Farmers Get Ally in Fight for Water

An Oregon senator is expected to launch a legislative push today to return water to drought-plagued Klamath Basin farmers, an effort that environmentalists warn could drive endangered salmon and suckerfish into extinction.

Republican Gordon Smith is angling to insert language into an Interior Department appropriations bill that would once again open the taps for farmers in the region straddling the Oregon-California border.

Those farmers have been virtually without water because of a historic drought and concerns about the threatened coho salmon in the Klamath River and two species of suckerfish in Klamath Lake.

Under the proposed legislation, water allocations in Upper Klamath Lake, where the suckerfish reside, would be based in part on flows during 1992, the last drought year in the region and a time when the limited water supplies were divided between fish and farmers.

Water allocations for the salmon, which have been decimated in the Klamath River and its tributaries, would be based on 1999, a more normal rainfall year. Rainfall in the basin this year is about a quarter of normal.

Smith’s proposal would not allow any variation from those water levels unless U.S. Fish and Wildlife officials take a series of costly and time-consuming steps. Those include establishing special refuge sites for the suckers, setting up a complex aeration system to improve water quality in the algae-choked lake, instituting efforts to kill off the fish’s predators and improving wetlands that serve as breeding grounds.

Smith could not be reached for comment late Wednesday.

But environmentalists and salmon fishermen, who provided a copy of the proposed legislation to The Times, blasted the looming effort as an attempt to circumvent the nation’s endangered species rules.

“They’re making an all-court press here,” said Glen Spain, Northwest regional director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Assn. “This would essentially undo the Endangered Species Act for the benefit of Klamath Basin farmers. And it would probably result in the extinction of these species.”