[env-trinity] Siskiyou County Petition to FERC, response to Hoopas

[FISH1IFR at aol.com]

In a message dated 6/28/2012 9:52:10 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time,  
andrew at wildcalifornia.org writes:

Just  for clarification then, Condit did involve a settlement agreement, 
but  Congress was not asked for $$.
Andrew... correct.  But of  course no Congressional money is being asked 
for dam removal per  se in the Klamath either... dam removal and related 
mitigation  measures necessary from dam removal are being funded mostly by 
Company  ratepayers, with some remaining second-tier funding (if needed) to 
eventually  come (by 2020) from California, where most of the economic benefits 
from dam  removal will be.  
 
About $35 million  dollars is now in that dam removal Klamath Trust Fund, 
cumulative  collected from ratepayer surcharges that amount to about 
$1.61/month per average  residential customer in northern California -- less than 
the price of a  decent cup of coffee a month.  And it builds up at about $1  
million/month until 2020 and the target removal date.  A total of $200  
million is to come from that source by 2020, and we are pretty much on  track.  
Current delays in Congress do not hurt this effort in any way so  long as 
those funds continue being collected.
 
Congressional approval is  required, of course, for the process of removing 
jurisdiction from FERC,  and for the transfer of Keno Dam and a few other 
elements of the Klamath  Hydropower Settlement Agreement (KHSA).  But NO 
federal money.   This is to prevent what happened with the Elwha dam, which was 
actually  authorized by Congress for removal but then kept Congressionally 
unfunded (for  purely political reasons as a bargaining chip in Congress on 
unrelated issues)  for more than a decade.   (And even the Elwha dam 
eventually came down  (this year) in spite of Congressional resistance.)  The KHSA 
dam  removal components only need to come through Congress once and only 
once. 
 
Many Settlement  Parties' overarching goal is and always has been Klamath 
salmon  restoration.  Dam removal is only one element, though an essential 
one, of  that 50-year watershed restoration program.  Dam removal is thus a  
necessary -- but in itself not sufficient --prerequisite to that  salmon 
restoration.  Much more than mere dam removal is necessary to  restore healthy 
salmon runs to an over-appropriated river with much of its  salmon habitat 
severely damaged.  Can't get there from dam removal  alone.  
 
Federal funding is, of  course, required for the long-term salmon watershed 
restoration efforts in  the parallel KBRA.  This is, of course, the rub in 
a Congress  committed to pinching every penny.  My own view -- and the 
numbers  substantiate this -- is that investing a little more in the basin to  
fix its water over-allocation and habitat problems once and for all is  far 
cheaper, in the long run, than spending federal money in  periodic disaster 
assistance programs caused nearly every year by the problems  that need 
fixing.  And far more certain than trying to get these water  reforms through 
litigation.
 
Last decade nearly $15 million/year  went to the Klamath Basin in federal 
disaster assistance  alone!  The economic  price to the basin and coastal 
communities of the back-to-back water crises  of 2001 and 2010 and fish kills 
(2002, leading to fishery closures  2006) to the region was in the hundreds 
of millions of  dollars!   Lurching from disaster to disaster is not the  way 
to run things, and is not sustainable!
 
Suppose we were able to get the dams  down without that Restoration 
Agreement (the KBRA)?  The lower river would  still be starved of water, much of 
the spawning and rearing habitat still  damaged, and salmon highly unlikely to 
recover to any major degree.  This  is why the KHSA is tied to and part of 
a much broader watershed restoration  plan.  
 
The KBRA is very like the San Joaquin  Settlement Agreement, seeking to 
restore salmon to the completely dewatered San  Joaquin River in northern 
California for the first time in 60 years.  That  also took some years longer to 
get funded through Congress than originally  anticipated.  But once the San 
Joaquin Settlement Act began to move, it  took only three weeks to become 
law!  
 
One is nearly always better off  having tried something and failed rather 
than having tried nothing and  succeeded.  A 50-year watershed restoration 
plan like the KBRA is  ambitious, yes, but it is in fact what the Klamath 
salmon runs need to fully  recover.  And all the science says that the kind of 
restoration and water  reallocation programs embodied in the KBRA and KHSA 
will be moving us very far  along indeed in the right direction.
 
======================================
Glen H.  Spain, Northwest Regional Director
Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's  Associations (PCFFA)
PO Box 11170, Eugene, OR 97440-3370
Office:  (541)689-2000 Fax: (541)689-2500
Web Home Page: _www.pcffa.org_ (http://www.pcffa.org/) 
Email:  fish1ifr at aol.com
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