By Craig Welch
Seattle Times staff reporter
Seattle Times - from
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/134315869_klamath09m.html

	GARY THAIN / AP Protesters use their bare hands last week to open headgates on the A Canal, which taps Upper Klamath Lake.

KLAMATH FALLS, Ore.July 9, 2001  - Farmland here is so dry it crumbles like old cement, but tensions in this drought-desiccated valley are boiling over.

Three times in five days last week, protesters frustrated at the government's refusal to release irrigation water from nearby Upper Klamath Lake used saws or a blowtorch to open headgates and release water from behind a dam.

Meanwhile, residents unsuccessfully begged reluctant county officials to pass unorthodox laws to wrest more control of water from Washington, D.C.

The FBI is in town. County commissioners are worried. The sympathetic sheriff is under fire for not taking action. And the Bush administration is suddenly in the hot seat to resolve a conflict more reminiscent of the Clinton era.

"When your house is on fire you start looking for the nearest garden hose," Klamath County Commissioner Steve West said. "People are losing hope. I just hope they don't lose common sense."

As temperatures soar into the 90s and crops wither, farmers, merchants and residents are turning to ever more radical measures in their battle with the feds.

• Some residents, who promise a repeat performance of the dam release later this week, threaten within earshot of police to chain themselves to squad cars if anyone interferes.

• One group has hired a Yale-educated attorney who urges the political right to parrot the protest methods used at World Trade Organization conference in Seattle in late 1999.

• Mainstream farm groups, which organized a communitywide "bucket brigade" protest in May that drew thousands, kick around ideas such as tying up the highway with a tractor convoy from here to Eugene.

• A few more-militant individuals insist they've talked others out of plans to dynamite dams.

 

With erosion-blocking cover crops already planted, many of the region's 1,300 normally workaholic farm families are suddenly faced with too much idle time.

"They've cut and baled their only crop of hay. They've changed the oil in the tractor. There's nothing to do," said cattle rancher Bill Kennedy. "And it's going to get worse."

The resource battleground

Three months after the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation announced it would withhold nearly 90 percent of the region's irrigation water to protect two species of endangered suckerfish, the skirmish here along the California-Oregon border has become the central resource battle of the West.

Property-rights-groups from several states are coordinating events here, and conservatives in Congress see the region as a prime example for dismantling the federal Endangered Species Act.

But the Klamath Basin water war also represents a subtle coming-of-age for the so-called wise-use movement, a broad collection of interest groups that push for more traditional uses such as farming, logging, mining and ranching in the West.

In 1994, Dick Carver, a commissioner in Nye County, Nev., bulldozed through a road closed by a Forest Service ranger and later suggested that if the ranger had drawn his weapon, "50 people" with sidearms would have drilled him. In 1999, in Elko, Nev., residents calling themselves a "shovel brigade" who promised to rebuild a road closed to protect bull trout, were so menacing that Humboldt-Toiyabe Forest supervisor Gloria Flora resigned in protest.

While some tactics employed here directly descend from the defiant Sagebrush Rebellion of the early 1980s and mimic recent protests elsewhere, actions show an increasing sophistication.

Residents here work with the same wise-use groups and admit they took the idea for some demonstrations from Nevada. But here, farmers and merchants are media-savvy, producing videotapes of their plight, and staging less-threatening demonstrations of civil disobedience. Klamath irrigators are even represented by a lobbying firm that employs former U.S. Rep. Bob Smith, R-Ore., the onetime chair of the House Agriculture Committee.

Meanwhile,the county-supremacy measures sought but rejected last week in Kalamath Falls were similar to toothless laws passed in the early 1990s in Boundary County, Idaho, and Catron County, N.M. — constitutionalist edicts that shared philosophy with the militia movement and which were quickly struck down in court.

But here, maverick attorney James Buchal, who recently wrote a book, "The Great Salmon Hoax," urged residents to seek something equally controversial: money to bring in nonviolence trainers.

One organizer of last week's Fourth of July rally was a Washingtonian, Chuck Cushman, with American Land Rights in Battle Ground, Clark County, and a longtime wise-use activist. He wants to conduct a seminar here on "nonviolent civil disobedience and how not to go too far."

While a few angry residents mutter about tyranny and not wanting a repeat of Waco or Ruby Ridge — the siren song of Western anti-government movements—most take pains not to even hint at violence.

Stan Thompson, who is organizing another protest at the dams this week, said he planned radio messages today informing the FBI that participants would willingly be arrested without confrontation.

"Don't kick our doors down or storm-trooper us. Call us," Thompson said. "We'll go quietly."

Klamath County Sheriff Tim Evinger doesn't hide his support for the demonstrators and defends his decision not to interfere with last week's water release at the dam. He said he'd arranged months ago with the U.S. Marshals Office and the FBI that they would lead any investigation. "There were fliers up and it sounded like a protest, so I went to keep an eye out," he said, complaining that media accounts made it "look like I was a wild-eyed Western sheriff.

"It's difficult for me. It's never fun to arrest your neighbors, but I will if I have to."

Prompted by court decisions and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biological opinions, the decision to cut irrigation water here affects most of the 170,000 acres served by Upper Klamath Lake. While some farmers still have state water rights or private wells, and others still get water from two nearby lakes, most farms are so parched their crops have blown away and the soil may be damaged for years.

Elsewhere in town, food-bank supplies are stretched. The county's mental health services are up 60 percent over the same period last year.

Alfalfa prices are so high struggling cattle owners can't afford it, but hay producers short on water have no crop to sell to take advantage of the market.

Work at one local hairdressers has "dropped off like a lead sinker," one cosmetologist said.

County officials estimate some 30 wells also have gone dry, and they blame empty irrigation canals they say help recharge deep aquifers.

While residents of this town and the nearby communities of Merrill, Malin and Tulelake are quick to support each other, they're deeply divided on tactics.

"The solution is not to open the headgates," said Jimmy Carleton, who normally farms 1,100 acres of alfalfa. Instead, his cattle have been moved to Grants Pass, and he's taken a job this spring with the state Labor Department, coordinating retraining for farmers.

"It's a political problem, and it requires a political solution," he said.

He and other farmers are trying to put pressure on Congress, where a $20 million aid package has stalled. They've also become eager foot soldiers in the war against the ESA.

They support calling on the "God Squad"—a rarely convened committee of high-ranking officials in Washington, D.C., who judge whether an ESA decision is too detrimental to people.

While requests have been made more than a dozen times in the past 25 years, the committee has only convened in three cases - the snail darter, the whooping crane and the northern spotted owl. The one decision against the ESA - the spotted-owl case - was later overturned.

"I understand the frustration, but in the past, the God Squad has not really been helpful," said Jeff Eager, spokesman for U.S. Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., who has requested information about such a committee from Interior Secretary Gale Norton. It's not clear yet how Norton will respond.

Still others want to be more aggressive.

"I'm tired of playing by the rules," said farmer Arritola. "Nobody's listening."

And everyone, it seems, is both courting - and fearing - attention from outside the region.

"We want people to hear our story," said Commissioner Steve West. "But I fear there have been some with no ties to this basin who've come in and tried to get people to buy into their beliefs and get them more worked up."

He sighed.

"And the summer's only going to get hotter."

Craig Welch can be reached at 206-464-2093 or cwelch@seattletimes.com.

Copyright © 2001 The Seattle Times Company

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, any copyrighted work in this message is distributed under fair use without profit or payment for non-profit research and educational purposes only. [Ref. http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml]