FISHERIES
Comment: Shred the Roadmap to Salmon Extinction

Bruce Babbitt was secretary of the Interior from 1993 to 2001. He is a former governor and attorney general of Arizona.

Wild salmon are drifting toward extinction in the northern Rocky Mountains. Last month, the Bush administration delivered a decision that will be the death blow, if it stands: four obsolete dams on the Snake River in eastern Washington state will not be dismantled.

The Snake River dams were conceived on a field of industrial dreams. The idea took root in the 1960s, when local boosters persuaded Congress to authorize a huge project to transform Lewiston, Idaho, 400 miles from the Pacific, into a seaport.

The Army Corps of Engineers then proceeded to subdue 140 miles of the wild Snake, remaking it into a slack-water barge channel.

The dream soon turned into a nightmare for people and towns that depend on wild salmon. The fish began disappearing from the lakes and rivers upstream from the dams.

In one year, only a single sockeye managed to find its way up to Redfish Lake, in the Sawtooth Mountains, to spawn.

Prized Chinook runs vanished throughout central Idaho. Fisheries and fishing jobs in the Northwest and as far away as Alaska, tribal fisheries included, declined with them.

Meanwhile, the promised inland seaport boom did not arrive.

The volume of barge shipments never reached expectations, in part because many farmers in the region still found it cheaper to ship by rail to the deep-water port at Tacoma.

That didn't deter the corps, which continues to spend $36 million a year to operate and maintain the four Snake River dams, their locks and the navigation channel.

Yet even at this late date, there is still a chance to save the salmon. The corps, the farmers and the fishermen could cooperate to get the wheat off the river and onto railroads where it belongs.

The track is in place. The mainlines of the Burlington Northern and the Union Pacific run right through this wheat country and then west to ports at Pasco, Vancouver, Tacoma and Portland.

The state of Washington just purchased the short lines that feed the mainlines. This system already ships a lot of local wheat, and with modest further investment, the Burlington Northern says it will be ready and willing to handle what is now shipped by river.

Farmers near the river who use the channel to transport grain are the main voice for keeping the dams, because they save 3 to 7 cents per bushel compared with shipping by rail. What stands between waters alive with salmon and the silent expanses of extinction is that 3 to 7 cents per bushel.

All of this cries out for a common-sense solution that takes all sides into account. There is one that has yet to be considered: Simply shut down the barge traffic, take out the dams and then dedicate a small part of the annual $36 million that would be saved to making up the shipping differential with the farmers.

In contrast, the administration's plan to keep the dams and "save" the salmon has an estimated total cost of $6 billion over the next 10 years. Much of that would go to various schemes to barge, truck, pipe and steer migrating salmon around the dams.

Scientists have repeatedly concluded that these proposals offer little hope of restoring the wild salmon to fishable abundance.

Neither science nor logic - nor economic theory - supports the administration's plan. The dams could be dismantled, the farmers who ship on the river compensated and the relatively small amount of electricity the dams generate replaced, for about one-third of the $6 billion. A restored fishery would be worth at least $1 billion a year to Pacific Northwest states.

The administration's plan is a very expensive roadmap to salmon extinction. It's time to admit a mistake and set about fixing it for the sake of fishermen, farmers, Native Americans, the salmon, the inland Pacific Northwest ecosystem - and the taxpayers.#

U.S. Forest Service officials said the changes, contained in an administrative rewrite of national forest rules expected to take effect next week, would free them from wasteful and time-consuming paperwork and give them the latitude to more quickly respond to evolving forest conditions and scientific research.

"The new rule will improve the way we work with the public by making forest planning more open, understandable and timely," said Forest Service Associate Chief Sally Collins. "It will enable Forest Service experts to respond more rapidly to changing conditions, such as wildfires, and emerging threats, such as invasive species."

But environmentalists and former Clinton administration officials said the new rules in effect diminish public participation in the management of public lands and give forest managers more leeway to open them to increased logging and gas and oil development.

"This is the most dramatic change in national forest management policy since passage of the [1976] National Forest Management Act," said Jim Lyons, who oversaw the Forest Service as Agriculture undersecretary during the Clinton administration. "It is really a clandestine effort in my mind to subvert much of what the national forests stand for."

The 160-page document outlining the new rules contains two major revisions to forest planning regulations. The first drops the 25-year-old requirement that managers prepare environmental impact statements — a cornerstone of public involvement in environmental decisions — when they develop or revise management plans for individual national forests.

The new rule directs forest managers to involve the public in the planning process but leaves the "methods and timing of public involvement opportunities" up to forest officials.

Management plans are a forest's basic zoning document, outlining which activities are allowed on every acre of the land — from recreation to oil and gas drilling, road building and logging.

The second change drops a mandate, adopted during the Reagan administration in 1982, that fish and wildlife habitat in national forests be managed to maintain "viable populations of existing native and desired nonnative vertebrate species." Instead, managers will be directed to provide "ecological conditions to support diversity of native plant and animal species."

The viability clause is widely considered the Forest Service's most important wildlife protection — and has been a key point of contention with logging interests. It was cited in environmental lawsuits that forced drastic reductions in timber harvests to protect the northern spotted owl in the Pacific Northwest.

"I'm very fearful that we've just lost the foundation for the protection of old-growth forests and wildlife that has protected the national forests for the last 20 years," said Mike Anderson, senior resources analyst for the Wilderness Society.

Forest Service officials denied that the new approach would weaken wildlife protections.

"We tried to bring the best, newest scientific thinking as to how to protect species, and we think we've got that in the rule," Collins said. "We're going to be able to protect species better with this approach. The accountability that people have been clamoring for so long has never been stronger."

The new rules also mandate that all forests adopt an "environmental management system" — used more commonly to manage private-sector land — and conduct periodic independent audits of whether they are meeting their management goals.

By eliminating the requirement for environmental impact statements — bulky documents that outline the environmental consequences of proposed actions and call for extensive public comment — Forest Service officials said they will shave years off the preparation of new forest plans.

"The problem with [the current system is that] it's a lot of wasted motion that takes a lot of time," said Fred Norbury, associate deputy chief of the national forest system.

"The [environmental impact statement] model is based on a 1950s model of how you relate to the public. It creates documents that don't get used or don't get read and are rapidly obsolete," he said.

Environmental impact statements would still be required for individual projects, such as large logging operations or oil and gas drilling.

But environmentalists pointed out that previous rule changes and legislation under the Bush administration have exempted more and more projects from environmental review.

"Their justification is that the public can comment on individual projects, but they've already issued policies that cut out public comment on many projects. All the pieces fit together," said Amy Mall, forest policy specialist for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Representatives of the timber industry and several Western politicians applauded the rule changes, saying they were overdue.

Michael Goergen, executive vice president of the Society of American Foresters, said the "rules could be the difference in getting managers out from behind their desks and into the forest." Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.) called the new regulations "a great Christmas present for our national forests and the people who depend on them."

"This new rule involves the public from start to finish, but no one has to worry about dying of old age in the interim. In too many Western states, forest planning became so convoluted under the old rule that the process was taking 10 to 15 years to complete. That's an absurd tangle of pointless red tape," Domenici said.

