The adage “a good compromise is when both parties are dissatisfied” often applies to water management. Yet in the case of the Bureau of Reclamation’s recent draft environmental assessment, the unanimous opposition expressed by agricultural and tribal representatives does not suggest a carefully crafted, durable product.
Rather, the comments reflect widespread doubt about the validity of Reclamation’s new proposed action for operation of the Klamath Project, condemnation of its analysis, and concerns about the potential impacts to the natural and human resources of the Klamath Basin.
Reclamation released its draft environmental assessment on September 11, 2024, and gave the public 14 days to comment on the 150-page document.
The Klamath Water Users Association (KWUA), Klamath Irrigation District, and Klamath Drainage District submitted comments on behalf of agricultural interests in the Klamath Project. The Klamath Tribes, the Karuk Tribe, and the Yurok Tribe filed comments addressing their respective rights and interests.
Failure to Disclose Impacts
An environmental assessment is a document prepared by a federal agency to evaluate the potential impacts to the human environment from a major federal action, as required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).
Although the comments reflect differences in the resources and potential impacts of concern for various parties, they all criticized Reclamation’s environmental assessment’s for being inadequate and incomplete.
“The Draft EA is woefully short of what is necessary,” commented KWUA. “It simply does not disclose the obvious and well-understood impacts of curtailing surface water deliveries to agricultural lands and refuges in the Klamath Basin, and instead creates a comparison of hypotheticals that obscures those impacts.”
KWUA’s letter noted the plagues of grasshoppers, blowing dust, dry domestic wells, and damages to public infrastructure that have stemmed from recent operations of the Klamath Project.
For the Klamath Tribes, Reclamation’s analysis was critically lacking with respect to potential impacts to c’waam and koptu (also known as Lost River and shortnose suckers), the two species of endangered fish in Upper Klamath Lake. The Klamath Tribes’ letter noted the recent “terrifying decrease in the abundance” of c’waam and koptu in Upper Klamath Lake, and urged that Reclamation more fully evaluate the impacts from anticipated lake levels to these species.
“The extirpation of c’waam and koptu from UKL would be a cultural calamity of existential proportions for the Klamath Tribes for whom these fish and their natural environments are indeed sacred,” the Klamath Tribes commented. For the Yurok Tribe, the primary concern expressed was for salmon in the Klamath River. The Yurok’s comments pointed out Reclamation’s failure to consider alternatives that would “promote, rather than impede, salmon recovery.” By not evaluating such an alternative, the Yurok’s letter concluded, the environmental assessment “fails to reveal the harmful toll Klamath Project irrigation has already taken (and continues to take) on salmon…” For their part, Klamath Irrigation District attributed the shortcoming in the document’s analysis to Reclamation’s failure to “provide a clear statement of the agency’s objectives.”
The “EA does not adequately define the actual operational objectives or the potential tradeoffs involved in managing competing needs, such as agricultural water rights, environmental protection, and tribal interests,” the district wrote.
Questions over the Status Quo
Several parties also took issue with Reclamation’s characterization of the “noaction alternative” used for comparison to the proposed action. The draft environmental assessment presented as a no-action alternative a modified version of the “Interim Operations Plan” (IOP) that has ostensibly governed Klamath Project operations since 2020.
Parties noted that the IOP was never strictly followed because actual hydrology frequently made it impossible to achieve the anticipated modeled outcomes.
KWUA and the districts also pointed out that Reclamation had materially modified the IOP for sake of this analysis, assuming a number of current and future changed conditions, along with some form of “rebalancing” of the model to achieve desirable (but unspecified) hydrologic outcomes.
With the model “rebalanced”, Reclamation’s proposed action somehow appeared to deliver more water for agricultural use than provided for under the IOP, notwithstanding clear and obvious information to the contrary. In actuality, across all year-types, Reclamation’s proposed action represents a decrease in the agricultural water supply of upwards of 25 percent compared to the IOP.
By inflating the amount of water delivered under the proposed action, the draft environmental assessment concluded that water levels in Upper Klamath Lake would be lower on average in comparison to the IOP. The Klamath Tribes naturally took issue with this perceived reduction in lake levels and called for the proposed action to be modified to include explicit lake level requirements.
Controversy over Water for Wildlife Refuges
Another common point of criticism of the draft environmental assessment was the anticipated water to be delivered to Lower Klamath and Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuges, presumably in part to support populations of c’waam and koptu within the refuges.
While KWUA emphasized its general support for water deliveries to the refuges, “Reclamation cannot unilaterally reprioritize water entitlements,” it wrote. The proposed action’s deliveries to the refuges, KWUA offered, “contravenes water law and Reclamation’s contracts, and comes at the expense of Project irrigators, whose vested rights are senior to the NWRs.”
For their part, Klamath Irrigation District attributed the shortcoming in the document’s analysis to
Reclamation’s failure to “provide a clear statement of the agency’s objectives.”
The Klamath Tribes also opposed this plan to try to recover c’waam and koptu in the refuges.
“There is no evidence, and there is no analysis in the draft EA,” the Klamath Tribes wrote, “as to whether the wildlife refuges in their current state can actually support healthy, full lifecycle populations of c’waam and koptu. Until that is determined, heaping more risk onto the fish in UKL to roll the dice on the refuges is a gamble neither the Tribes nor the species – particularly in their current condition – can afford to take.”
The Yurok Tribes also pointed out this “massive change” to how water is managed in the Upper Klamath Basin and questioned how water will be “tracked to ensure” it is delivered to refuges instead of used for agricultural use.
Next Steps?
The decision now before Reclamation is whether, based on the draft environmental assessment and the comments received, whether to proceed in preparing a more robust and exhaustive environmental impact statement (EIS) on the proposed action. Alternatively, Reclamation may elect to finalize its environmental assessment and issue a “finding of no significant environmental impact.”
By G. Moss Driscoll, KWUA
