Herald and News: Klamath Falls, Oregon
http://www.heraldandnews.com/articles/2003/10/24/viewpoints/letters/letters.txt

Study Long Lake proposal

10/24/03  The Klamath Water Foundation is a non-profit organization whose goal is to unite local agricultural, business and community interests in order to sustain traditional livelihoods and protect our local communities, their economy and the environment.

We are funded by broad-based community support. Foundation board members are well-known business leaders, agricultural producers, scientists and educators. Our principal mission is to secure and sustain reliable guarantees of water supply for irrigation in the Klamath Basin.

In pursuit of that mission, we wish to go on record as supporting continued detailed study and construction of additional deep-water storage in the Upper Klamath Basin. We believe that study of the Long Lake reservoir site and similar storage alternatives should be conducted to determine the most productive and economically feasible options.

We do not believe that further permanent reductions in irrigated agricultural acreage are either necessary nor desirable, nor even capable of providing desired water supply security for all Basin interests. Nor do we believe that current proposals for reduced summer irrigation diversions above Upper Klamath Lake can substitute for real, year round, deep-water storage capable of retaining normally abundant spring runoff for later use.

It has become abundantly clear that Upper Klamath Lake's present water storage capacity of approximately 500,000 acre-feet is inadequate to support both Klamath Project irrigation water security and all desired environmental purposes.

More of the lake's annual net inflow, which averages about 1.3 million acre-feet, should be captured and stored for later use.

We believe that most technically feasible alternative and the most politically acceptable solution to all Klamath Basin interests will be deep-water facilities, which both minimize evaporative losses and provide long-term storage capability.

Lynan Lea Baghott
President
KWF Board of Directors