Even in the fairgrounds parking lot near Linman Hall one could feel the pressure of the announcement that accompanied the KWUA 2021 Operations Meeting. Though the morning was sunny with a cool breeze, it was quiet and the air felt heavy and still. Inside the hall was no better. People and chairs were spaced appropriately to go along with the safety theater the COVID-19 pandemic has forced us to grow accustomed to.
On stage along with irrigation district managers and Klamath Water Users Association’s Paul Simmons and Mark Johnson was KWUA president Ben DuVal at the podium. All of them looked like they were getting ready to speak at a funeral rather than announce the Klamath Project’s operation plans for the 2021 season. And maybe, in a way, they were. Everyone knew it was going to be a grim season, and the chances of all the farmers and ranchers in the Klamath Basin surviving to next year was slim. How grim is what everyone wanted to know.
“My biggest fear is radical outsiders coming in and taking what we do here and using our crisis as a soapbox for them . . . . The only way we’re going to get through this and improve the situation long-term is by sticking together, by acting in a unified and dignified manner, and making sure that it’s the people of this community that are suffering whose voices are heard.”
KWUA President, Ben DuVal
Everyone in the fairgrounds hall and watching online were waiting for the Klamath Basin Area Office of the Bureau of Reclamation to announce how drastic the cut would be to this year’s water deliveries. Nobody thought it would be good – we had all been prepped for that for months. But everyone wanted to hear for themselves what the Bureau had to say.
Only no one from the Bureau of Reclamation showed.
Presumably hiding out far away from the Klamath County fairgrounds, someone made the decision not to send anyone from Reclamation to deliver the 2021 water allocation. Nope. They left that weight for president DuVal to carry and deliver to his neighbors. And they sent that bomb to KWUA 45 minutes before the meeting.
President DuVal didn’t waste any time getting to the point.
“So, there’s no easy way to say this,” DuVal said, directly addressing the audience, “and no one’s here to listen to me talk. So what we know today as of this morning the allocation from Upper Klamath Lake will be 33,000 acre/feet. We know that’s barely enough to charge some of the ditches. We know that’s less than we got in 2001. And that would be starting June 1st.”
33,000 acre/feet. June 1st.
Less than 10% of what it would take to deliver water to every family farmer and rancher in the Klamath Project. And it comes so late that many won’t be able to plant a crop and those who have will see severely reduced yields.
After KWUA executive director Paul Simmons gave the crowd updates on the current litigation plaguing our Basin, the irrigation district managers tried to give the audience an idea, any idea, of what was possible but always circled back to the need for the districts to work together and that this is a disaster. Even after Marc Staunton shared the good-ish news of $15 million available through the Klamath Project Drought Response Agency and Mark Johnson updated us on the status of groundwater rules, nothing could quite blunt the blow of 33,000 acre/feet.
“It’s just enough water to fight over.”
33,000 acre/feet isn’t just a devastating blow to Project irrigators that have mortgages to pay as well as power bills and water bills for a season they’ll receive little to no water. As these farms and ranches dry up, so will businesses all over the Basin. Every community in and around the Klamath Project will feel the dusty ripples of the impact of this drought and this harsh allocation.
Not just people will get hit hard by this.
Birds of the Pacific Flyway will not only find there’s nowhere for them to rest in the refuges, the fields around Upper Klamath Lake and down to Tule Lake won’t have the historic fall provisions they rely on.
From the deer and antelope that roam the hay fields to the raptors that float the drafts in search of prey or carnage, habitat and food sources will bear the brunt of the misguided approach of one species management mandated by the Endangered Species Act.
In a time when there’s plenty of sound and fury surrounding climate change, the once productive fields of the Klamath Basin will go dry, unable to capture carbon from the atmosphere.
Over 20 years of using the Klamath Project as the only solution for the problems of salmon and sucker fish has resulted in no change for the fish, and worsening conditions for Klamath ag and birds. Everyone in Linman Hall and those watching the meeting online know this has been the wrong approach and we desperately need a change. Ironically, the people directly impacted by the 33,000 acre/feet allocation pay Reclamation to ignore it’s legal duty to deliver water to Klamath ag and instead participate in the decades old farce of sending water downriver or keeping it in the lake per the ESA and Tribal Trust. Meanwhile salmon and sucker fish populations have yet to improve.
If anyone is serious about saving fish or birds, they need to take a hard look beyond Klamath Project water for a solution. 33,000 acre/feet for agriculture isn’t going to save any fish. 20 plus years of this ridiculous approach of one species management is only killing family ranches and farms.
Kill Klamath ag, you kill Klamath wildlife.