.
Any time you go in the opposite direction from historical function, you're going to have things.
Nature's going to play tricks on you.
This is what it should look like.
This is what it did before they took out the, you know, before they dried up Lower Klamath Lake.
And this is from the Coho Salmon Steelhead experts, and they said, how come you're not talking about this?
And the National Science Foundation, National Academy of Sciences said, fill it up for suckers and for the hydrograph.
It's not even in the DEIR as a consideration, so that makes it deficient under CEQA, at least.
And I think this is not just a one-time deal.
We're going to see this happening.
And juvenile salmon are going to be kicking it at an unsustainable rate.
And here's the sucker report card.
Basically, Upper Klamath Lake, they're having trouble recruiting.
So even when the little guys can get into the wetlands, they're dying of water quality problems is my hypothesis.
There's no question they're not in Lost River.
They're not in Tule Sump B.
They're not in Lower Klamath Lake.
And there's a hybrid population of short-nosed over here in Gerber.
And the one population is in the dam they made bigger in Clear Lake.
This does not make ecological stability.
And unless some of these populations are restored, Upper Klamath Lake population is unstable, and I believe it will lead to extinction in 50 years.
It's what you need, NEPA, to declare a national policy which will encourage productive and enjoyable harmony between man and his environment to promote the efforts which will prevent or eliminate damage to the environment and the biosphere and stimulate the health and welfare of man to enrich the understanding of the ecological systems and the natural resources important to the nation.
They're not doing that in the D-A-S-D-E-I-R.
Give me the sunset slide.
Thanks very much, Pat.
Our final speaker, please.
Haley.
Good evening.
I'm Haley Hutt, Hoopa Valley Tribal Council member.
And like you, I had a different idea of tonight's event.
So I don't have a PowerPoint presentation.
And you probably can't see my prop.
I thought it was funny when Andrew had his net out here with the fish jumping in it because this is a picture of one of our Hoopa Valley Tribal fishermen net full of, what is this, green algae?
Some kind of scary swamp monster.
But I'll pass it around.
I think I'll need some light to see my notes.
Can we bring up the lights, please?
I want to say right off the bat that the Hoopa Valley Tribe supports dam removal.
I want to make that very clear because while we've been objecting to this KBRA, KHSA deal for years, we've been at the table and we've been booted from the table and we still get information slowly but surely are trying to still influence and participate in this deal.
But we object to it for all of these, all the reasons that these gentlemen describe.
I've been on council for four months and it would have been really great to have this presentation four months ago before they handed me the KBRA and the KHSA, which I'm telling you is a book about that thick of what this deal is all about.
The Hoopa Valley Tribe has been protecting the Trinity River forever.
But in 2000, we did pass the record of a decision.
Congress passed it into law and that is our Trinity restoration program that we've been operating since 2000.
And so we have a lot invested in the science of river systems and what it would take to restore a river and we're in that process of restoring the Trinity River.
Our goal is to restore fish to pre-dam levels.
Thank you.
The Trinity River restoration program started with science and our science said that we're going to need at least 51% of the water and that's what we battled for and that's what we won in our deal.
And really the record of decision is a modern day treaty.
As you may know, tribes are treaty based and our relationship with the United States government is based on this treaty relationship.
And within our treaties, it says that the United States acts as the trustee and we're the beneficiary.
And I may be making this sound elementary, but what that means is that they protect us in our goals to maintain the sustainability of our resources, such as fish and water and also for our timber.
The same thing as with our forest lands, we seek to maintain sustainability and if we weren't, the United States would step in and say, hey, we're going to make sure you're sustaining your forests, you're sustaining your rivers and your waters and your fish.
And if anyone else tried to interrupt that or stop that from happening or get in the way from that happening, the United States will step in and say, no, as a trustee for this tribe or any tribe, we're going to make sure that this forest is sustainable, that this river is sustaining the fish that we need for our survival.
And we feel as the Hoopa Valley tribe that salmon is not just the survival of our physical existence, but it is our cultural, emotional and spiritual home base.
So anyway, of course we were looking over to see what was going on with the Klamath River and in 2002 it's really important to know that our sister tribe, the Yurok tribe, in that year they got their fish quotas and more.
They did actually very well in fishing for salmon in 2002 and the salmon kill happened at mile, I want to say 18, and that salmon was destined for the Trinity River.
So we are very interested in what happens in the Klamath River and we also, our tribe is on the Klamath River so we have Klamath River fishing rights and Trinity River fishing rights.
And so in our efforts to restore the Trinity River, of course we're interested and have deep roots in restoring the Klamath River.
So we started looking at this agreement and we identified all of the things that these gentlemen described.
I kind of want to just say the short version of what we discovered, in this agreement it does not guarantee water for fish.
So 378,000 acre feet are promised right off the top to the irrigators and that leaves less than what is needed for the fish to survive, which is what these gentlemen have gone over.
But I just want to show you our graph of what that would look like.
These are all years alongside here and these are months and these are all the months, June, July, August, September and October,
in which the same amount of water and same amount of conditions could result in the same kind of 2002 fish kill.
We're very alarmed by that.
I just have to back up a second because, you know, all of us on both sides of this deal, we want dam removal and we are looking for the best interest of the environment.
We know that there's the wetlands, the migrating fish, I mean, pardon me, migrating birds and various fish that are all endangered right now.
And it obviously takes no amount of common sense to look at those pictures of green water and seeing signs that say don't let your dog in the water,
to be horrified that we accept and tolerate this in our environment and that no human being is unaffected by that kind of immoral activity.
So we want dam removal. But we want it done right. And part of the deal is that it terminates our trusty relationship with the United States.
And the sister tribes, which is the Klamath tribe, the Crute tribe and the Yurok tribe, have voluntarily waived their rights and that is their right to do so.
But we, the Hoopa tribe, we are not waiving our rights. We will never waive our rights. And I believe that the Rezeguini and Quartz Valley weren't even a part of the conversation
and their rights are going to be waived if this bill is passed by Congress.
Also, our efforts for the Trinity River will become subordinate to this agreement if it is passed by Congress.
No one can take away our treaty relationship with the United States unless it's passed into law by Congress.
