[env-trinity] ICYMI: Corruption, Dead Birds & Endangered Coho in Klamath Basin - Inspector General says Reclamation wasted $32.2 million on Klamath irrigators

[Dan Bacher]

Good Morning

I know the election is on everybody's minds, but this is a must-read  
story about corruption, dead birds and endangered coho salmon in the  
Klamath Basin.

Thanks
Dan

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/10/16/1583352/-Klamath-Irrigators-Illegal-Piggy-Bank-Broken-Up

http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2016/10/20/18792496.php





Photo of Iron Gate Dam on the Klamath River by Dan Bacher.

Inspector General says Reclamation wasted $32.2 million on Klamath  
irrigators

by Dan Bacher

Federal auditors have found that the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (USBR)  
wasted $32.2 million intended for fish and wildlife and drought relief  
in the Klamath Basin on subsidies for irrigators.

This scandal takes place as the Yurok, Karuk and Hoopa Valley Tribes,  
recreational anglers, commercial fishing families and river and  
coastal communities are suffering from the big cultural and economic  
loss caused by low numbers of returning salmon on the Klamath River  
this year, the result of decades of mismanagement by the state and  
federal governments.

The misspending is a revealed in a new audit report that confirms  
charges leveled last year by the Public Employees for Environmental  
Responsibility (PEER). In a news release, PEER described the  
arrangement between Reclamation and KWAPA as the “Klamath Irrigators’  
Illegal Piggy Bank.” (http://www.peer.org/news/news-releases/klamath-irrigators-illegal-piggy-bank-broken-up.html 
)

“We found that USBR did not have the legal authority to enter into the  
cooperative agreement, resulting in $32.2 million in wasted funds  
spent by KWAPA (Klamath Water and Power Agency )under the agreement,”  
wrote Mary L. Kendall, Deputy Inspector General for the Office of  
Inspector General, in the audit report dated October 11, 2016.

The report found that the program had done little to help endangered  
coho salmon, Lost River suckers and shortnose suckers, as it was  
intended to do.

The IG report details how Reclamation diverted $32.2 million in  
federal funds intended for drought contingency planning and helping  
struggling fish populations:

• In a “waste of funds” wholly lacking in any legal authority;
• Paying for KWAPA salaries, fringe benefits, rent, travel and other  
expenses whose benefits flowed “primarily to irrigator contractors  
rather than fish and wildlife,” including $4.2 million for uses that  
could not be supported with documentation or were outright  
“unallowable”; and
• By modifying the KWAPA contract “19 times to expand the scope of  
activities” and extend the original payment program from 2008 through  
September 30, 2015.

Reclamation disputes the Inspector General’s findings. “Reclamation  
maintains that the reimbursement program has been an important tool in  
dealing with water issues in an over-allocated basin,” Reclamation  
claimed in a written statement.

The Klamath Water and Power Agency was a water and power authority in  
Klamath Falls, Oregon that received water from federal water projects  
in northern California and southern Oregon. KWAPA was forced to close  
its doors on March 31, 2006 due to “disorganization” and complaints  
filed by PEER. (http://ktvl.com/news/local/kwapa-forced-to-close-due-to-disorganization-in-klamath-county 
)

The Klamath River watershed — and its precious salmon and steelhead  
populations — have been devastated by a series of droughts in recent  
years. Over the past several years, Reclamation, under pressure from  
Tribes, fishermen and environmentalists, has released supplemental  
cold water flows from Trinity Reservoir into the Trinity River to stop  
a massive fish kill on the lower Klamath like the one that ravaged the  
river in September 2002. During that fish kill, the largest of its  
kind in U.S. history, an estimated 35,000 to 68,000 salmon perished.

Since the Bureau rejected the audit report's findings, the IG is  
kicking this intra-agency dispute upstairs in Interior to the  
Assistant Secretary for Policy, Management and Budget for resolution.  
“While the payments have ended, Reclamation refuses to change its  
practices to prevent future abuse or to recoup moneys illegally  
spent,” according to PEER.

“Basically, the Bureau of Reclamation became an illicit ATM for  
favored special interests,” stated PEER Senior Counsel Paula  
Dinerstein. “To add injury to insult, these improper subsidies were  
used to aggravate environmental damage by draining shrinking  
groundwater supplies to benefit irrigators.”

Dinerstein emphasized that these illegal payments would be continuing  
if Reclamation employees had not blown the whistle. The whistleblower  
complaint from two Reclamation biologists filed through PEER prodded  
the U.S. Office of Special Counsel to order Secretary of Interior  
Sally Jewell to address the illegal diversion of funds and how her  
agency would remedy identified these violations.

“That answer to the Special Counsel was due back in August of 2015 but  
Reclamation, on the Secretary’s behalf, has obtained extensions  
totaling 15 months,” added Dinerstein.