But House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco called the new regulations "an insult to every American who cares about our national forests" and maintained they would "increase the exploitation of our natural resources by private companies without ensuring the survival of the forests for future generations."

Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey, who oversees the Forest Service, is a former lobbyist for the timber industry, which threw its political support overwhelmingly toward Republicans in the last election cycle, donating more than $1.7 million to GOP candidates and party committees and just $380,000 to Democrats, according to data compiled by Dwight L. Morris & Associates, a Virginia firm that tracks campaign contributions.

Contributors identifying themselves as working for the timber industry gave $268,552 to the Republican National Committee and another $163,321 to President Bush, records show.

Three of Bush's elite fundraisers were also top timber executives: W. Henson Moore, chief of the American Forest and Paper Assn., the industry's trade group; Otis B. Ingram III, president of a Georgia lumber company; and Peter Secchia, chairman of Universal Forest Products.

Among the first donors to Bush's 2005 inaugural committee was International Paper Co., which donated $100,000 to help pay for the festivities.#

But just as critics rev up for a major rewrite of the act in Congress next year, environmentalists see in a new plan for West Coast salmon and steelhead trout sure signs from the Bush administration that it wants out of the recovery business.

NOAA Fisheries, an arm of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, insists that its proposal is the result of better information, not a radical policy shift.

It says that scientists now know more about where the endangered fish hang out in the rivers and streams, and that there is no need to designate critical habitat where the fish aren't.

But under a draft proposal released earlier this month, 80 percent to 90 percent of the riverbanks and watersheds once considered critical for the recovery of the endangered fish will be freed from any constraints under the controversial law.

In some cases, entire watersheds will become exempt from critical habitat designations. The areas are vast. For instance, most of the Russian River, and many of its tributaries, no longer will be treated as critical habitat for salmon and steelhead, according to Trout Unlimited.

Further reductions in critical habitat could result from the agency's decision to exempt fish habitat on streams or rivers otherwise covered by state or federal management plans.

To environmentalists, it adds up to a larger strategy by the administration and on Capitol Hill to weaken the act's focus on helping endangered species get healthy.

"This is part of an all-out assault to remove the recovery standard from the Endangered Species Act," said David Hogan of the Center for Biological Diversity in San Diego.

Federal officials and congressional leaders see it differently.

They say the designation of critical habitat, rather than bringing fish and wildlife species back from the brink of extinction, is burdening agencies with crippling lawsuits and landowners with restrictions that don't work.

"Critical habitat is one of the most perverse shortcomings of the act," said House Resources Committee Chairman Richard Pombo, a Tracy Republican whose mission since coming to Congress in 1992 has been to rewrite the law. "It has been interpreted to mean that if an animal is determined to be in trouble, there is only one viable option - to designate critical habitat and let nature take its course."

The problems are legion, Pombo and others say. The act requires decisions under strict schedules that, if not met, land the government in court. And even when deadlines are met, they say, decisions often are made before scientists determine where species live and habitat gets designated as critical when it's not.

Such is the case with the salmon and steelhead proposal. To meet deadlines when the fish were first listed, the fisheries agency proposed critical habitat four years ago that basically included all the waters where the fish swim.

That decision was undone by a lawsuit from the National Association of Homebuilders that claimed economic considerations were ignored. The agency then was sued for not meeting its habitat deadline, resulting in a settlement requiring a new proposal no later than Nov. 30.

But what the agency proposed on Nov. 30 is certain to bring another round of lawsuits because it trims dramatically the amount of habitat the agency now regards as critical.

In announcing their decision, federal fisheries managers said salmon and steelhead are not found on most of the habitat once considered critical, and the stocks themselves are improving.

"Since 2000, 13 of the 16 listed runs of salmon in the Pacific Northwest, and three of the four Northern and Central California runs for which NOAA Fisheries has recent data, have experienced significant improvements," the agency said.

Certainly there have been improvements, said David Katz, California director for Trout Unlimited. But the improvements are largely the result of increased cooperation, much of it voluntary, with county governments, road builders and foresters because of critical habitat designations, he said.

"We have a very innovative partnership with timber companies, for instance, who are not normally friendly to fish," he said. "They're voluntarily working closely with us to do a better job. They have accepted the fact that we are going to bring these fish back and that there's a regulatory process in place.

"To undermine this after we've done all this work to build partnerships would be really unfortunate."

But in the Pacific Northwest, said Earthjustice lawyer Michael Mayer, the Bush administration proposal not only reduces critical habitat by 90 percent, it also writes off entirely those stocks where there is too little critical habitat left for them to regenerate.

"Snake River steelhead, upper Columbia River spring chinook, middle Columbia River steelhead, Oregon coast coho - all these are likely not to receive any critical habitat," he said. "These are pretty broad-brush efforts to take critical habitat off the table."

Glen Spain, Northwest regional director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Association, equated the administration's deferral to state or federal conservation plans already in force to "death by a circular firing squad," because those plans are largely regarded as ineffective for fish protection.

"This is a status quo plan - keep the fish at the extinction level and leave it at that," Spain said. "It's as if they just threw up their hands and said, 'This just costs too much.' "

Hogan, of the Center for Biological Diversity, said the administration's view that critical habitat exists only where fish are currently found virtually eliminates any possibility of restricting development elsewhere so that recovering stocks can move into those areas as well.

"What that does is to throw out the window the entire purpose of the critical habitat designation - that is, to identify areas that are necessary to ensure the survival of the species and provide for recovery," he said.

The retrenchment on critical habitat proposed by the administration is echoed by work already under way on Capitol Hill to rewrite the Endangered Species Act.

In October, Pombo's House Resources Committee voted 28-14 to approve legislation sponsored by Rep. Dennis Cardoza, D-Atwater, revising the process the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service uses to determine critical habitat.

Among the provisions of that bill, which died with the adjournment of Congress but which committee aides say is likely to be revived next year, is an exemption for lands already covered by state or federal conservation plans, the same approach now proposed by federal fish managers for salmon and steelhead.

"We see this a lot in this government," Hogan said. "A conservative administration will work closely with lawmakers to identify their gripes and begin to respond in their policies, and then the lawmakers will turn that policy into new law."

But what troubles Spain, of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Association, is that the administration is moving ahead independently from Congress.

According to court records, Deputy Assistant Interior Secretary Julie MacDonald tried to change scientific recommendations related to protecting wetland species and endangered fish.

In the first instance, the correspondence was between MacDonald, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service managers and the California Farm Bureau Federation in April. A month later, the federation used the information to back a federal lawsuit in Washington, D.C., seeking to overturn the service's decision continuing protection for the delta smelt.

MacDonald sent an e-mail to regional officials in California that disputed that they could reasonably estimate the remaining population of the tiny fish, which federal biologists had determined is in danger of extinction.

She then telephoned the farm bureau's chief lawyer and read her the e-mail, providing the farm bureau with a printout of the e-mail the same day.

Environmental groups say such contacts suggest top-level administrators at the nation's land management agencies care more about business interests than the wildlife they're assigned to protect.

MacDonald, whose office is in Washington, D.C., confirmed the e-mail and the telephone calls in an interview with The Associated Press but said they do not indicate bias against the Endangered Species Act.