So I guess if this is such a terrific plan, I don't see any reason why our rights need to be waived.
But what it would mean is that when we come to the day that there is not enough water for the fish and our rights are waived against our will,
the United States will say, sorry, we don't act on your behalf any longer. We act on behalf of the irrigators.
And this agreement says that 378,000 acre feet of water will go to them first for the farms that you saw in the pictures, that checkerboard business.
That's the priority in this agreement. And we will have no rights and no protection from the United States.
We also have a government-to-government relationship. We have a unique kind of thing with tribes.
And I don't feel like we have had the kind of communication that Obama has promised us in this deal.
And it's really sad because, well, this is probably too personal, but I'm a big fan of President Obama.
And if this termination takes place, this is something that has not happened since the 50s.
It's really going into new territory on our relationship with the United States.
And I think that's very disappointing. And I think that our continued relationship is a benefit to everyone
because all we're trying to defend is the fish and the water and the environment in this particular activity.
So we, Senator Merkley is going to carry this bill forward. His goal is to move it forward by November 1st.
And we have responded. And our letter is on the back page. And I would please encourage you to pick it up.
There are 17 very specific reasons why we object to it, mostly because we're concerned about the environment
and also we're concerned about our rights. Senator Merkley, I just came back from Washington, D.C. last year.
I mean, last week. It feels like a year ago. And despite our urging them to consider our objections,
I do think it may be moving forward. While we object to this, we do support dam removal, as I said.
And what we support is called the no action alternative. It's the fastest straight shot to dam removal that exists.
And what it means is that the California Water Board has been allowing Pacific Corp to continue operating its dams
without complying with the Clean Water Act. So just recently we did go down and testify to the water board
and said, you know, why are you allowing them to continue year after year while it is against the Clean Water Act?
They are not enforcing the Clean Water Act because they're waiting for this big deal. So how did this happen?
Pacific Corp makes $27 million in profit a year. And I don't know what the irrigators and farmers make.
But this is a terrific plan that can roll on for years and years while they are not required to meet the Clean Water Act
or the FERC licensing, which would enforce environmental. I have another graph that I'm sorry is not on the PowerPoint presentation.
But these are all the stages. This is the Klamath settlement flow chart. And every single stop here is where this plan can be derailed
or prolonged. So this goal of 2020 for dam removal has a dozen opportunities to be to not go forward.
And who does that benefit? That benefits Pacific Corp, who doesn't have to meet environmental requirements
and can continue to make their incredible profit. And everybody can feel wonderful about themselves
as they all signed up to remove the dams because they are part of the dam removal project here.
But in fact, they are not going to protect the environment. They are not going to protect the fish.
And they are going to place all of it in very dangerous circumstances in this process.
So again, our alternative is that if the water board enacts the Clean Water Act, that will trigger FERC licensing process.
And what happens with FERC is that they will require a fish ladder to be built on all these dams.
And Pacific Corp already knows that those fish dams are going to cost far more than dam removal.
So it's much more to their benefit to remove the dams. And it's even more to their benefit to be in this terrific KBRA,
KHSA, because for one thing, all the Indians' rights will be waived, so they won't have to answer to the United States government.
And they have all these opportunities to prolong the process and continue profiting.
And if it ever does come down, they don't have to pay the whole bill, because $90 million will be paid by California taxpayers.
Another $10 million will be paid by the users in California of the energy.
And Oregon will pay, I believe, $180 million of it.
And California, so I think our greatest concern is this $100 million that we'll flip the bill for.
And this sounds very familiar to me, if you're watching the news and the little protests going around the country.
Yeah, big business is all about the taxpayers flipping the bill for what they've created.
And this is just another government buyout for big business, as far as that's how we perceive it.
There is a very quick and direct way to remove dams, and that's to enforce the laws that we voted for,
the Clean Water Act, NEPA, the Environmental Act, for FERC to trigger their license and say,
we're not tolerating this any longer, we the people have voted for something different.
We didn't vote for this green water, we didn't vote for migrating birds dying, the fish dying,
your dog dying, you know, who wants to take a stroll and look at this?
So, you know, for us, there's a lot on the line.
And again, not only because our culture and our livelihood is based on the salmon,
but also because we do have this unique relationship with the United States that we value.
And we believe that the United States honoring and respecting that relationship is a value to all Americans.
So I guess my time is up.
Thank you.
Thank you very much, Haley.
Now, Rain has some questions for the panelists.
I'm just going to clarify some areas for folks, and we're going to open it up.
I'm just going to take just a moment.
As some of you know, I did pass around a document that gives some proponents of the KBRA,
KHSA, and some dissenting opinions about it just for clarification for all of you,
so that you can kind of synthesize.
And I want to just pose a few questions to the panel and to the audience for you to start thinking about,
just to give it some structure.
Some of the things we've heard tonight are difficulty surrounding water for irrigators first over fish.
I think that we can all agree that this is a major point.
There's a social justice issue related to Huba Tribe not having the Department of Justice be able to represent them.
So this would be an issue we could surround questions.
The legislation by Senator Merkley, if there are questions about that,
I think that that would be really helpful for clarification.
What does it say? What are the concerns?
Federal regulatory process, many people have expressed a concern.
The Klamath Dams are not the only dams that are slated for decommissioning.
What does this say if we set a precedent that we need to have some sort of agreement
rather than have it go through the process?
So I know that there are some questions about that.
ESA, will ESA be honored if the water levels or the in-stream flows drop beneath a certain level?
Water quality, so forming framing questions around water quality issues.
And then I guess just Pacifico not having a financial burden here,
or the ratepayers taking the financial burden, or the state of California having to take some of the financial burden,
if you'd like to frame questions around that.
Also just stakeholder process that the agreements went through.
Keep in mind the stakeholder process that many proponents of the KHSA and KBRA feel
that there is no other way to get the dams out.
So be framing questions around realistically, is FERC going to work?
Because remember that's one of the points for proponents.
And so just in trying to be fair and really get a sense around this,
and please do remember that everyone on this panel would like you to frame your comments,
either I'm pro-dam removal or I'm anti-dam removal.
Other issues should follow after that for your comments on the EIR EIS, very important.
