March 25, 2016
Proponents: Klamath
dam pact beneicial
By TIM HEARDEN
Monarch lawsuit has GMO implications
Environmentalists
claim biotech crops
reduced habitat
By MATEUSZ PERKOWSKI
Capital Press
Capital Press
SACRAMENTO — Pro-
ponents say an updated plan
to remove four dams from the
Klamath River doesn’t skirt
the U.S. Constitution or leave
out opportunities for public
debate.
In their irst announced
public meeting since announc-
ing their plan last month, ofi-
cials from Oregon, California
and the federal government
said it’s perfectly appropriate
to seek dam removal approv-
al through the Federal Energy
Regulatory Commission.
“In my opinion, we’re not
trying anything new here,”
California Department of
Fish and Wildlife director
Charlton Bonham said during
the March 16 hearing at the
state Environmental Protec-
tion Agency headquarters. He
added the FERC process for
removing dams has existed
since the 1920s.
Richard Whitman, natu-
ral resources adviser to Ore-
gon’s Gov. Kate Brown, said
no interstate compact is being
made to set up the “non-feder-
al” entity that would take con-
trol of the dams from owner
PaciiCorp and handle their
removal.
“It’s easy to get confused
about this entity,” Whitman
said. “That corporation is an
independent corporation that
is not an instrument of the
states of Oregon or Califor-
nia.”
He also said the state
is willing to help farming
and ranching communities
in Klamath County, where
Commissioner Tom Mallams
contends the dams’ remov-
al would cost the county as
much as $500,000 in annual
revenue and take away local
jobs.
Mallams, who attended the
meeting, said he would like to
see a settlement that resolves
water issues in the Klamath
Basin but wants the county
“left whole.”
The exchanges came amid
a sometimes contentious af-
ternoon of haggling over lan-
guage in the 133-page “agree-
A new lawsuit claims the
prevalence of crops geneti-
cally engineered to withstand
glyphosate herbicides is re-
sponsible for the decline of
monarch butterlies.
The battle over monarch
butterlies has been brewing
since 2014, when several
environmental groups peti-
tioned federal wildlife reg-
ulators to list the species as
threatened or endangered.
Later that year, the U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service
found there’s substantial sci-
entiic evidence that such a
listing may be warranted, but
the agency did not arrive at
a inal conclusion within 12
months as required by the
By DON JENKINS
Capital Press
OLYMPIA — The Wash-
ington Department of Fish
and Wildlife has dropped
plans to buy a ranch and riv-
erside grasslands in Eastern
Washington, signaling the
agency’s increasing sensitivi-
ty to complaints that state land
purchases rob taxes from rural
counties.
WDFW had identiied
5,542 acres of Lincoln Coun-
ty rangeland and 2,560 acres
in Walla Walla County along
the Touchet River as among
10 properties it might pursue
in 2017.
Both pieces of land have
been used for agriculture,
though are not currently in
production, according to
WDFW.
They were the largest par-
Courtesy of Elizabeth A. Sellers, USGS
Environmental groups have
iled a lawsuit against the U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service for not
making a inal decision whether
to list monarch butterlies as
endangered or threatened with-
in 12 months of inding such
a listing may be warranted, as
required by federal law.
Endangered Species Act.
Two of the groups that
iled the petition — the Cen-
ter for Food Safety and the
Center for Biological Diver-
sity — have now asked a fed-
eral judge to order the Fish
and Wildlife Service to make
a decision within a reason-
able timeframe.
The plaintiffs argue that
widespread spraying of gly-
phosate has eliminated much
of the monarch’s milkweed
habitat, contributing to a 90
percent population decline
since the 1990s.
While farmers sprayed
for milkweed prior to the
commercialization of genet-
ically engineered crops, en-
vironmentalists say that gly-
phosate is more effective at
killing the plant’s roots, pre-
venting it from regenerating.