"This was part of an ongoing series of calls in which they were unhappy with a decision that had been made. This was a case where I had to agree with them," MacDonald said.

During dry periods, the delta smelt clusters around the gigantic intake pipes that draw water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta before sending it south to Central Valley farms and Southern California. The endangered species designation forces water managers to slow the pumps just when farmers need the water most.

"This has real consequences for our members. It's not hypothetical," said Brenda Southwick, the farm bureau lead attorney MacDonald called that day. "We can't grow crops without water."

MacDonald said the Interior Department supported the Fish and Wildlife Service's decision to continue protections for the smelt, although that isn't evident in her e-mail. The e-mail challenges the science behind the ruling, particularly its reliance on population estimates and other "flawed assumptions and data."

MacDonald also intervened at the last minute to exclude five California counties from wetlands protections in a separate decision that aided farmers and land developers. She now acknowledges that decision was based on a flawed analysis.

In that case, MacDonald substituted her own cost-benefit analysis for that done by the Fish and Wildlife Service. She made the changes the night before a court-ordered decision was due on establishing critical habitat for 15 plants and animals that survive only in shallow seasonal pools across much of California.

MacDonald wrote Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks Craig Manson in a July 2003 e-mail, saying the costs of establishing critical habitat outweighed the economic benefits in five counties – Butte, Madera, Merced, Sacramento and Solano.

Wildlife managers later discovered her analysis was flawed. For example, it underestimated each county's annual taxable sales a thousandfold, which affected her cost analysis.

"This is like the stupidest mistake in the world. It's humiliating to have made it," MacDonald told the AP.

Nonetheless, Manson excluded the five counties, with some of MacDonald's reasoning showing up word-for-word in the final decision. She said the correct numbers wouldn't have altered her recommendation to eliminate the five counties with the highest unemployment rates.

In that case, the exchange worked in the favor of the environmental groups, as the service agreed to reconsider. Its new decision is expected in July.#

December 16, 2004
The Bureau of Reclamation announces the availability of the Final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the proposed long-term renewal of Central Valley Project water service contracts between Reclamation and up to 145 Sacramento River Settlement Contractors. The proposed contract renewals allow for the continued diversion of up to 1.8 million acre-feet of Base Supply water per year and 380,000 acre-feet of Project Water per year for agricultural and municipal and industrial uses for a period of 40 years.

The written comment period on the Draft EIS ended on November 15, 2004. A separate 60-day public review and comment period for the associated Sacramento River Settlement contracts ended September 7, 2004. The Final EIS contains comments received on the Draft EIS and responses to those comments. Reclamation will make a decision on the proposed action no earlier than 30 days after the date of publication of the Final EIS. The Record of Decision will state the action that will be implemented and discuss the factors leading to the decision.

The Final EIS can be reviewed at the following Reclamation offices: Northern California Area Office, 16349 Shasta Dam Boulevard, Shasta Lake, California; Red Bluff Division Office, 22500 Altube Road, Red Bluff, California; Willows Office, 1140 West Wood Street, Willows, California; and Regional Office, Public Affairs Office, 2800 Cottage Way, Sacramento, California.

In the Bush world of nature, no right of a fish or animal species is apparently enough to cause discomfort to any citizen holding a deed to land anywhere in America. This must be what they mean by achieving an ''ownership society.'' The more the land is owned by individuals, the more privatized, the less there is in commons, the less we have the right to even care what happens to any of the natural wonders of Indian country's remarkable landscape.

This season the pressure is again on the Pacific salmon. The ''dry-out'' of the salmon has begun in earnest, as the Bush administration has opted to drop protection from four-fifths of protected rivers, judged crucial to the recovery of salmon and steelhead, from Southern California to the Canadian border.

Declaring that these are no longer critical for salmon and steelhead recovery, tens of thousands of miles of river have been set loose for change and exploitation in the broadest environmental policy reversal in recent history. Down to only 27,000 miles of river, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries, the federal agency assigned to handle salmon recovery. ''A flip-flop on Salmon,'' the Idaho Statesman calls it.

The controversy dates back to the extended California drought in the early 1990s, when the federal government held back water from two San Joaquin Valley irrigation districts to protect the Chinook salmon and delta smelt populations in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.

A private law firm, Marzulla & Marzulla, sued the federal government on behalf of the irrigation districts -- which in turn represent 285 growers in the area. The suit claimed that withholding the water represented an illegal ''taking'' of property, prohibited by the U.S. Constitution.

In 2001, John Wiese, a judge in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in Washington, D.C., ruled in the grower's favor. The ruling effectively overturned decades of California law. For years, it had been accepted that our water is owned by the people of California, and not by those who have signed contracts to use it. ''You can acquire rights to use water, but you can never acquire ownership of water in the same way you can a piece of land, or an automobile,'' said Joseph Sax, a UC Berkeley Boalt Hall School of Law professor who helped prepare a brief against the water districts' claims. Wiese in effect ruled that the users of the water, through their local water districts, owned the water. He ordered the federal government to pay the growers $14 million in damages, which, with interest and attorneys' fees, has grown to $26 million. ''This could have a devastating impact on regulating water in the public interest in California,'' Sax told us.

But instead of appealing the case to a higher court -- which the federal government typically does when it has to pay out large sums of money - - the Bush administration is reportedly on the verge of reaching a settlement with the growers, to the alarm of state officials.

On Dec. 1, California's Water Resources Control Board, representing the Schwarzenegger administration, urged the Bush administration to appeal Wiese's decision and to consider having the case transferred to the California Supreme Court. In a letter to three Bush cabinet secretaries, water board chairman Arthur Baggett Jr. wrote that Wiese's ruling could ''fundamentally change the way water resources are managed in California.''

State Attorney General Bill Lockyer has made a similar request. Even the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, charged with managing the nation's fisheries, has urged the administration to appeal the ruling, arguing that ''liability was wrongly decided.''

All Californians should be concerned about the Justice Department's apparent eagerness to go along with a flawed ruling in a single court that could have a disastrous impact on the environment, as well as determine who controls water in California for decades to come..

Urge Attorney General John Ashcroft to stand up for taxpayers and the environment by appealing this ruling. E-mail him at askdoj@usdoj.gov. #

What will it take to fill streams again with these silvery fish, symbols of nature and a clean, thriving environment? There are lots of answers, but don't expect any good ones from the Bush administration.

Step by step, it is rolling back policies and changing rules to undercut a revival of these fish. The latest is a plan to cut protections for rivers, which are the vital nurseries of the fish to spawn and grow before heading out to sea.

The proposal wipes out 80 percent of the habitat controls that prevent timber cuts and roads that muddy the clear-flowing water needed by the fish. The shift also helps developers who want to build near streams, another activity that can lead to lower water quality.

It's a giveaway to business and a loss for the environment. Coming a month after the presidential vote, the move seems timed to minimize fallout for President Bush.

The cuts in river protections aren't the only dismaying setback for salmon. Earlier, the administration tried to count hatchery-raised fish along with slim numbers of wild fish to show that populations weren't endangered.

