SACRAMENTO (AP) _ A Northern California congressman is trying to end funding of a Klamath River advisory panel, saying the panel's recommendations are hurting upstream farmers in their bitter fight over scarce irrigation water.

The move has upset downstream fishermen, Indian tribes, and the congressman who represents them, prompting a showdown expected Wednesday when the House Interior Appropriations Subcommittee considers the U.S. Department of Interior's budget.

  
U.S. Rep. Wally Herger, R-Marysville, added a provision last Wednesday that removes funding for the 11-member Klamath Fishery Management Council, which includes representatives from commercial and recreational ocean and river fishermen, river tribes, and state and federal agencies.

It advises the Pacific Fisheries Management Council and indirectly helps determine how the river flowing from south-central Oregon through northwest California is split between the needs of farmers and fish.

The council ``has become a forum for the advancement of an anti-agriculture agenda,'' Herger said in a statement released Friday. He called it ``an abuse of taxpayer dollars'' to continue spending money on a panel he said made ``a completely unsubstantiated attack'' on upstream farmers.

The dispute dates from the drought year of 2001, when the federal government was forced by the Endangered Species Act to shut off water to most of the farms on the Klamath Reclamation Project to let more flow down the Klamath River for threatened coho salmon.

Herger is upset over two letters from the panel he said blamed low water and a ``hostile environment'' created by Klamath River Basin agricultural practices in part for last summer's massive fish kill that left an estimated 33,000 chinook salmon dead near the river's mouth.

The California Department of Fish and Game and members of the American Fisheries Society also pointed to the low amount of water released down the Klamath River after irrigating the Klamath Project. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has yet to release its report on what caused the kill.

By joining the debate with official letters in October and March, Herger said the advisory council improperly injected itself into the irrigation water debate, when it was created solely to give advice on how much downstream and ocean fishing can be sustained by the river's salmon population.

Countered U.S. Rep. Mike Thompson, D-St. Helena: ``It's pretty hard to have fish without water. It's a pretty benign letter, and I think they raise some pretty good issues.''

At stake is $111,000 that pays the council's administrative and technical support costs and other expenses.

Eliminating the council's funding, and thus the council itself, would "systematically exclude the fishermen and the tribes and all the coastal communities," Thompson said in a telephone interview Saturday. He called the council ``the one entity that represents the downstream interests'' in the water fight.

The move also has drawn outcries from environmental groups like WaterWatch of Oregon, downstream tribes, and the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations.

A federal judge in Oakland is considering downstream interests' lawsuit seeking to force the federal government to send more water down the Klamath for salmon.

Copyright (c) 2003 The Associated Press
Received by NewsEdge Insight: 06/21/2003 18:42:21