So I guess I'd like to open it up.
Duncan McLaren is going to be our moderator here.
Three-minute limits.
They will be strictly enforced as much as possible, please, to respect that.
I want to talk to the panel, though.
Okay, my name's Jen Calt.
I'm on the NEC board, and I'm not speaking for the NEC board right now,
because since we decided to not sign the KBRA,
we have not reestablished a new position on any of this.
And I haven't read the draft EIS EIR either.
But what I would like to ask is related to the scientific study
that the NEC commissioned a few years ago that helped guide our position.
And the scientists found that there wouldn't be enough water for fish,
but recently Fish and Wildlife Service hired an independent science panel
that came to the same conclusion,
but they also concluded that dam removal is the only path to...
You can answer, Bob.
The Fish and Wildlife Service panel found that the NEC's science study
was a pretty good assessment,
but that dam removal is the only path to survival of the salmon runs
and that we can deal with a lot of the problems later,
which is what a lot of the pro-KBRA settlement parties have been saying all along.
And so I wonder, have you read that study, and what do you think about it?
Thanks.
I have not read that study, so...
But I have not read the study, but I guess I'm not sure exactly what it is.
But we need the dams out, but fish are still going to need water with the dams out.
And there's no reason to tie dam removal to a bad water deal.
These dams don't supply the irrigation water,
and whether they're in or out won't affect irrigation water,
and whether they're in or out won't also affect the power rates that these folks pay.
So there's really no logical reason other than political to tie the two together.
And when you get to tying them, you know, people are saying,
well, you need a deal to get dams out.
The FERC process doesn't work that well always to get dams out.
There's some truth to that.
But at the same time, FERC and Clean Water Act and those laws give us leverage
to strike a deal that isn't a bad deal on water and isn't a bad deal on refuges.
The bottom line on flow, I see a lot of theoretical things about averages,
but the bottom lines are in Appendix E5.
They go down as low as 440, and I can't envision how you could run the river lower in winter
and then down to as low as 440 in the summer
and not have algae blooms that are worse than at present, and they're lethal at present.
I just realized I forgot to follow the instructions and say I'm for a dam removal, so.
Definitely make those comments to the Department of the Interior.
Next, please.
Well, my name is Craig Tucker, and I'm the Klamath negotiator for the Karuk tribe,
and I'm not willing to limit my comments to three minutes,
so I want somebody to donate me some minutes.
There's three minutes. Can I get three more?
I think nine's good.
So I started working on Klamath in 2002,
and I started working with leaders from the Karuk, the Yurok, the Klamath, and the Hupa tribes,
and we decided instead of making this a fight over the dams,
instead of making it a fight with the government, instead of making it a fight with FERC,
we decided to take it straight to the company that owned the dams,
and we designed what was, which I think is probably the first and only corporate responsibility campaign
aimed at removing dams.
In 2002 or 2003, I think about 30 of us, almost all tribal members, went to Scotland,
and we crashed the shareholders' meeting of Scottish Power,
and those at the time were the guys who owned Pacificor.
We did that for three years, went to Scotland three times,
and ruined their shareholders' meeting and started shareholder organizing
to drive these guys into capitulations to let these dams go.
What they did instead is they sold the dams to Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett's company.
And so for the next three years, we went to Omaha, Nebraska,
and really had a showdown with Warren Buffett on his own turf
in front of 30,000 adoring fans in a giant basketball arena.
It was a very bizarre experience.
At the same time, all this activism was going on,
and this is something that I have to say that EPIC, NEC, the Sierra Club,
and these other guys were not a part of.
At the same time we were doing that, we decided we needed more than dam removal, we needed water.
And the tribes had all been engaged with litigation with these irrigators for decades since the fish kill.
And in fact, the Hoopa and the Yurok tribe filed a tribal trust claim against the United States
for breach of trust for having the flow regime that resulted in the fish kill.
Both of them settled out of court because it was a claim they could not win.
60,000 fish died because of low flows,
and tribes could not use the trust obligation of the United States to win in court.
It's the most unjust thing that's happened in the Klamath Basin, I think.
We decided that what we had to do if we wanted the dams out,
FERC has never, FERC has never successfully ordered a dam removal, ever.
Every dam that's been removed in the United States has been a result of a negotiated settlement agreement
between the dam owner and stakeholders in the river basin.
We knew that was the path to dam removal, but we wanted more than dam removal, we wanted to balance water use.
We sat down, and over the course of five years, and the Hoopa tribe sat down with us for most of that,
and negotiated a water balancing act.
Any way we cut it, at the end of the day, we were going to have to go to Washington, D.C.,
and pass legislation to take out dams and restore this river basin.
And we knew that it was going to have to, at some point, be a bipartisan effort.
So indeed, we worked with the Klamath Project irrigators,
or the enemies of the tribe since those guys showed up.
We sat down and we did work out a water sharing agreement.
Now, because we were denied the Karuk, the Yurok, the Klamath, American Rivers,
Trout Unlimited, the Salmon River Restoration Council, Klamath Riverkeeper,
and all the other great organizations that were part of this were denied an opportunity to get up here
and give you guys our version of the PowerPoint, you didn't get the right story.
Thirty to fifty percent of what you've been told tonight is either wrong or an exaggeration.
Now, we do not solve all the problems in the Klamath Basin with these agreements.
We do not get rid of all the farmers. We don't rebuild all the wetlands.
But we do pull off the biggest dam removal in the history of the world, as far as I know.
And I think it's to be the biggest basin-wide restoration effort in the history of the world.
It doesn't fix everything.
But I think these guys are really on the road of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
And if we don't seize this opportunity to move the ball downfield while we have it right now,
we're going to blow it.
Because I don't know if you all have noticed, but getting stuff through Congress ain't easy.
And we're going to need, we need you guys to help us move the ball.
And instead of writing nasty letters to congressmen saying this deal sucks,
we need you guys writing letters saying help us move the ball.
And if we still got to deal with water quality issues at Kino at the end of the day,
I can guarantee the Karuk tribe and Craig Tucker will be in the front seat dealing with that next.
We don't think we're solving it all here.
We are getting down the road.