Also, this week Bush officials formally buried talk of taking down federal dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers that obstruct migrating fish. Removing the eight major dams -- a radical step, to be sure -- had at least stayed on the table in a long-running argument in the Northwest about salmon losses.

Salmon and steelhead are no match for the White House's political calculations. #

A coalition of 22 environmental groups said Wednesday the plan would shift some of the federal water burden - and potentially more than $20 million in expenses in some years - onto the state-controlled water supply. In some years, hundreds of thousands of acre-feet of water might not be available for wildlife, the groups said.

Federal spokesmen said the plan would protect the environmental water allotment while balancing the needs of farmers and urban residents.

At issue are agreements, federal law and a federal court decision that requires the government to guarantee 800,000 acre-feet of federally controlled water goes to Delta fisheries each year. That's roughly enough water to supply 800,000 households for a year.

"This is a big, thorny issue of water in California," said Diana Jacobs, deputy director of the state Department of Fish and Game.

Twenty populations of West Coast salmon and steelhead are listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, which requires that the government identify "critical habitat areas" -- the places where a listed species can recover. The plan put forth by the National Marine Fisheries Service designates habitat for the endangered fish in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and California.

But the habitat proposed Tuesday is 80 percent less than the habitat identified by the service from 1999 to 2002, when it announced it would suspend the process pending further study. The proposal resumes the habitat- designation program.

"We've reduced the area under designation to one-fifth as large as it was, " said Brian Gorman, a spokesman for the agency.

Critical habitat areas can be subject to restrictions on activities such as development, logging and grazing -- and Tuesday's proposal also emphasized that potential impacts on such economic activities would be weighed in the consideration of critical habitat.

A 60-day public comment period follows the announcement. The agency is expected to make a final decision on the matter by June 2005.

Gorman said the move was essentially procedural and wouldn't have a major impact on salmon and steelhead protection.

"The real teeth of the ESA (Endangered Species Act) comes from the listing itself, not the critical habitat," Gorman said. "(Critical habitat) is basically a red flag to other agencies that they have to be careful, to adjust their activities accordingly."

Gorman said that original critical habitat proposals for Pacific salmon and steelhead were more extensive than has turned out to be necessary because the agency had not completed its research -- and wanted to err, if at all, on the side of caution.

"We now have scientific tools and maps that allow much more refined determinations, that show which streams have viable populations (of fish), which should be critical habitat," Gorman said.

But Bill Kier, a Sausalito-based fisheries consultant who specializes in salmon and steelhead, said the announcement marked "a sea change" in federal policy, one that could prove disastrous for the fish.

"It's a default shredding of the ESA," Kier said. "Salmon and steelhead have essential freshwater stages, and they need precisely those areas NMFS (National Marine Fisheries Service) plans to abandon. If 80 percent of the critical habitat is to be cut, I don't see how these fish can sustain their recovery."

Kier said that much progress has been made in resuscitating populations of steelhead and coho and chinook salmon, particularly in California.

"This, however, could pull the rug out from lots of landowner groups, community groups and local agencies that have been working to bring these fish back," he said.

The revised plan, which was prompted by a lawsuit from the National Assn. of Homebuilders, could exclude 80% to 90% of the "critical habitat" that the National Marine Fisheries Service designated four years ago as necessary to keep West Coast salmon and steelhead populations from going extinct and to allow their depleted populations to recover.

Streams and rivers at Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa Barbara County and at Camp Pendleton in San Diego County would be withdrawn as protected habitat because the military argued that the protections would delay training exercises and space launches and diminish military readiness.

In addition, streams that run through millions of acres of national forests stretching from northwestern California through western Oregon and Washington would be excluded as critical habitat for the fish. Federal officials said they did not want to impose another layer of restrictions on areas already subject to protections for the northern spotted owl.

The new plan also drops protections on private land where developers have struck conservation deals with government officials.

By removing all of these areas, "We would get down to excluding around 90% of the critical habitat that had been [previously] identified," said Jim Lecky, an assistant regional administrator for the Fisheries Service.

The new plan, released late Tuesday, was immediately applauded as "a very large improvement" by Christopher Galik, an environmental policy analyst for the National Assn. of Homebuilders.

But environmentalists and fishermen said it failed to meet the agency's own scientific criteria for what is needed for the once-abundant fish to return to healthy population levels.

"None of this is defensible," said Chris Frissell, a fisheries biologist with the Pacific Rivers Council. "There is no way it would come anywhere close to helping these fish recover."

All sides in the battle are predicting more lawsuits over designating critical habitat, arguably the most powerful tool under the federal Endangered Species Act to control development, timber harvesting and farming practices that can degrade healthy streams and rivers.

"That is the one certainty," Lecky said. "More litigation."

The legal battle began in the 1990s after the federal government began a 15-year effort to bring back salmon, as well as steelhead, which are prized by fishermen and seafood lovers.

The Fisheries Service in 2000 designated large areas of the Pacific Coast from Malibu Creek in Los Angeles County to the tip of Washington state as critical habitat for the ever-declining salmon and steelhead. It extended into the northern reaches of California's Central Valley and included vast areas of the Columbia and Snake river valleys that stretch into Idaho.

Homebuilders feared the habitat restrictions would stall, change or cancel streamside projects. Timber companies worried that the restrictions would curb plans for logging roads and harvesting practices that can muddy streams. Farmers were concerned that they would be prohibited from siphoning water from rivers and streams used by the fish.

The National Assn. of Homebuilders led a list of groups that sued, arguing that the designations were excessive, unduly vague and lacked a required analysis of economic impact.

The federal government withdrew the critical habitat designation for 19 types of salmon and steelhead.

On Tuesday, it reissued substantially modified designations after taking into account the economic costs of its first plan, which federal officials said could run about $220 million a year in the Pacific Northwest and $100 million to $200 million a year in California.

"Clearly, there were some areas where the economic costs of the critical habitat clearly outweighed the biological benefit," Lecky said. Other areas were eliminated, he said, because better mapping and more accurate data allowed federal officials to more precisely pinpoint which streams were used by the fish.

Nicole Cordan, policy and legal director of Save Our Wild Salmon, called the plan "ridiculous" on its face, predicting that eliminating 90% of protected habitat would fail to meet the biological needs of salmon and the legal tests of the Endangered Species Act.

The proposal, she said, falls in line with other administration positions, including one announced Tuesday stating that federal dams do not jeopardize salmon by blocking their migration to and from the ocean.

Salmon, which live as juveniles in rivers and streams, spend most of their adult lives in the ocean and then return to fresh water to spawn.

The Fisheries Service ruled out demolishing eight dams on the lower reaches of the Columbia and Snake rivers, even as a last resort. Instead, it said the endangered fish could be protected by continuing to truck fish around the dams and building a new type of weir that works like a water slide to allow juvenile fish to slide around the obstructions on their way to the ocean.

The administration's plan, which must be approved by a federal judge, is estimated to cost about $600 million a year.

Earlier this year, the administration proposed counting millions of hatchery-raised fish that are released into the wild as wild fish, undercutting the need to keep fish born in the wild on the list of endangered species.

Federal officials next year will review the status of 26 species of wild salmon that are supplemented with hatchery fish to determine if they should remain protected as endangered or threatened species.

