GRANTS PASS, Ore. (AP) — The chairman of the Klamath Tribes said Friday that the unexpected sale of private timberlands the tribes had hoped to regain to rebuild their lost reservation jeopardizes agreements to settle long-standing battles over water.
Chairman Don Gentry said a key provision of the Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement is funding so the tribes could buy 140 square miles of lodgepole pine known as the Mazama Tree Farm. It also lays out ways to divide water between protected fish and farms in times of drought.
This week, Fidelity National Financial Ventures announced it had sold the assets of Cascade Timberlands LLC to Singapore-based Whitefish Cascade Forest Resources LLC. The sale included the Mazama Tree Farm, which straddles U.S. Highway 97 between Chemult and Chiloquin. Fidelity National received a distribution of $63 million from Cascade at closing.
Gentry said the tribes had an option to buy the land, but it expired. He added that Fidelity had emailed a tribal member, but that person was no longer involved in tribal government, and it was not noticed until too late.
Gentry said the tribes’ participation in the agreement depends on regaining that land, or some substitute. He adds that two other agreements are closely related and would also be in jeopardy. One would remove four Klamath River dams to help salmon and another would help ranchers when they have to stop irrigating due to tribal water rights.
“Certainly the agreements are at risk,” Gentry said. “I’m not sure what other benefit would satisfy our tribes. Our members voted on the agreements as they are.”
The agreements grew out of a desire by farmers, tribes, salmon fishermen, conservation groups and others to settle long-standing battles over water that reached a peak in 2001, when water had to be cut off to a federal irrigation project straddling the Oregon-California border to leave enough water for fish protected by the endangered Species Act — endangered suckers in Upper Klamath Lake and threatened coho in the Klamath River.
The next year water was restored to irrigators, and tens of thousands of adult salmon died in the lower reaches of the Klamath River from diseases that thrive in low warm water conditions.
Meanwhile, PacifiCorp agreed to give up four aging hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River in Oregon and California to restore salmon to the upper basin and avoid having to spend millions of dollars to upgrade the dams so salmon could swim over them.
Those agreements have languished for years in Congress, where House Republicans have been strongly opposed. Last year, a third agreement was added that helps ranchers forced to stop irrigating when there is only enough water in streams running through the former reservation to satisfy tribal water rights, which are devoted to fish.
The Klamath, Modoc and Yahooskin Band of Snake Indians were terminated by Congress in 1954, and their 1,400-square-mile reservation sold off, becoming ranches, rural subdivisions, private timberlands, and parts of two national forests. Since tribal status was restored in 1986, the tribes have been working to regain some of the reservation as an economic base.