And I would say we're not waiving the Hoopa tribe's rights with this agreement.
We refute that allegation.
And if you go to KlamathRestoration.org, I've got fact sheets and I've got documents that technically refute and legally refute
a lot of these, what I would call erroneous claims that were made here tonight.
Craig, where's our debate here?
I've been debating you guys for years.
I would have had it tonight.
I've debated you guys, John Driscoll moderated a debate.
But...
Because there's no use for us rushing and saying...
Well, I think he was done.
He got six minutes.
Next.
Well, can I respond to that?
Yeah.
Thank you.
Just briefly before we have our next question, Haley Hutt wanted to say something.
And I just want to say out of respect for our last speaker, this is another reason to say you're either for dam removal or against.
Haley, please.
I just want to read what it says, the United States acting in its capacity as trustee for the federally recognized tribes of the Klamath Basin
hereby provides interim assurances as stated in section 15.3.8.B and conditional or permanent assurances that it will not assert
tribal water or fishing right theories or tribal trust theories in a matter or tribal water or trust rights, whatever they may be,
in a matter that will interfere with the diversion, use or reuse of water for the Klamath Reclamation Project that is not precluded by the
limitation on diversions of water as provided in Appendix E.1 in any administrative context or proceeding or judicial proceeding or otherwise.
That is waiving our rights.
That is why the National Congress of American Indians, the largest organization of tribes in America, has signed a resolution saying they don't support this.
They have lawyers, too.
They've read it as well.
So they're not just supporting Hootba.
They're saying that we don't support the United States waiving our rights without our agreeing to it.
And that is what is going on here.
Does it say what the CARE Act actually signed?
I think that's the wrong terminology to use.
What it does is the United States agrees in this agreement and they agree with a group of your own Klamath that the actions in this agreement are
in line with the trust obligations to the tribes.
It doesn't mean that the tribe cannot file a water rights claim.
It does not mean that the tribe cannot file a water rights claim.
It means the Department of Justice won't be your lawyer.
That's right.
That's why what happened is the Department of Justice would be in this predicament of being your lawyer at the same time they're the group of tribes' lawyers.
They can't sue themselves.
We're too, in fact, like you said earlier.
The Hootba tribe has EPA recognized water quality authority on the Klamath River, and yet they won't have standing to sit on the Klamath Basin Coordinating Committee,
Water Quality Committee, because they're not signatories to the tribe.
And neither will the other two tribes who weren't even invited to the discussions.
And just to be clear for the audience, and thank you so much, Craig, and thank you, Haley, just to be clear, what we are talking about is that the Hootba tribe,
the Hootba tribe in this case, because Rezeguin is not, but the Hootba tribe would not be represented by the Department of Justice,
which for the Hootba tribe is a social justice concern.
But again, Craig Tucker is saying they can file a water rights claim, a fishing rights claim, just to be clear.
And let's turn it over to our next question.
Hello. My name is Angelo Haynes. I'm a Corpsmember of the Conservation Corps.
I in no way, shape, or form speak for them.
I'm very new to these issues.
However, I do support dam removal.
Some questions that I have are, are there any other dam removal projects of this kind that have been done in our nation?
And have they been successful?
And, you know, can we learn from things from those sorts of projects?
To gain some recognition in the community and to gauge voter opinion,
have there been any political surveys or anything of that nature polled for that sort of thing, or are you planning on doing it?
Are there any issues with aquatic invasive species in the upper Klamath Basin areas?
And would restoration efforts be started in the upper Klamath Basin area as it seems as though the history of water manipulation seems to be strongest up there?
Thank you.
The actions on restoration in the upper basin are seriously constrained by the land allocation,
including the farming on the Tulalip lease lands and the lower Klamath lease lands going forward.
The, your first question was, are there other successful dam removals?
Yes, the Kandybeck Dam in the Edmonds Dam on the Kandybeck River in Maine and the current removal of the Awa Dam in Washington is proceeding.
I don't think that anybody's run polls, and I think that this has not been an issue that's been sufficiently in the public mind for us to have meaningful results yet.
So I think it's good for us to be educating.
Was, is there another one?
There's also a Condit Dam on the White Salmon River in Washington being removed.
So as well as many other smaller dams throughout the country.
Sandy Dam, Sandy River on, was it Marmot Dam on Sandy River in Oregon?
And then Savage Rapids, Oak Hill, Gold Ray Dam, Gold Ray.
So there's, they're coming down. These are going to come down.
The state agrees, the people agree, the Fed agree.
Did I answer your question?
Yeah, and I was just, the other question I had was just about invasive aquatic species.
Oh, toxic blue-green algae is an invasive aquatic of sorts.
It's invading all ecosystems in the West that are out of ecological balance.
And so the marsh function in the upper Klamath is essential for its, for combating it.
And these chemistry things kind of indirect from ecological function, they're very complex.
And yet, if you look at them, they're simple at the same time.
They're complex in their chemistry, but simple in their logic.
And then the question is, how much will we give back for the Klamath for ecosystem function?
Thank you.
Thank you. My name is Dave Bitz.
I'm a commercial salmon fisherman based in Eureka, and I'm also the president of the Pacific Coast
Federation of Fisherman's Associations.
And we are a party to the KVRA-KHSA agreements.
I definitely support dam removal.
It also chaps my ass that it's going to take until the year 20 at best to get them out.
Our board has found that very difficult to wrap our minds around.
I think it would be wonderful if we could, as a guy whose main concern is to see lots and lots of salmon
swimming around in the ocean so that there's a lot for me to catch, I think it would be wonderful if we could restore
the Klamath Basin to its pristine condition before any of this Bureau of Reclamation stuff happened.
But I don't think that's very realistic.
I just don't think it's going to happen.
We could spend the rest of our lives and our children's and our grandchildren's lives throwing rocks at the
farmers on the Klamath project, and they would love to throw rocks back at us, but we wouldn't get anywhere.
We'd be stuck with the status quo.
And so reluctantly, I have come to accept that, okay, 2020, that's when the dams, if we're lucky, will come out.
Let's do everything we can to see that they do, in fact, come out that year.
There is a lot of steps to the process left.
