Feds Seek Fast OK for Water Release

Even as U.S. Interior Secretary Gale Norton prepares for a Friday ceremony opening the headgates to deliver water to drought-stricken Klamath Basin farmers, federal biologists rushed this week to establish legal grounds for Norton’s action.

Confident that biologists employed by the Interior Department would support the water release, officials announced Wednesday that Norton and U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman would open the headgates Friday morning

Biologists with the department’s Fish and Wildlife Service were given only six days to determine that releasing the water in April and May will not hurt endangered fish--an evaluation process that normally can take up to four months under the U.S. Endangered Species Act.

For the release to be legal, the government biologists must affirm that two endangered species of sucker fish will not be imperiled if some of the water they live in is diverted to agriculture.

A federal decision last year to divert water from farmers to fish created a storm of criticism aimed at the Endangered Species Act, the 1973 law that protects animals, fish and plants in danger of extinction. Many farmers lost crops and some declared bankruptcy.

The law is enforced by the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service, which must review how federal actions will affect protected species.

The Fish and Wildlife Service, which has been under pressure from the Bush administration to ease protection of a number of rare species, is expected to render an opinion today that will allow the water to flow to the farmers.

“We’re doing this fast, faster than we normally would like to do, because biologists like to go over things over and over,” said Fish and Wildlife spokeswoman Patricia Foulk. “But we feel this opinion will be biologically sound.”

Foulk said more rain and a larger snowpack have made the water shortage less serious than last year. She said the availability of more water lessens the chance that the fish will be harmed during the next two months.

Another reason for the agency’s confidence is that the Bureau of Reclamation--the agency that regulates the flow of water in the basin, which is dependent on irrigation--has agreed to install nets and barriers to help prevent the sucker fish from being killed as they are swept through the headgates or stranded in farm fields.

Critics questioned why federal biologists are being given so little time to study what has become the most controversial irrigation project in the nation. The Fish and Wildlife opinion is to be faxed to Washington this morning and signed this afternoon.

“If this wasn’t prejudging the outcome of the final opinion, I don’t know what it is,” said Jamie Rappaport Clark, who was director of the Fish and Wildlife Service from 1997 to 2001 and is now senior vice president for conservation at the National Wildlife Federation.

“You have to be very concerned about whether the biological needs of the species have been politicized in their zeal to make a deal,” said Clark, who added she has never heard of a biological opinion turned around so quickly.

“It was highly atypical,” said a source within the Fish and Wildlife Service, who said that the agency was given only four business days to provide the opinion and that biologists were required to work through the weekend. “Any time you do something in four days, you cut a lot of corners.”

The National Marine Fisheries Service was also asked to conduct an expedited review of the effects of the water diversion on threatened coho salmon. The fisheries service concluded it did not have time for the review, and instead plans to report that salmon are not likely to be harmed.

The fast-track reviews were requested as government officials, farmers and environmentalists gear up for planting season in the Klamath Basin straddling the Oregon-California border, site last summer of one of the West’s fiercest water battles in decades.

The Bureau of Reclamation requested the fast-track Fish and Wildlife Service opinion in a letter dated March 22. Earlier, federal officials had said that a section of the Endangered Species Act would allow them to provide water to farmers starting April 1, even if the biological reviews were not complete, but federal attorneys questioned that view, sources said.

The Fish and Wildlife Service’s review of fish conditions last year has been blamed for cutting off water to farmers and was criticized by a committee of the National Academy of Sciences.

Sue Ellen Wooldridge, Norton’s deputy chief of staff, said Wednesday that the fish and general conditions in the basin have received considerable scientific scrutiny in the last year.

“We’ve been informally consulting for months and months and months,” she said, adding that she doubted the Fish and Wildlife Service would find that two months of water supplied to farmers would threaten the sucker fish.

“We will continue to look for all sorts of things we can do to give the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service comfort that they can allow the water to be managed in such a way that they can allow the farmers” to receive water, she said.