[env-trinity] Times Standard April 13

[Byron Leydecker]

Federal betrayal claimed on Trinity water
Eureka Times-Standard - 4/13/04
By John Driscoll, staff writer
The Hoopa Valley Tribe said U.S. Assistant Interior Secretary Bennett Raley
reneged on a pledge to push for more water to flow down the Trinity River.

In a strongly worded statement Monday, the tribe said federal attorneys
missed a deadline to plead with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for
the water needed by salmon.

There is a lot more water available this year than there has been in the
past several years. Trinity Lake is nearly full, and the year has been
classified as wet. The water picture on the Sacramento River is also good,
leaving the two artificially connected watersheds relatively flush.

The U.S. District Court in Fresno has capped the flows to the river at what
would be allowed during a dry year. The tribe said Raley this winter vowed
to submit his own brief seeking higher flows to the appeals court now
hearing the case, but later backed away, saying it would only support the
tribe's request.

The Interior Department didn't do that either.

"Today was the deadline for the department to support our request for
water," tribal chairman Clifford Lyle Marshall said. "But Interior never
showed up, and left us alone at the courthouse door."

Raley, on an eight-day rafting junket with federal officials and reporters
down the Colorado River, was not able to return the Times-Standard's phone
call by deadline. Interior and U.S. Bureau of Reclamation public relations
personnel would not comment.

The injunction on flows comes as part of a suit pressed by the Westlands
Water District. The powerful irrigation interest was identified as the main
benefactor in legislation authorizing the Trinity River project in the
1950s, and it sued when a federal plan to restore flows to the river was
signed years later.

Former U.S. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt in 2000 approved a restoration
plan backed by two decades of studies. The plan would send just under half
the upper watershed's water down the river, which joins the Klamath River at
Weitchpec. Westlands, in the San Joaquin Valley, gets its water through the
Sacramento River delta, fed in part by a diversion tunnel connecting the two
rivers.

If the court were to uphold the Hoopa Tribe's request, some 71 billion more
gallons would flow down the river, opening up habitat for salmon along the
course of the Trinity. That water is needed for fish now, according to the
tribe. Should the appeals court wait to rule on the merits of the case, the
benefits of the water would be lessened.

Water from the Trinity last year was credited for staving off another fish
kill on the warmer, shallower Klamath, which this year is expected to have
generally higher flows.

Marshall said Interior's failure to back up the tribe's request will hurt
the run of chinook salmon -- a mainstay of the Hoopa and Yurok tribes -- by
keeping habitat out of their reach. He said Interior Secretary Gale Norton's
decision not to ask for more water is "unconscionable."

"The government's silence is mute evidence of Secretary Norton's disregard
of her trust responsibility and requirement in federal reclamation law to
protect the fishery."


Byron Leydecker
Chairman, Friends of Trinity River
Consultant, California Trout, Inc,
PO Box 2327
Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327
415 383 4810 ph
415 519 4810 cell
415 383 9562 fx
bwl3 at comcast.net
bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary)
http://www.fotr.org
http://www.caltrout.org

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