There's a lot of places where it could all come apart, as you mentioned.
But those are also each of those places where it could come apart is, in a sense, a part of the vetting of the whole
thing, where it's reevaluated like the secretarial determination next year.
Does this make sense?
Is it in the national interest to remove these dams?
That could be seen as an essential part of the process of getting there, as well as a stumbling block or an off ramp or whatever.
So I believe and our board believes that these agreements are by far the likeliest path to dam removal and to fishery restoration.
The KBRA offers substantially more water for fish in most years than status quo on the order of 100,000 acre feet of water per year more.
There is a reason that came from the negotiations why there are not minimum flows guaranteed in the KBRA.
A different path was taken to get to the same result without specifically saying guaranteed minimum flows because those words
were a deal breaker.
And the people on the fish side, if you will, of this whole thing, realized that the only way we were going to move forward was to get a deal.
And so they found a way around that deal breaking terminology, which has been referenced here many times, to achieve the same result
without saying those killer words.
KBRA explicitly, I believe there's language in the agreement that explicitly says that it does not supersede any existing law such as the Endangered Species Act
or the Clean Water Act or any biological opinion.
It does what it does.
It doesn't do what it doesn't do.
It doesn't deal a whole lot with problems in the Scott and Shasta.
Those are big problems.
It doesn't deal adequately with problems at Keno.
Those are big problems.
It also does not solve the issue of settlement of the West Bank, for God's sakes.
What were they thinking?
But there is nothing in the agreement that precludes or prohibits or impedes efforts to address issues that are not resolved through the agreement.
And I have to say also another reason why you might not want to support it is because the KBRA cannot create water in years of severe drought.
It just can't do that.
If you think you can get an agreement that can do that, I think you're going to be negotiating with a different party.
But it's just that's the way it is.
There are some years when there just isn't enough water.
Fish have lived with it for thousands of years.
We're going to have to learn to live with it, too.
Thank you.
I wanted to ask a question to the panel based on the comments of the last speaker related to ESA, because this is something that has been a question of mine for quite some time.
If sufficient flows are not present in the Klamath and ESA has to kick in because salmon are dying or salmon are predicted to die, what will that process look like?
Do you have to file a lawsuit?
Do you have to wait and go through a process while the salmon are dying?
What does that process look like?
This is my question about how the ESA will work in lieu of adequate in-stream flows.
A couple of responses.
First, I do want to just correct one thing that was said, because I think it's important.
We do not, by this agreement, limit Klamath Project irrigation use by 100,000 acre feet every year.
What that 100,000 acre feet is, is they took the single highest use of water that they once used in a dry year, and they reduced that by 100,000 to come up with 330, which will go up to 340 later.
But in the wet years, they're actually, the KVRA allocates more water than they've ever used before, except in a couple years.
In wet years, about the average in the average years.
The reason they like it is, one, even in the dry years, they typically didn't use up to the 100,000 acre feet more.
Only one dry year out of the whole history did they use 100,000 acre feet more.
In fact, that's what I showed in that chart up there in terms of water use.
The reason that Klamath Project irrigators like it is because in the dry years, they get to use more water than they currently do under ESA regulation, based on what litigation under the ESA has required reclamation to meet as minimum flows for the river during specific times.
This agreement intends to undermine the ESA by not building an agreement around meeting the current buyout flows, but instead allocating water to farmers first and saying, we are going to support regulatory assurances under the ESA that will deliver them that much water,
which may mean that people who are part of the agreement maybe can't sue under the ESA if the farmers are only using the amount guaranteed in it.
So it will be up to other people to sue with a lot of pressure on the agencies to come up with a new buyout that doesn't have the old minimums, because if the old minimums, you can't meet the A guarantees.
This was a great year, your question about ESA compliance. So the KBRA does not eviscerate the ESA. The ESA will still be in place.
The concern though is what happens if all fish go extinct or Congress amends the act like they did for wolves to carve out an exception under the ESA.
A lot of things could happen and the ESA protection could go away. So basically the KBRA would not be there to maintain the flows that are currently described under the ESA.
Under the California Endangered Species Act there will be a blanket take permit for suckers in the lost area of Tule Lake, even though they are not part of the DEISDEIR.
We are not trying to get this ecosystem back to Christina. We just have the 20,000 acres in the wildlife refuges and the margins of Kino Reservoir and key pieces of real estate around Upper Clam and Clay.
Then essentially make a one time investment and nature basically drives the water purification system because it's ecosystem function.
We spent $500 million on water subsidies and the shell game since 2001 and essentially if we made those same investments in strategic acquisitions and kicked these guys off to leased lands then we'd be home now with that money.
If you get into a Fascian bargain like this and you let them stay on the leased lands you can't get the climate ecosystem back. So you've got to settle for a deal not just that's good socially and makes you feel good while you're in the room but something that's going to actually work for the river.
This does not work for the river. You can read the Chinook Expert Panel report.
Thank you for the blurb by your vision.
Yeah, you should read that report. I agree.
Thank you all.
My name is Felice Pace. I live at Clamath near the mouth.
I wanted, I am in favor of dam removal and I actually have a question, but I also have to make a comment.
Craig Tucker got up and he kind of said, well this started with a trip to Scotland. Well I remember when that happened it didn't start then, Craig. It started a long, long time ago and Craig stands on the shoulders of some people that were physically kind of small but they're really giants and they're no longer with us.
A lot of us know them and knew them and we're honored to do that. And that gets me to really the core that you saw here today and it kind of goes to Peter's question is disunity.
We built in this basin and I was honored to be part of it. We built a unity of tribes, environmentalists, fishermen. We built a strong coalition and it's divided and it's weak and it doesn't exist anymore.
It's in disarray and we need to put it back together. We need to put it back together, Craig, because the dams are not the goal.
You know how they say you can win the battle and lose the war? When I left for a while, 10 years ago, left the activism about 10 years ago to go down and work for the Yurok tribe,
I told folks that were there, Craig wasn't there yet, but I said, you know, watch out because we can get the dams out and not restore the river.
Keep in mind what the goal is and this ecological restoration. You know, ecological restoration is not going back to pristine, okay, but it's using natural processes as your guide and it's the cheapest way to do it.
