Klamath Water Users Association on Wednesday filed a
49-page brief objecting to the Klamath Tribes request
for a court order that could eventually shut off Klamath
Project irrigation water in order to maintain Upper
Klamath Lake elevation levels for endangered suckers.
Sunnyside Irrigation District and Tulelake resident Ben
DuVal are co-intervenors in the case, which will be
heard in U.S. District Court of Northern California in
San Francisco on Friday, July 20.
“I
would suspect that if the Tribes prevail, we could
expect a shutdown extremely soon after that,” said Scott
White, executive director of the KWUA.
“In 2001 — That was early in the season when they
determined that the Project wasn’t going to get any
water so people had the opportunity not to put seed in
the ground, and choose not to make the investment
necessary.
“This year, is an exception to that, so a mid-season
shutoff, I mean it’d be just catastrophic because
there’s so much money in the ground already this year
that it’s just – You’re looking at a total and complete
loss,” he said.
Not to mention the longterm effects, White added.
“There’s a lot of growers that have contracts they need
to fulfill … and those contracts take years to get, and
if those contracts go away, then they don’t have
somebody to grow food for next year or the year after,”
White said.
“Those are very, very valuable to the individual
growers, and those, in theory, could go away with the
Project shutdown.
The water users told the court that the Klamath Tribes
are trying to recycle discredited theories about Upper
Klamath Lake levels and overall sucker populations,
White said.
“We would have much preferred to have this conversation
outside of the courts, but that’s not the path the
plaintiffs chose and now all I think about is what this
will mean for our community regardless of outcome,”
White said in a news release.
Klamath Tribes Chairman Don Gentry told the Herald and
News the Tribes spent a lot of time considering their
actions to file litigation as a necessary response to
concerns by the Tribes that the sucker will go extinct
in Upper Klamath Lake under current drought conditions.
“The interest is to protect our fish from going extinct,
and it’s not directed in a manner to provide harm to the
agricultural community,” said Gentry. “It’s directed
towards ... what we need to do to protect our fish.
“If we lose these fish, it indicates that we’re setting
ourselves up for a dire future,” Gentry added. “It’s a
part of our subsistence and culture that we haven’t been
able to harvest since 1986.
The sucker — known as the Koptu and C’waam to the Tribes
— is a resource that the Tribes were guaranteed under
the Treaty of 1864 between the tribes and the U.S.
Government, Gentry said.
“Not only have we lost the salmon for 100 years, but
we’re on the verge of losing the C’waam and Koptu, which
people thought would be here forever when we negotiated
the treaty,” Gentry said.
“Our immediate concern is to protect those fish and
provide for future harvestable opportunities for our
members because it’s so important for treaty rights and
exercise of our subsistence rights and our culture and
traditions.”