All these actions, Cordan said, "are typical of this administration — ignore science, ignore sound economics and ignore the law."

Glen H. Spain, northwest regional director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Assns., said the administration is making a critical error in its economic analysis by failing to consider the benefits of restored salmon populations — such as helping the struggling salmon fishing industry.

The Arundo donax species is an aggressive Mediterranean plant that looks like bamboo, but can grow four inches a day and reach heights of 30 feet. It also consumes about 80 percent more water than other plants.

Arundo was introduced in Southern California by Spanish missionaries and used for roofing material. It is still used today in reeds for musical instruments.

Officials once thought it could be used as a tool to stabilize stream banks, and ranchers and farmers around the state planted it. But during storms, the roots break loose and release silt into the water, harming fish. Stalks have become lodged beneath bridges, building up pressure and wiping out roads.

The plant does not produce enough shade for salmon and trout, which need cold water. And its also highly flammable and does not provide much food or habitat for other wildlife.

The Western Shasta Resource Conservation District is applying for grants to pay for eradication efforts, said biologist Valerie Shaffer.

"The money and effort spent now is a drop in the bucket compared to what we will have to spend later if we allow the further spread of invasives" like Arundo, she said.

The Redding Rotary Club, fly fishing and trails enthusiasts, Boy Scouts, and other clean-stream advocates will work with the state Department of Fish and Game to clean up several local creeks on Dec. 4.#

Sacramento Bee - 11/27/04
By Ed Fletcher, staff writer
Two young girls bounce between the shin-high concrete tanks, tossing rice-sized pellets of fish food at the thousands of weeks-old salmon waiting to test their fins and instincts on the open waters. One girl, a quick-minded 9-year-old, knows plenty about salmon, their life cycle and the Nimbus Fish Hatchery in Rancho Cordova, to which her mother and another home-school mom took their children on a recent Friday afternoon.

"We like feeding the fish," said Beata Mackenroth. "I also like to see the fish ladder." One question she couldn't answer was: How different are hatchery-born fish and fish that spawn naturally? That's no elementary school question. Heck, grown-ups are fighting over the answer.

Whether hatchery salmon should be counted with salmon born in the wild when making Endangered Species Act determinations is the latest battleground in the long-standing war between environmentalists, who are pushing habitat protection, and landowners, represented by a Sacramento-based legal group that wants less stringent land-use rules.

The Endangered Species Act, enacted by Congress in 1973, protects a wide array of wildlife, but landowner rights advocates say it is overused and hurts property owners.

Prompted by a 2001 court decision, NOAA Fisheries, the federal agency responsible for salmon recovery, is rewriting the rules on how it determines whether a species qualifies as "threatened" or "endangered" under the act.

The finalized rule isn't due out until June, but because the comment period ended recently, the draft of the proposed rule was being attacked from both sides.

Environmentalists and land-rights advocates each had problems with the new rule, which seeks to take factors other than population into account when determining the viability of salmon and steelhead populations.

Under the rule change, genetic diversity, survival rates and population distribution would all be considered in addition to a raw population count.

Senate President Pro Tem John Burton, who requested the report, said consumers and policy-makers should be concerned, but he didn't recommend specific legislation. The San Francisco Democrat has reached his term limit and will leave office next month.

Burton pushed a bill through the Legislature this year to ban foie gras - a liver pâté derived by force-feeding geese - beginning in 2012 unless its makers adopt more humane feeding practices.

The suit is part of Butte Environmental Council's larger effort to preserve wetlands throughout the state, said Barbara Vlamis, BEC's director.

Filed last week, the suit challenges plans for more than 8,400 homes on 3,162 acres, which the city of Roseville would annex on its west side.

Vlamis isn't so concerned about the houses as she is the vernal pools dotting the land and the principle that land designated critical habitat ought to remain undeveloped.

Vernal pools, found in certain areas up and down California, are low spots in the land that fill with water in the spring. They are home to various plants and animals that appear with the water. Some of these organisms, such as meadowfoam, are on the Endangered Species List.

Because of BEC's pushing, the federal government in 2003 designated as critical habitat nearly 1.7 million acres of vernal pools in 36 California counties, Vlamis said. But last year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service cut that back to 740,000 acres in 30 California counties and one Oregon county.

BEC sued the wildlife service , demanding that the full 1.7 million acres receive the critical-habitat designation. The case is continuing. Butte is one of the five counties where wetlands lost the critical-habitat designation. BEC wants the designation restored to wetlands in all five counties.

Another issue is whether land designated as critical habitat will receive protection or not.

Vlamis said the project west of Roseville would destroy 2,100 acres of vernal-pool grasslands. The Fish and Wildlife Service and the Army Corps of Engineers approved the project. Yet, just last week, she said, the service identified this land as vital in a draft Vernal Pool Recovery Plan for the state.

If the land is so important to achieving recovery for these endangered species, she asked, how can it be approved for elimination?

A spokesman for Fish and Wildlife in Sacramento said he couldn't comment on the matter because it was being litigated.

Vlamis said last summer a federal court ruled in two cases that land designated critical habitat could not be changed in ways that jeopardized endangered species. Those two cases involved the habitat for the spotted owl and the Mojave desert tortoise.

Another conservation group, Defenders of Wildlife, joined BEC as a plaintiff the suit filed Friday.#

"We got a great crop," he says.

After a few years, the refuge will flood the land again. The ducks and marsh plants will return. Then the refuge will drain it once again, and the farmers will return. So the cycle goes.

Refuge managers see the rotation between wetland and cropland as a chance to improve the outlook for both wildlife and agriculture -- not only in this wildlife refuge but also in the rest of the Klamath Basin and possibly elsewhere in the country.

"I like to think that what we are doing here is sound stewardship, one that will carry this basin and maybe some other basins to a much longer life," says Ron Cole, Tule Lake refuge manager.

Cole wants to expand the "walking wetland" program from a few experimental plots to cover much of the 39,000 acres in the refuge.

The practice is a rare bright spot in the Klamath Basin, where conflict is as regular as the turning of the seasons. Agriculture and development have taken about 75 percent of the basin's wetlands, leaving farmers, tribes and endangered fish to compete for limited water.

Audubon Oregon and Waterwatch, an environmental group that advocates phasing out farming altogether on Tule Lake, support the rotation. "The walking wetland program is a good program, and it shows how productive reconstructed wetlands can be," says Bob Hunter, staff attorney with Waterwatch in Medford.

Founded in 1928, the Tule Lake refuge sits in a semi-arid punch bowl just south of the Oregon-California border. It's one of the six refuges in the Klamath Basin that lie in a geographic bottleneck along the Pacific Flyway. Every fall, 80 percent of the birds heading south from Alaska to warmer climates pass through the river basin.

At Tule Lake, the water surface is thick with battalions of black American coots. Mallard and pintail ducks seek cover in the reed beds. Seen from a migratory bird's-eye view, the refuge looks like a checkerboard of brown and green cropland.

Almost half of the refuge's acreage is dedicated to commercial agriculture, while only 8 percent is marsh. Uplands and open water make up the rest.