It's where we're going to have to move in restoration, I think, because the money's not going to be there, is to using nature to get the job done.
So the disunity is a terrible thing here and it's a weakness. And you know what the elders, I was, what the elders taught us, and there's many people in this room that know this,
is they said whatever the leaders are doing, if the leaders are unified, the people are going to be unified.
And if the leaders are disunified, the medicine people, you know, then everything's going to be disunified.
And I look at the river and that's what I see. And we can't restore the river until we restore our spirit and our spirit of unity.
That's going to, we're not going to do that by giving up or, you know, not fighting. We're going to do that by working our way through this conflict.
And now we're out of the back rooms into the public arena and, you know, this idea of fear that we can't do this or we can't question anything because we got a fear.
It's not in the company's interest for the dams to stay in. The dams are going to come out. The issue is what else is going to go with that.
It gets me to my question, which is the National Academy of Sciences, National Research Council said full basin management,
we need to look at flows holistically, ecological restoration. We have this idea of whole basin management,
but we're managing the Trinity separately. We're managing the Shasta and the Scott.
The reason they didn't get into deals is because Fish and Game said, oh, no, no, that's our daily whip.
And, you know, and so in any case, that was before you got here, Craig. So you don't have no way of knowing that.
So don't call out and say, you know, something that you fucking don't know because you don't know.
OK, so so I'm not the one that called out somebody else called out out of the audience. All right.
So my question is ecological whole basin management. We're way away from it. How do we get to what are the steps?
How can we move towards whole basin management? What's needed?
I think we have to demand it and we have to reshift legislation to include it because without it, we won't get the river back.
We will not get a functioning ecosystem. And therefore, our side doesn't win.
And that includes all the folks here for the party traps.
I want to just say that, you know, we appreciate everybody who came and respect everyone in this room.
And so we will just forget that that little moment happens.
And we do appreciate Feliçe getting passionate and being passionate about it as well as Craig.
Thank you so much for being passionate and being here.
My name is Sunshine Watkins and I am from the business council of the Resigini Rancheria.
We are for dam removal. KVRA, KHSA, 2020.
They implement restoration as part of the project. When will the restoration take place? We need water now.
The impact the dams have on the river and wildlife allocates we need. We are in need of restoration now.
We as the Resigini are left out of any decision making, which means we don't get invited.
Nobody talks to us about it. And making the Klamath River as with a few other local tribes that are left out.
The upper Klamath has lost their way of life through the sucker fish.
And we on the Klamath River are on the same path. And it's a scary path.
We are all fish people and we depend on fish as a way of life. Without water we have no or little fish.
If we start restoring now by putting back natural habitat with marshes and ponds, we will help our water and wildlife, our fish,
which in turn helps the people. They go hand in hand. We help Mother Earth, she helps us.
If we take from her, she takes from us. And it's going to keep on going, it's going to get worse if we don't step up now.
I agree we have to get the ball moving. And it's not only in our court though. So we all have to work together. Thank you.
The Resigini Rancheria has posted information on ecological information about the Klamath.
If you go to Klamath ER, ecological restoration, or Klamath emergency room, whichever you think is more fitting, it's KlamathER.org.
Lots of information there.
Hi, I'm Greg King of the Siskiyou Land Conservancy. For two years I negotiated these Klamath deals for the North Coast Environmental Center.
I was in those rooms many times and my very first meeting was the one in which there is a small conspiracy to actually kick out two parties,
Oregon Wild and Water Watch, Bob Hunter here is from Water Watch. Because, well basically it's the people who do too much.
There were these other excuses that were made up, but it was very clearly choreographed and it was very unsettling and it was destructive.
Two of the most important groups on the Oregon side of the issue were booted out because they weren't going to put up with the shenanigans that were going on.
And they were shenanigans and they continue to be. This is not so much a dam removal deal as a water deal.
This is about control of water. Water is more valuable than gold.
The out of basin transfer deal, one of the things we tried to do was strengthen that.
That there would be a total prohibition on transferring water out of the Klamath basin.
There was, we got no traction on that. We got no traction on a lot of things. Rain, I think it was rain, or no,
Jen mentioned the study that we commissioned, which has now been verified that the water flows would not be sufficient enough to sustain fish even with dams out.
There are all these problems. And Craig, I apologize, I know you've worked hard for many years, but it's really galling to hear you say that 30 to 50% of what these people are telling us is wrong.
You know that's not true. You guys hired three scientists to evaluate the play.
Just hold on. Hold on. You know what? You know that's not true. 30 to 50% of what they say.
Pat and Bob in particular are two of the foremost experts on the Klamath River. A lot.
You know, and I saw all this stuff happening, and I heard you say that don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good so many times as this backroom deal was created.
And it was so disturbing. And it still is. And now we see it kind of being shoved through.
And it could be the end of the Klamath River salmon. I hope not. I'm for dam removal, right? We all are, I think.
But to see what's happening with the water. That's what this is. It's a water deal. It's not a dam removal deal.
It was orchestrated by Pacific Corps, the US government, and the irrigators with a lot of help from American Rivers, Trout Unlimited, Haru, Yurok, Klamath Tribes.
The tribes are particularly pinched. I appreciate that. You know, for 150 years now. Longer.
But, you know, the friends of the river dropped out. They said, we can't go along with this.
They're a very respected mainstream river group out of Sacramento that said, we're not doing this.
Hupa said, we're not doing this. NEC said, we're not doing this.
You know, and then the other two groups that would have said it were booted.
And there are other dissenters in the room who really couldn't, you know, say anything, you know, state and federal representatives who have been kind of shifted around.
And so it's important to look at this as a backroom Bush era led deal that is now being transferred over into the present times.
And that's where we are. So thank you all for being here.
Applause
So we have, you have a comment, yes? A question?
I just wanted to just say that what you're hearing there, obviously, is, you know, is it right to have water for irrigators before water for fish?
That's essentially part of what you're hearing and then a critique of the process, you know, just to keep that in mind.
But again, dam removal. So make your comments to the Department of the Interior, pro dam removal, not pro dam removal, and then KBRKHSA.
