[env-trinity] Eureka Times-Standard -Snubbed: Interior Department ignores Humboldt's request for Trinity water

[Tom Stokely]

CENTRAL VALLEY PROJECT / TRINITY RIVER

Snubbed: Interior Department ignores Humboldt's request for Trinity water 

Eureka Times-Standard - 8/4/04

By John Driscoll, staff writer

The U.S. Interior Department essentially chose not to answer Humboldt County's request for water promised as part of the project that diverts part of the Trinity River south.

The county has been trying to secure some 50,000 acre feet -- 16 billion gallons -- it is allotted as part of the 1955 Trinity River Division Act. An April letter to Interior Secretary Gale Norton was answered last week by Duncan Brown of the Office of the Executive Secretariat. It dodges the question. 

Brown replies that since a July decision by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals fully implements a restoration plan for the river, more water will flow down the Trinity anyway. Flows will increase under the plan to help restore the river's salmon, but the additional water will be sent down the river in the spring. 

Some 53 percent of the river's flows above Lewiston Dam will still be sent to the Sacramento River, where it's withdrawn by Central Valley irrigators. 

"This proposal will undoubtedly improve the habitat fish need to survive and multiply," Brown wrote. 

But Humboldt County officials hope to use the water in case an emergency arises on the Klamath River in the fall. The water could be used to raise and cool the lower Klamath River, where in 2002 between 34,000 and 68,000 chinook salmon died. State and federal studies have pointed to low flows as a key element that perpetuated the salmon-killing diseases. 

The Interior Department is in the process of buying the same amount of water, 50,000 acre feet, from Central Valley water contractors, for that purpose. 

Longtime environmental law attorney Michael Jackson said that the Bush administration, already knee-deep in western water conflicts, probably isn't willing to take up anything new before the November elections.

"They're just flat out at 100 percent," Jackson said. "I presume they just don't want to think about it."

Jackson said the county may now need to go directly to the State Water Resources Control Board, which could order the contract be honored.

 

 
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