“Reclamation is circling its wagons to defend the potentially criminal  
conduct by its own managers,”said Dinerstein, pointing to the Anti- 
Deficiency Act that forbids expenditures not authorized by any  
appropriation and is enforced by criminal fines and/or imprisonment  
for up to two years. “We will keep pressing for some accountability to  
taxpayers from Reclamation’s multi-year, multi-million dollar illegal  
money-laundering operation.”

Jim McCarthy, Communications Director & Southern Oregon Program  
Manager for WaterWatch, pointed out that not only was this program  
apparently illegal and wasted millions, but the resulting lack of  
water on the Klamath’s wildlife refuges, which the program in question  
was created to provide, “actually killed huge numbers of wildlife in  
recent years.”

In fact, seventeen conservation groups sent a letter to Interior  
Secretary Jewell on October 13 asking for emergency water deliveries  
for the Klamath refuges to reduce the risk of yet another waterfowl  
die-off, said McCarthy.

The letter states, “As you are aware, since 2012, tens of thousands of  
birds on these refuges have died for lack of water resulting from  
allocation decisions made within the Department of the Interior. When  
few wetland acres are available on these refuges due to lack of water,  
large numbers of waterfowl pack together during migration periods,  
leading to lethal disease outbreaks. Refuge staff estimated that some  
20,000 birds perished this way in 2014. Similar conditions on these  
refuges sparked massive waterfowl die-offs in 2012 and 2013."

Mike Orcutt, Fisheries Director of the Hoopa Valley Tribe, said the  
water bank created under the agreement between Reclamation and KWAPA  
was supposed to improve water quality and the fishery in the Klamath  
Basin, but that didn’t happen, according to the IG report.

“Looking to the future, the Tribe receives their money for fish  
restoration from the same budget and the budget has been flatlined. We  
get the aftermath of that flatlined budget,” he said.

Another potential impact is that this scandal could impact the trust  
in the Bureau by Congress and make it harder for similar future  
agreements to be funded.

“You’re going to be hard-pressed to get the money if you don’t use the  
funds for what you were supposed to,” Orcutt told the Eureka Times- 
Standard. (http://www.times-standard.com/article/NJ/20161017/NEWS/161019812 
)

On July 29, the Hoopa Valley Tribe filed a lawsuit against the Bureau  
of Reclamation and the National Marine Fisheries Service in the U.S.  
District Court in Oakland for violations of the Endangered Species Act  
(ESA) over management actions that have imperiled Coho salmon on the  
Klamath River. The Trinity River, the largest tributary of the  
Klamath, runs through the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation.

The Hoopa lawsuit is expected to be followed by several other  
lawsuits, including litigation by the Yurok Tribe, Karuk Tribe and a  
coalition of groups, including the Pacific Coast Federation of  
Fishermen’s Associations (PCFFA), Institute for Fisheries Resources,  
Klamath Riverkeeper and Earthjustice. (http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/7/29/1554325/-Hoopa-Valley-Tribe-Files-ESA-Lawsuit-to-Protect-Salmon 
)

Hopefully, this illegal spending of $32.2 million in federal funds to  
further subsidize already heavily-subsidized agribusiness interests  
will result in criminal convictions if the allegations by PEER are  
proven true.

This is not the first time that state and government officials have  
diverted millions of dollars designed to restore fish and wildlife for  
other purposes. For example, the Department of Interior’s Inspector  
General earlier this year opened an investigation into the possible  
illegal use of millions of dollars by the California Department of  
Water Resources (DWR) in preparing the Environmental Impact Statement  
(EIS) for Governor Jerry Brown’s controversial Delta Tunnels Plan. (http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/04/12/feds-to-probe-misuse-of-state-funds-for-jerry-browns-delta-tunnels/

The investigation resulted from a complaint PEER filed on the behalf  
of a Bureau of Reclamation employee on February 19, 2016. The  
complaint, made public in a statement from PEER on April 11, details  
how a funding agreement with DWR is “illegally siphoning off funds  
that are supposed to benefit fish and wildlife to a project that will  
principally benefit irrigators” under the California Water Fix, the  
newest name for the Delta Tunnels plan.

The Delta Tunnels project is deeply connected to the Klamath River  
watershed. The two 35-mile long tunnels under the Delta would hasten  
the extinction of Central Valley steelhead, Sacramento River winter- 
run Chinook salmon, Delta and longfin smelt, green sturgeon and other  
fish species. The project would also imperil the salmon and steelhead  
populations on the Trinity and Klamath rivers, a fishery that for  
thousands of years has played an integral part in the culture,  
religion and food supply of the Yurok, Karuk and Hoopa Valley Tribes.
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