Because 80 percent of the people in Siskiyou County are united by demagoguery and fear based arguments, oppose dam removal and also deny toxic algae.
So they are united. We need to get educated and get more united.
Well, I've been spending about the last six months trying to understand this. This is a KBRA document.
I've been making calls, talking to people right up to this morning.
Blinchi and I were talking about it some earlier today.
My name is Peter Kennecan.
And I've been actually hoping because government processes are not set up for real education.
You know, there's a whole system of testimony that renders people fairly powerless, right?
Whether it's local government, wherever else, it's not government's people's fault. It's just the way it works.
I was actually hoping to come here and learn something.
And what I've learned is that when you set things up to just be one side and no real discussion, no civility to actually talk about it, what you'll learn is that there's sides.
And what I've learned today is there were sides. And I knew that six months ago.
So I would really ask that organizations, all organizations, work towards unity and do that by respecting difference in the way they actually design these things.
Because otherwise it just creates bigger splits. We're seeing that happen right here.
So to Epic and NEC, we could have done better, but we're all learning. I hope it's better next time.
Peter, you want to help put a debate together? Because that's the other format that in order for us to inform people about a 3,000 page document,
we can't have a debate at the same time as inform people about the deficiencies.
And so more forums would be better.
But the arguments in favor of the government's position have been well known, covered by the government in many meetings throughout the community prior.
And there are several websites that Craig has. And the information from the pro-down party, pro-deal removal settlement people is well known.
And so this is a format for different views.
But thank you.
It's been simple too. I mean it's heated because people have been asking.
And I just, I mean I think I would like to thank our last presenter. Is this? Yeah. Okay.
So I'd like to thank you for your comments. And I also just wanted to say that again, part of the reason that we designed it like this is because people were not,
people who had a dissenting view and who had some concerns that were based in ecology, environmental groups who really wanted to make sure that they could speak,
give a voice to the voiceless, so the sucker fish, et cetera, wanted a forum to be able to inform people about their concerns.
They also wanted to say, hey, we're pro-down removal, but we have these concerns that have not been heard by the community.
And so because the public meetings are going to very strongly address that, I just wanted to let you know that that's kind of why we set it up this way.
And it was in no way meant to be a debate by for against. It's just meant to give you another view in addition to the public, you know, public presentations.
You're going to hear this next week. So we have other other speakers, other questions.
Mark Lovelace, I am speaking for myself. I'm not as a member of the board of supervisors.
Our board of supervisors has supported these agreements. But since I'm the alternate on the climate issues, I don't want to put in words in Ryan's mouth here.
But I really want to comment on the point that's been made. A number of people talked about unity, the need for unity on this issue.
And there is unity. There's real strong unity. And I'm going to see it tomorrow when I go to Wairika.
And I'm going to be in a room probably twice or three times as packed as this with people unified with their signs saying save our dams.
That's where the unity is. And that's the argument we're working against. People will be unified saying save our dams.
And if that is the only unified message that's out there, a broken message on the other side is going to die. It's not going to go anywhere.
There has to be a clear message to support dam removal.
And there's, you know, everyone in here is saying we support dam removal, but we're fractured about other pieces of it, of what goes with it.
But if there's not a single solid voice on we support dam removal, it's going to be very, very difficult to make the case for it.
Because the arguments that are going to go with it are going to be they're going to push for delay.
They're already doing that. SISCU is pushing for delay in the process and they will love to see folks on the other side pushing for delay too.
They will be using every anti-government argument that they have, which they already are using.
They will be using every argument against funding, saying it's a boondoggle.
They will be looking for every place that their arguments are compatible with the arguments, you know, with some of the arguments on the other side.
Or actually they'll be looking at the ones on the other side, finding the ones they can use to support their arguments.
And that is what we're up against in this. And they have a Congress that is eager to lap up all of those arguments.
They will love every minute of it. And, you know, if you think about that, think about the huge hurdle we have in terms of getting this through.
Think about the national mindset right now and a project to take out dams, to remove industrial infrastructure like that at a cost to the nation and to the states.
That is an incredibly high hurdle to get there in this climate right now.
And I think that there's – there really has to be a certain amount of a reality check in terms of what we can accomplish on this issue.
Because the toolbox for doing a better project, the toolbox of using the Endangered Species Act, CEQA, NEPA, Clean Water Act, those tools have been in the box for 40 years.
They have not taken these dams out. The players in this room have been around 30 or 40 years. They have not taken the dams out.
The idea that this is going to take until 2020, yeah, that's a long horizon, but guess what? We're still working on our general plan update.
These things take time. I really didn't mean for that to be funny.
So, you know, I want to note that there are people in this room that we've heard very passionately from who I trust to know a hell of a lot more about these issues than I do.
I'm not a fisheries expert. I'm not a fisheries biologist. I don't know this stuff. I read. I try to do my best to study it.
But I look and I see people that I respect deeply who have studied these issues for years and years and years who are equals, equally respected in the community.
We're looking at the same information and coming to different conclusions. That doesn't mean someone's right or someone's wrong or that someone's a liar.
It means that equally qualified people can reach different conclusions on something.
And so, you know, it's really important that we look for that large goal that we can agree on and we can address the differences.
We can address the fact that we don't agree on all of it. But, you know, we've got to recognize that we're not going to come to one data set that's going to get everyone on board and say we all agree with this.
You know, I wish that I lived or that I worked in a world that was governed simply by the reasonable exercise of objective facts.
That's not the world I work in.
Sorry. Okay. I just want to put out a suggestion of perhaps a different message than just the I'm for dam removal, I'm against dam removal.
I suggest that folks can put out a message saying I'm for dam removal and I support these agreements, but we have these concerns.
As the range is noted, we can support these agreements because they are the only thing on the table that has a chance of taking these out within a realistic timeframe.
And we can speak to those concerns and we can say this is not enough. It's not good enough and we keep need to keep doing more work.
But it's a start and it's the only start we have right now.
My name is Ken Miller. Is it okay if I ask a question?
There was a bond issue that was going to be floated. It was $11 billion and it was actually partially authored by one of the congressional candidates, Huffman.
