[env-trinity] Eureka Reporter- HVT Protests Water Policy on Trinity R.

[Tom Stokely]

      http://www.eurekareporter.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?ArticleID=11095 
        
      Hoopa Valley Tribe protests water policy on Trinity River 
      by Sharon Letts, 5/13/2006 
        
      In a letter dated, April 24, 2006, the Hoopa Valley Tribe requested a meeting with Mark Limbaugh, assistant Secretary of Water and Science at the U.S. Interior Department, and James E. Cason, associate deputy secretary and acting assistant secretary of Indian Affairs at Interior.

      The meeting is in response to the tribe’s request that the Bureau of Reclamation not renew the long-term contracts with the largest consumers of irrigation water in the Central Valley until those contracts are revised to protect the Trinity River.

      According to a letter drafted April 19, 2006, by the Westlands Water District, the district is disputing a Bureau of Reclamation designation that this year’s water forecast is an “extremely wet year” rather than a “wet year,” and are threatening litigation if the Bureau of Reclamation does not change the language, thus allowing more water to be taken from the river.

      In a settlement proposal drafted by the Westlands Water District, the water forecast is key to providing water to the farmers of the Central Valley. In this settlement, Westlands provides a detailed rainfall chart that reflects data collected as far back as 1912.

      According to the Hoopa Valley Tribe Chairman Clifford Lyle Marshall, the degradation of the Trinity River fishery began in 1955 when Congress authorized diversions of the river’s water to the Central Valley. The act said enough water would be left in the river to support the fishery, but spawning runs have diminished since the diversions began. He said that the Bureau of Reclamation was taking up to 90 percent of the river’s water in some years.

      Congress passed the Central Valley Project Improvement Act, or CVPIA, in 1992, which included cooperative restoration studies by the tribe and Interior. The studies culminated in a record of decision agreeing to a river restoration plan, which was signed by Department of Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt in 2000. 

      Litigation continued as the fight for water to and from the river continued over the years and conditions worsened until 2002 when some 68,000 fish died in the combined Trinity and Klamath rivers’ now infamous “fish kill.”

      “The Hoopa Valley Tribe will not stop fighting those who are trying to destroy this river and the fish,” Marshall said. “We have no choice. We do not have another river that flows through our ancestral land and blood. The fish do not have another river to spawn in.”

      The Westlands settlement proposal puts an emphasis on restoring the Trinity River fishery as well as providing water to the farmers. 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www2.dcn.org/pipermail/env-trinity/attachments/20060519/d6eb2dca/attachment.html>