The refuge here -- as does the Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge -- leases acreage to private farmers under a 1964 law that sought to balance the demands of farming and wildlife in the basin. "It was a law that said, 'You're going to have agriculture, and you're going to have wildlife. Now get along,' " Cole says. "And for a long time, they didn't."

When the law was passed, several million ducks and geese visited Tule Lake. In recent years, those figures have declined to about 400,000, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service figures show.

The Defenders of Wildlife, a Washington, D.C.-based group, recently listed the entire complex of Klamath Basin marshes as among the nation's most endangered. At the same time, agricultural land on the refuge has declined in quality. Decades of planting and harvesting depleted organic matter in the soil, requiring more fertilizer. Pests such as nematodes, which cover potato skins with tiny pimples, became endemic.

In the early 1990s, refuge managers began experimenting with flooding agricultural lands and discovered that long-dormant marsh plants recovered within one year, Cole says. Then in 1999, the refuge drained an experimental wetland and leased the field to private farmers. The plot was known as Lot 5. Farmers had joked the site would drop 6 inches if you took all the bugs out of the soil. It had been under water for two years when Marshall Staunton and his two brothers entered the winning bid to farm its 90 acres. What they found surprised nearly everyone: After it was drained, Lot 5 held black, sweet-smelling soil relatively free of pests and pathogens.

Basin potato crops average about 24 tons an acre. But that fall, Staunton harvested 29 tons per acre of worm-free potatoes from the plot. Plus, because the pests were gone, he saved about $200 an acre on fumigants and other chemicals, he says.

Eventually, word of the Stauntons' success got around. Minor bidding wars erupted to win the leases of other newly drained wetland plots. This year, farmers bid an average of 75 percent more, or a total of $160 an acre, for formerly flooded land compared with non-wetland acres.

At the same time, ducks and geese have begun taking advantage of the temporary wetlands. Pintail ducks have increased more than threefold since 1997 and green-winged teals more than fivefold in the same period, in part because of the wetland-rotation program, refuge managers say.

"For some species of waterfowl, we're seeing numbers we haven't seen in a quarter of a century," Cole says.

Now about 3,000 acres of refuge land are in different stages of wetland/cropland rotation, but eventually Cole hopes to have 18,000 acres in the mix.

The program is part of a massive plan to re-engineer the refuge by draining some portions of the lake and flooding other long-dry areas to better mimic the historic range of habitats at Tule Lake, he says.

Though still somewhat experimental, it's showing good results for farmers and the refuge, Cole says. "If this isn't a good way to manage an ecosystem, we'll find out soon enough," he says. "But one thing I do know: It's better than what we were doing."

Cole and others at the refuge hope to see farmers eventually adopt a wetland rotation on their own land just as they might a cropland rotation. The process could be adapted to other areas -- the Willamette Valley, for example, or even the Mississippi Delta.

"It's one of these tools where everyone can come out better than they went into it, and that's what you're looking for. You're not looking for winners and losers," says Steve Kandra, a Tulelake farmer and president of the Klamath Water Users Association.

But the ecological benefits of the walking wetlands are less certain.

For instance, a system of temporary wetlands probably won't have near the biological diversity of established wetlands, says Mary Santelmann, a research scientist at Oregon State University who focuses on wetlands and ecosystem ecology.

Put simply, when the wetlands "walk," many species such as amphibians can't follow. Other species, such as sandhill cranes, return to their same nesting spots year after year and may not react well to a shifting mosaic of habitats.

Once the fields are drained again, "you could create ecological traps for some species that aren't particularly mobile," Santelmann says.

She also says the program may not work in other places, such as Iowa, where farming is more established and marsh germination slower.

But in the Klamath Basin, the walking wetlands may ease some of the strains on the basin's water, soil and people. Staunton is one of the farmers looking for ways to export the program to private lands.

Out of his pickup and standing in the neat potato rows, Staunton sniffs the damp soil and inspects some pest-free russets in the back of a harvester.

"This basin seems to get more than its share of crisis, confusion and conflict," he says. But "these are good potatoes, a good crop."#

The Cache Creek Conservancy, Yolo County Flood Control and Water Conservation District, and the Yolo Resource Conservation District, are working with USDA Agricultural Research Service and NASA to explore the feasibility of satellite monitoring of invasive plant infestations on Cache Creek.

Scientists from USDA-ARS and NASA's Ames Research Center recently met with participating Yolo County agencies to discuss the feasibility of satellite monitoring. NASA researchers, led by Dr. David Bubenheim, are interested in conducting research on the reach along Cache Creek from Clear Lake to Woodland's Settling Basin.

"This is an opportunity to apply cutting edge technology to on the ground work being done along Cache Creek," Dr. Bubenheim said. "We are touring Yolo County to get a better idea of what problems are encountered by land managers and the restoration community," he added.

"The Cache Creek Conservancy has worked closely with USDA-ARS for the past five years on eradication efforts aimed at tamarisk and Arundo," said Jan Lowrey, the Conservancy's Executive Director. "We welcome NASA's interest and believe they could be invaluable in the battle to eradicate invasive plant species from the creek."

During the meeting, NASA researcher Lee Johnson displayed a preliminary website that will show the extent and location of invasive plant species including yellow star thistle, tamarisk, and Arundo and the extent of infestation. Hyperspectral imaging is used to document the presence of invasives, to identify the species, and the size and location of the infestation.

Invasive plant species often crowd out native species, provide poor habitat for wildlife, use disproportionate amounts of water, and frequently lodge in streambeds where their presence may facilitate flooding and erosion. Tamarisk and Arundo are two types of invasive species commonly found throughout Yolo County.

In addition to invasive species, the satellite imagery also could be used to display the presence of native plants stands as well. "This is a tremendous opportunity to fine-tune and integrate an update of the Yolo County Flood Control & Water Conservation District's water management plan update with other restoration work proceeding in the area," General Manager Tim O'Halloran noted. "Furthermore, by increasing our knowledge of the location and density of existing, beneficial wildlife habitat we can better practice our role as stewards of the environment."

NID directors last month decided to send out a special mailing to about 5,400 irrigation water users with information about the Placer-Nevada-South Sutter-North Sacramento Subwatershed Group.

Individual growers are banding together into watershed groups so they can apply for a discharge waiver and more easily share the costs of water quality monitoring programs.

The Sacramento Valley is divided into 10 groups to comply with agricultural discharge waiver rules approved by the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board.

Yuba, Sutter and Butte counties are in their own watershed group. The Colusa Basin includes Glenn, Colusa and northern Yolo counties.

The Nevada Irrigation District sent a five-page letter to its customers in early November that was written by the local subwatershed group.

According to NID, many of its water users objected to having to join the watershed group and to pay its acreage fee. A few customers thought NID was seeking the money.

"This is something we were not really involved in," NID General Manager Ron Nelson said in a statement. "We were simply trying to support our local agricultural groups. We're sorry for any confusion or misunderstanding this letter may have caused."

Lane Therrell, assistant director of the Placer County Farm Bureau, acknowledged that "our message wasn't delivered very clearly."

This fall, the returns of chinook salmon to Bogus Creek and the Shasta, Scott and Salmon rivers -- Northern California tributaries to the Klamath River -- have been disappointing. Estimates based on fish and carcass counts are showing less than 25 percent of last year's returns and less than 10 percent of the strong returns of 2000.