And what scares me about it is that it seems to tie this deal to water needs and supplies in the state, including the Perferral Canal.
So my question is about, Greg raised it, out of basin transfers, what's your opinion on the possibility of irrigators selling their water south in the future under this deal?
For fertilizer, they don't have any water to export and the quality of water support, they actually have to spray it with atrazine to get it to flow to the A canal. So this is not water suitable for export.
Is that true, they're spraying it with atrazine?
Yeah.
Like on the water?
Yeah, it keeps it flowing. And you know, the bond was withdrawn from the ballot because of no support, it was tied to the Perferral Canal. That's a definite poison pill in California.
But the current legislation is opposed by the head of the power committee, McClintock, and while they heard about having this district vote 80-20 against dam removal, there's no chance that legislation is going to be enacted.
So no timely legislation enacted actually kills the Clown Basin Restoration Agreement and the Clowns Hygro-Settlement Agreement.
We're already a year and a half overdue. There's no prospect for legislation.
Merkley's bill is really just a trash can full of stuff and it's not going to go anywhere and they're not going to get any money.
So the state water quality control board is going to kick off the 401 certification next April if there's no timely legislation in action.
And so what we see here is that if they don't give a Clean Water Act permit to those dams, then those dams can't get a relicense and therefore Pacific Corps has to abandon and decommission.
And I've read the testimony of Brock Bank, the vice president of Pacific Corps, and you can see from this testimony, this is a deal made in heaven for them.
And to go back to the FERC process is something that they don't want to see because they're either going to abandon and decommission or they're going to get back in court.
And so this deal is dead as a doornail in Congress. It's not going anywhere.
The state water board is going to make a move on this next April.
And at that point Humboldt County needs to take another look at this because if it's the only game in town, I'm saying let's go sit on those dams on the anniversary of the fish kill.
And let's do direct action and get what we need because these backroom deals are not getting us what we need.
And if you don't have ecological sufficiency, then you've got yourself a bunch of money. You've got some programs. They get what they need.
Ninety-two million dollars in subsidy and otherwise their agriculture, according to the University of Oregon, would shrink by 30,000 acres and their water demand would go down 75,000 acre feet.
Why is it that they have a 92 million dollar farming subsidy to farm in the face of global warming in the high desert? And how do they call it sustainable?
That's a great question. That's a great. That's what this deal is about. We have to reject it. If it takes direct action. Thank you, Pat. Thank you.
So obviously you can see a lot of passion about the water for farming over salmon. And everybody I think in this room feels that way.
Our last our last guest had a really good question, though. What a great concern.
You know, everybody's concerned about water in the Trinity being farmed south. Could this happen in the climate?
I'm not sure anybody has an answer for that, but I do have two extra questions from the group that I want to make sure that we get to.
The one is for the Hupa representative. Hey, Leigha. Please state your name again for the group and please clarify Department of Justice ability to represent Hupa Tribe will change under KBRA question mark.
I'm stating my name Haley Hutt, Hupa Tribal Council member.
Say it again. Haley Hutt, Hupa Valley Tribal Council member. Yes, it'll terminate our rights.
And just to answer to the gentleman speaking on unity, there are 17 points in our letter to Senator Merkley's office.
If those 17 points were corrected, adjusted, changed, deleted in the bill, we would support it.
And we've also sent a complete markup of the bill to Senator Merkley. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much. And then did you want to say something about the water sales?
Well, I will on that too, but I just want to follow up on what Haley said in comment to that.
These agreements came out, these agreements need federal legislation, and that means Congress has to act.
So that means the public has an opportunity to weigh in. We do not have to accept in verbatim the deals that were made.
We can do what Haley suggested, make comments, and if there's legislation, we can try to improve upon it.
That's something we have a right to do. We don't have to accept everything as it is right now.
As far as water transfers, the concern isn't transferring water from the upper climate basin south.
The concern is that it's too much is being used right where it is.
I wanted to say, I see Craig Tucker trying to sneak out of the room, and I really wanted to thank him for his bravery in coming here tonight.
I mean, I think it's amazing and important that you came out and that you gave the comments that you did.
I really want to thank you for being here.
Well, I'm honored to ask for getting up.
And I'm not taking me and Pat for a change.
Of course.
And I warned you, we're all in the same room.
It's great. I'm so thankful that you came out. I'm so thankful that you came out.
I remember you from the other day.
The gentleman with the hat on, thank you for your comments.
It's been a mystery.
So I just wanted to thank you both before you took off.
And again, make sure that you show up to the other.
We have one last question that somebody drafted, and I think our panel is going to really like it.
Neither the KHSA nor the KBRA call for whole basin management. What needs to happen to get whole basin management in the Klamath-Trinity River Basin?
Great broad question. Can we keep it brief and clear?
Well, I think this point of unifying folks that really want to restore the river system to its end,
at that point can't be underscored enough.
I wish folks were unified and that people were not kicked out of the deals.
That would have been a great time for unification.
If one group was kicked out, then everybody should have walked out.
That's unity.
I think ultimately it's going to require us sitting back down and forging a new perspective on this entire process.
Whole basin management, again, we're looking at Congress and not this Congress.
And I guess I want to put out, and I know Bob's going to say something,
but I think for the folks in this panel, whole basin management includes the Shasta, the Scott.
It means coming together and sitting down over the TMDLs that are failing in those regions,
looking at the Klamath and the Trinity, getting all the tribal members,
all the environmental groups who speak and represent for the ignored, the voiceless, together, Sierra Club, everybody,
Yurok, Karuk. So I'm going to let Bob Hunter take the rest.
I just want to say, I mean, whole basin management would be wonderful if it's something that basin does need.
I just say two things, though.
To have it come to think, you need a little public, open, transparent process to get there.
And if we end up with a piece of legislation that approves the KBRA and directs agencies to sign a 50-year contract,
I think that's the nail in the coffin of ever having whole basin management that's going to restore the basin.
I have people who are very concerned here about the water for irrigators over water for fish,
about water quality issues not being addressed.
These are all valid. These are all valid opinions and valid ideas.
Good night, folks. Thanks so much for coming.
Thanks to hosting parties and to all of our panelists. And you guys are great. This is really, really interesting.