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Alice Kilham leads the Klamath River
Compact Commission. |
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Stakeholders aim to fashion their own Klamath
plan
Tam Moore
Oregon Staff Writer
It’s a collection of farmers, commercial
fishermen, environmental activists, regional
federal officials and representatives of
American Indian tribes tied to the Klamath
River. They call themselves “stakeholders.”
Next week those stakeholders after nearly three
years of meetings held in several locations of
the 10 million acre Klamath Basin shared by
California and Oregon will gather in Yreka to
define something that has eluded several levels
of government: a structure for basin-wide
decision making.
“I find it interesting that when we spent time
getting to know the issues and one another,
people were impatient and wanted action. Now
that we are talking about action, people seem
afraid that a few people will make decisions for
them,” Alice Kilham, chairwoman of the Klamath
River Compact Commission said in an invitation
urging wide participation in the Nov. 1-3
meetings at Yreka’s Miners Inn convention
center.
Kilham’s compact commission is betting this
homegrown process, which it launched with
consultant Bob Chadwick in 2003, will do
something two much-publicized government efforts
haven’t: produce results.
President George W. Bush in 2002 directed four
Cabinet secretaries to give him a plan for the
federal part of the basin. They’ve yet to
publicly report.
Last fall, the governors of California and
Oregon joined with Interior Secretary Gale
Norton in a promised Klamath task force. It has
yet to hold a public meeting within the basin.
Competing demands for the Klamath’s water and
fish resources are more than a quarter-century
old. However, it wasn’t until 2001 – when about
90 percent of the acreage in the Klamath
Reclamation Project didn’t get irrigation water
– that national attention turned to Klamath
policy. There was a drought, three fish species
under protection of the Endangered Species Act,
and what the government calls “prudent
alternatives” to assure fish habitat, all in
play.
Next week’s Yreka meetings will attempt to focus
on which issues that need addressing in the
Klamath’s subbasins, then set a process for
integrating the many Klamath resource plans now
in existence.
Kilham said there’s one other part to success:
“We need to tell the federal, state and county
governments that we want a process for receiving
funding, streamlining regulation and
implementing projects that we will initiate.”
The Klamath River Compact Commission was
established as law by both states in 1957 and
ratified by Congress the same year. At its most
recent meeting, the commission again endorsed
the grass-roots effort. |