Biotech and pesticide in-
dustry supporters fear the
emphasis on monarch butter-
lies signals that opponents of
genetic engineering hope to
use the Endangered Species
Act as a weapon against such
crops.
One possibility suggest-
ed by environmentalists is
requiring farmers to plant
reserves of crops that ar-
en’t resistant to glyphosate,
where milkweed could re-
cover and provide habitat for
monarchs.
Tim Hearden/Capital Press
Don Gentry, chairman of the Klamath Tribes, makes a point during
a March 16 meeting on a new proposal to remove four dams from
the Klamath River. The meeting was held at the California Environ-
mental Protection Agency headquarters in Sacramento.
ment in principle” announced
Feb. 2 by PaciiCorp, the states
of Oregon and California and
the U.S. Departments of the
Interior and Commerce. The
new agreement was reached
after Congress failed to autho-
rize the original Klamath Ba-
sin water-sharing agreements
by the end of 2015.
The March 16 meeting was
attended by representatives
from most of the 42 original
signatories to the 2010 agree-
ments as well as critics, who
in recent weeks have accused
dam-removal proponents of
meeting in secret and claimed
the private entity created under
the new plan would still need
congressional approval.
The latter argument is
based on a legal opinion is-
sued in late January by Oregon
Legislative Counsel Dexter
Johnston, who opined the pri-
vate entity amounted to an in-
terstate compact that must be
authorized by Congress under
the Constitution. But Whitman
said Johnston’s opinion was
based on language from the
original agreements and not
the new pact, which the Ore-
gon Department of Justice has
assured him is legally sound.
“The amendments we’re
discussing today are an agree-
ment to a private party to han-
dle removal of its dams,” he
said.
The meeting began as a
veritable rehashing of a more
than decade-long debate over
dam removal, as public ofi-
cials given a chance to make
opening statements argued in
favor of or against the idea.
Grace Bennett, chairwoman
of the Siskiyou County Board
of Supervisors, argued remov-
ing the dams is unnecessary
to help ish and would expose
area residents to risks from the
built-up sediment and loss of
lood control and water supply.
“This is our livelihood,
this is our watershed, this
is our home,” Bennett said.
“For two decades, the county
government has worked with
landowners and water users to
improve ish habitat and water
quality in a successful effort to
reverse the last century’s trend
of declining salmon runs.”
WDFW drops rural land
buys as counties complain
Payment freeze
puts property
purchases on ice
7
CapitalPress.com
cels on WDFW’s newest list
of possible additions to its
million-acre portfolio. The
department prized the proper-
ties as recreational areas and
wildlife havens.
County commissioners in
both counties, however, pro-
tested. The commissioners
said taking land out of private
ownership strains county bud-
gets because the state pays
less to support county ser-
vices than taxpayers.
County unrest has been
building since the Legislature
in 2011 revised the compli-
cated formula for calculating
payments in lieu of taxes,
commonly referred to as PILT.
As a result, WDFW’s pay-
ments to counties declined by
53 percent, according to a re-
port by the state Department of
Revenue.
Walla Walla County Com-
missioner Jim Johnson said
WDFW’s plan to buy land
along a 3.5-mile stretch of the
Touchet River for conserva-
tion and recreation was sound,
but the county can’t afford to
lose more taxable land.
“It just continues to reduce
our revenue,” he said. “At
some point, if the payments are
restored, we can look at some
of these things differently.”
The point may have been
moot for the Walla Wal-
la County land. The land’s
owner has decided the prop-
erty is not for sale, WDFW
Lands Division Manager Clay
Sprague said.
Nevertheless, the depart-
ment would have abandoned
its pursuit because the county
was opposed, he said
“We are trying to form
good solid partnerships with
all the counties,” Sprague
said. “PILT is such a charged
issue right now in the Legisla-
ture, we want to get it solved.”
Lawmakers
reworked
PILT during an economic
downturn and hard budget
times. Since then, state reve-
nues have picked up, but leg-
islators face other demands
for money, including an order
by state Supreme Court to
spend more on education.
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