The reasons are difficult to nail down, but the more researchers look, the more disease they are finding in young chinook migrating down the Klamath River. The fish that survive to reach the ocean are finding less food than they did a few years ago.

Meanwhile, an El Niño building in the South Pacific could reduce the mountain snowpack that feeds the Klamath River and make food even more scarce for salmon in the ocean.

The disease and ocean conditions come on top of the continuing struggle to balance scarce water between threatened coho salmon and farms on a federal irrigation projected along the Oregon-California border. A drought in 2001 prompted the federal government to shut off water to most farms on the Klamath Reclamation Project.

The health of the Klamath's chinook salmon also has widespread effects because when runs are down, harvests in the ocean off Southern Oregon and Northern California are cut back to allow more to return to the river to spawn.

Declines blamed on habitat loss, poor water quality and overfishing prompted Congress to initiate a rebuilding effort in 1986, which led to increased research that has uncovered an alarming rate of disease.

Understanding the role that diseases play in salmon returns is becoming increasingly important in the rebuilding effort, said Nick Hetrick, fisheries program leader for Fish and Wildlife in Arcata, Calif.

That's where Scott Foott comes in. He is a fish pathologist at the agency's California-Nevada Fish Health Center who has been studying fish diseases in the Klamath Basin.

Samples taken from traps and seining indicate that as many as 80 percent of young Klamath chinook are infested with the parasite parvicapsula minibicornis by the time they reach the ocean. It doesn't appear to be fatal, but it weakens fish by making their kidneys less efficient at filtering their blood, Foott said.

Another parasite, Ceratomyxa shasta, infests the intestines. Between 30 percent and 40 percent of young chinook swimming down the Klamath get infested with it, and nearly all of them die.

Biologists don't know how many salmon are spawned in the wild in the Klamath Basin, so they cannot estimate how many are being killed by disease. Overall, though, the chances of salmon surviving from egg to spawning adult generally are tiny.

The numbers of chinook smolts released from Iron Gate Hatchery on the Klamath River that survived to return to the hatchery averaged less than 1 percent from 1979 to 1999, said Hampton, a biologist with the California Department of Fish and Game.

"This disease problem hits much harder in some years than other years," he said. "We're just now finding out what it's doing."

The fish do not appear to become infested with C shasta in their home tributaries, Foott said. It all appears to happen after they enter the Klamath. The rate of infestation appears to be related to the prevalence of a tiny worm, found in fine sand at the bottom of river pools and in algae that grows on rocks, that serves as an intermediate host for the parasite.

"The general thought is, if you have high concentrations of (the worm) in the upper river ... you are creating this condition of a higher rate of infection than you normally have," Foott said. "It could be a cyclic phenomenon. It could be due to a lack of flushing flows in winter. These are just open questions right now.

"A river is a very dynamic creature. When you turn it into a drainage canal, it doesn't operate like it used to."

Diseases could become another issue in the debate about water allocations in the basin. Right now, the timing and amount of flows down the Klamath River are dictated by the needs of coho salmon under the Endangered Species Act.

That could change if the Yurok Tribe wins a lawsuit against the Bureau of Reclamation demanding more water for chinook and other fish to fulfill tribal trust responsibilities. Also, PacifiCorp is seeking a new license to operate dams in the basin.

Beyond anyone's control are changing conditions in the ocean based on climate drivers such as El Niño in the South Pacific and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation in the North Pacific.

"PG&E has clearly heard the community's request," said Lisa Randle, a company spokeswoman. "We do not anticipate recommending a floating thermal curtain in Lake Almanor."

The tentative decision brought cheers from Almanor residents who have fought construction of the device as big as 14 football fields, which they feared would ruin the fishery of the popular recreation reservoir and Butt Valley Reservoir, which is slated for two smaller underwater curtains.

"It's a wonderful thing!" said George Prostman, chairman of the Save Lake Almanor committee. "We're super-excited the company reached this decision."

The head of the U.S. Forest Service approved the plan Thursday. U.S. Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey has 15 days to decide whether to review the decision before it becomes final.

Should Rey not act, Lockyer said he will sue in federal court contending the plan violates federal environmental protection laws, and will increase logging, endanger wildlife habitat, harm water quality and weaken grazing restrictions. Environmental groups said they plan to sue as well, raising similar objections.

''We will not let stand this betrayal of treasured forests and the public trust,'' the Democratic attorney general and likely 2006 gubernatorial candidate said in a statement.

It is a valley about 9 miles long and 1 mile wide, ringed by granite walls and spires towering 2,000 feet. Before the dam, the Tuolumne River tracked through the valley floor, past verdant meadows and copses of black oak and ponderosa pine.

When the valley was inundated in 1923 to provide water to San Francisco, it was assumed it would remain submerged forever. But two months after a Bay Area environmental organization announced a study supporting the restoration of long-drowned Hetch Hetchy Valley, the idea has gained a degree of momentum.

A recent study by the group Environmental Defense indicates the valley could be resurrected, with water needs met by transferring water to Don Pedro Reservoir and building additional infrastructure. The study, which estimated it would cost between $500 million to $1.6 billion to expand water storage facilities below Hetch Hetchy, augments earlier analyses by UC Davis and the U. S. Department of Interior, both concluding that restoration was possible without threatening state water supplies. Earlier this month, the Schwarzenegger administration announced it was authorizing a state study to evaluate restoration scenarios.

The settlement, which now goes to President Bush for his signature, would cede to Indian tribes nearly half the Colorado River water originally set aside for Phoenix and Tucson and allow those tribes to lease it back to growing cities for a profit.

The cities would be able to claim a small amount of new water to add to their existing shares of the river. But more importantly, they would now know for certain the size of their long-term water supply, allowing them to plan better for future growth. Left unsettled, the tribal claims could have dragged through the courts for years and cost the state significantly more in money and water.

Arizona's debt to the federal government for building the Central Arizona Project Canal, which moves water from the Colorado, also would be reduced by the water measure. The measure would end a long-standing feud over repayment costs and clear the way for the CAP board to reduce property taxes in Maricopa, Pinal and Pima counties.

Some central Arizona farmers would eventually lose water to satisfy the tribal claims, but it would be a gradual loss. The deal wouldn't take any water from cities or private water companies and wouldn't raise water rates unless cities signed huge tribal leases in the future.

"The word would be 'eureka,' " said Herb Guenther, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources. "It's knowing where you are and what you have without trying to guess what a court might do. It's a monumental day in Arizona water history."

The settlement designates for Indian tribes more than 650,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water, 47 percent of the CAP Canal's annual flow. The rest of the water would remain for cities and non-Indian farmers and would easily satisfy existing allocations, leaving some for future growth.

Two tribes won specific allocations in the measure. The Tohono O'odham Nation south of Tucson is set to receive 37,800 acre-feet and the Gila River Indian Community south of Phoenix would receive 155,700 acre-feet. An acre-foot of water is 325,851 gallons, enough to serve one or two average households for one year.

The measure completes a much broader water settlement for the Gila River community, which is poised to control more than 650,000 acre-feet of water drawn from the CAP and the Gila, Salt and Verde rivers. That represents the largest tribal water settlement in U.S. history.

"We've been in this struggle to regain our water rights for almost a century now," said Gila River Gov. Richard Narcia, who was in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday. "Our traditional name translated is 'River People,' and to regain that water is not only something we've been working toward but also a cultural issue for our people."

The community plans to put most of the water to work, restoring farmland left fallow for generations. Narcia said the community plans to lease "a small amount" to Valley cities.

Some of those cities have already begun negotiating the leases, and others have been working with tribal water projects. But the settlement's true value was the certainty it gave the region's water supply.

"This brings certainty to the whole Gila basin, and that is a really important thing in water resources to have certainty," said Kathryn Sorensen, water resources coordinator for Mesa. "It is a way of getting out of horrible, protracted 100-year legal battles over water."

The battles won't end entirely. The Navajo Nation and Hopi Tribe in northern Arizona still want their claims to the Colorado River settled, and those discussions have barely begun. The San Carlos Apache Tribe also has claims remaining.

Not everyone was celebrating Wednesday. Water historian and retired journalist Earl Zarbin has voiced strong opposition to the tribal deal, calling it "a gift to them at the expense of everybody else."

"Why 1 percent of our population should be able to control that much water is beyond reason or comprehension," Zarbin said. "It sets up a mechanism for these reservations to control the future for Arizona's population growth. These Indian tribes are under no compulsion to lease water to the non-Indians. They can either lease or not lease."

The measure encompasses three settlements: two with Indian communities and a third between Arizona and the federal government. The tribal claims date back nearly two decades and languished for years as scores of interested parties joined in the talks.

Under a 1908 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Indian tribes can claim ancestral water rights and seek enough water to meet demands on their current reservation.

Negotiations over the final deal still took several years and failed several times to make it out of Congress. The U.S. Senate finally approved the package Oct 10. On Wednesday, the measure was adopted by the House, sending it to Bush, who has announced support.

"This legislation offers most everyone something, but not everything to anyone. It represents hard-fought compromise that deserves passage," said Rep. J.D. Hayworth, R-Ariz., the House sponsor of the bill, in urging its passage on the House floor.

All seven of Arizona's other House members were co-sponsors.

Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., was praised repeatedly Wednesday for his work in shepherding the bill and keeping negotiations alive despite frequent setbacks.

In a statement, Kyl said that virtually every major water user and provider in central Arizona worked for passage of the measure.

"Looking ahead, this could ultimately be nearly as important to Arizona's future as was the authorization of the Central Arizona Project itself," he said.

The measure actually brings closure to the CAP, authorized more than three decades ago as a way of bringing Colorado River water to Phoenix and Tucson. The federal government spent more than $3.6 billion to build the 336-mile canal, which was finished in 1993, and then demanded that Arizona repay $2.3 billion of the cost.

The CAP board argued that Arizona owed much less and refused to pay the bill. The federal government sued, but Arizona forced a settlement and agreed to pay $1.65 billion, an amount written into law with Wednesday's vote.

CAP General Manager Sid Wilson said settling the dispute will help give a property-tax break to homeowners in Maricopa, Pinal and Pima counties and will also help the CAP plan its future.

"It provides surety for everyone in terms of who has what water and who pays how much," he said. "That's something we need in Arizona."

In all, the Congressional Budget Office has estimated the cost of the legislation's various components would total $445 million through 2014, according to Hayworth's office. Delegate Donna Christensen, D-Virgin Islands, who like Hayworth sits on the House Resources Committee, said from the House floor that although the measure would be expensive, "I am satisfied the benefits will significantly outweigh the costs to taxpayers."

The bill sets aside money to help tribes build needed water infrastructure, with help specifically for the San Carlos Irrigation Project. That project was initiated in the 1930s but never completed.

The measure also would amend the Southern Arizona Water Rights Settlement Act enacted in 1982 to resolve water claims by the Tohono O'odham Nation. The measure would establish water-delivery requirements and construction obligations with regard to the San Xavier Indian Reservation and the Schuk Toak District.

The final provision relates to funding to help complete other negotiations on water issues involving the San Carlos Apache Tribe and the White Mountain Apache Tribe, and Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., said the measure "makes it far more likely remaining water disputes can be resolved."

That has been the one thing missing from California's water shuffle groundwater hasn't been part of the equation locally.

There's far more water in the deep aquifers beneath the Sacramento Valley than could be stored in all the reservoirs in California. There's no doubt it's coveted by water buyers, but they haven't been able to get to it.

That's the reason the aquifers are the subject of such intense study right now. Researchers are trying to figure out how much water flows into the ground and whether that rate could be increased. This all is aimed at using the tremendous resource beneath us.

And that's all water that hasn't been spoken for. Most of the surface water in the state belongs to someone because of the complicated system of water rights that has developed over the years.

But if you own land over an aquifer and you can drill a deep enough well, you can get water. You might be able to get enough to solve Southern California's perennial water problems.

The reason that hasn't happened is that getting the groundwater to Southern California would be more problematic. It would have to use the system of rivers and canals that are regulated by the state and federal governments. Once the water's flowing on the surface, it gets tangled in the whole water rights web and may not get where it was planned to go.

But if an irrigation system sells its surface water and replaces it with groundwater, that problem is avoided. The groundwater doesn't get into the river. The transaction is simplified.

There may be a way to use the water beneath us without damaging us, but that hasn't been determined yet. Western's plan would take three years to complete, and hopefully by the time they're done, we'll know.

The agency said Friday it averted a potential environmental crisis by holding back water in Lake Mendocino this summer and then releasing it into the Russian River during the fall chinook salmon spawning run.

But when agency officials presented their case to the state this week, they were cut short and were slammed for not having an adequate water conservation program.

At issue is whether the county agency is doing enough to ensure that reservoir levels remain high.

State officials said they wanted to send a message to the agency that it can't rely on river flow reductions - in the name of protecting fish - to keep the Mendocino County lake full during the summer and increase water supply for a growing population.

"We're pretty happy with what they're doing to protect the fish," said Liz Kanter, spokeswoman for the state water board. "We're not happy with what they're doing to conserve water."

County officials said that message indicates the state water board does not understand the use of the Russian River as a water delivery system. The county agency has rights to water stored in Lake Mendocino, but does not use it to serve its 570,000 customers in Sonoma and Marin counties. Instead, it uses water from a different reservoir downstream: Lake Sonoma.

The agency said a reduction in water use would not have prevented low Lake Mendocino water levels or the need to reduce reservoir releases this summer to help fish.

"I think there's a lot of confusion," said Miles Ferris, the Santa Rosa public utilities director who was part of the county water conservation presentation. "We're not trying to find a way to increase our water supply. We're trying to deal with a very sensitive question about supporting endangered species fish runs."

As California looks for new ways to increase water supplies in the face of mounting shortages, this monstrous 602-foot facade holding back the Sacramento River seems destined to grow even taller.

It's a perfect spot for expansion, although it's not the only site under intense scrutiny in this scramble for new water storage.

Shasta Dam was designed to be 800 feet tall, so adding concrete to its top presents no significant engineering obstacles.

"This is like adding a room on a house, rather than building a new hous