Gordon Smith played politics during the 2001 drought by subverting conservation laws and destroying endangered salmon, simply to win re-election. In order to secure rural southern-Oregon votes in the last election cycle, Smith and the Bush administration over-rode water level policies and violated the law, specifically the Endangered Species Act, in order to appease agricultural interests in southern-Oregon.

Forgoing proposed solutions which could have avoided the crisis by adopting plans which buy up land from farmers willing to sell and subsidizing area farms impacted by the drought. This would have protected farms, salmon runs and the fishing industry. Instead Karl Rove and Gordon Smith looked at opinion polls and overturned the science. The result...?

The largest fish-kill in the region's history!

History

The Klamath Basin in southern Oregon and northern California has an extensive irrigation project, built by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (BuRec) in the 1920s to put the arid lands into agricultural production. This delicate ecosystem is home to five native fish species, bald eagles, and a number of other species which are listed as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act (ESA).

As global climate becomes increasingly erratic, the Klamath Basin in 2001, like most of Oregon, experienced a severe drought due to the low snow fall during the winter of 2000-2001. Based on the science, and in order to protect several endangered species of fish including the threatened Coho salmon, water usually drained off from the Klamath river system and sent to farms in the basin was halted in April of 2001 on the recommendation of biologists at the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) which is part of the Department of the Interior, and National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Department of Commerce.

The result was anger directed towards the federal agencies with responsibility for water and species management by irrigators and farmers. At one point the farmers protested against this decision by they broke into an irrigation station with chain saws illegally opening the head gates to obtain restricted water for irrigation. This series of demonstrations featured prominently in national news, and a heated national debate about saving endangered species vs. agricultural profits erupted in the media.

Fishing for Votes

The Bush administration, seeking to exploit the dispute between the farmers and the science of conservation in order to overrule the scientific recommendations as well as erode the ESA which has long been a target of right-wing activists, requested a National Research Council (NRC) review. The NRC panel, using different criteria than that used by USFWS and NMFS scientists whose standards are set forth by law in the ESA, issued a hasty interim report to evaluate the Klamath River Basin crisis. The administration used this draft interim report to overrule the conclusions of the USFWS/NMFS and succeeded in creating the impression the fish did not need water and injecting the argument that science was inconclusive and therefore the ruling was, as the right-wing editorials and pundits often try to label such inconvenient facts and evidence, "junk science".

By the beginning of 2002 and outside of D.C. the issue of the Klamath basin crisis continued to roil throughout Oregon and California. The lone Republican Senator in either state, Gordon Smith, faced a potentially difficult re-election challenge by the popular Democratic Secretary of State Bill Bradbury back in Oregon, a state which Bush had barely lost to Al Gore by just 6,765 votes.

On Jan. 5 2002, Bush and his political manager Karl Rove flew to Oregon for an appearance in Portland Oregon with Smith. The president signaled his position to side with the agricultural interests and trying to get their votes by promising to reverse water policy in the basin, instead of following the law and the the science, saying "We'll do everything we can to make sure water is available for those who farm."

The next day Karl Rove moved swiftly to put into action the scheme to get southern-Oregon rural votes when he visited the 50 Interior Department managers attending an agency retreat at a Fish and Wildlife Service conference center in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. In a PowerPoint presentation Rove uses when soliciting Republican donors, and possibly violating the Hatch Act, he highlighted the Klamath water crisis and made clear that the administration was siding with irrigators and not the science.

Neil McCaleb, who was then an assistant Interior secretary, recalls the "chilling effect" of Rove's remarks. Wayne Smith, who was at the time the department's Bureau of Indian Affairs, whose budgeting and oversight committee Gordon Smith sits on in the Senate, states that Rove went about reminding the managers of the need to "support our base."

Rove continued to push the issue after the Shepherdstown meeting. Weeks later, he returned to Oregon on February 2, 2002 to met with a half-dozen or so farmers and ranchers. Soon after that meeting, the White House formed a cabinet-level task force on Klamath issues. The reversal moved beyond political targeting when on March 29, then Interior Secretary Gale Anne Norton stood with Gordon Smith in Klamath Falls and opened the irrigation-system head gates allowing the water that would sustain the endangered fish to be diverted from the rivers.

In April 2002 after the water began to be siphoned off, Michael Kelly, a top biologist with the NMFS, led a team which was tasked to review the situation on the Klamath River and report on the BuRec's 10-year plan for allocating the river's water. The report concluded that the current crisis and the BuRec plan would place the coho and the river echo-system in jeopardy.

The report, which was contrary to the position staked out by Rove and Gordon Smith, soon ended up at the Department Justice (DoJ) which was then controlled by John Ashcroft who, after having lost his re-election bid to the Senate in November of 2000 to a dead-man, was awarded political patronage by Rove and Bush when he was nominated to be Attorney General.

Ashcroft's nomination, having being promptly rubber-stamped by former colleague Gordon Smith and the GOP controlled Senate, was rewarded in kind when Ashcroft's legal department sent back a stinging rebuke ordering Kelly to rewrite his teams scientifically sound report of the BuRec's plan and the damage that Gordon Smith and the Bush administration were doing to the Klamath basin fishery.

Kelly issued a new report two weeks later, reaching the same conclusion and this time backing it up with more science and detailed legal analysis. This too was rejected.

Instead, the Bush administration adopted the irrigators' draft plan, hastily developed by the NRC, which slashed by more than 43 percent the river flows recommended by the biologists, a clear violation of the law (i.e. the Endangered Species Act). When Kelly objected, he was told by his superiors to shut up and sign off on the irrigators' plan. He refused and would later seek protection as a whistle-blower from a federal court.

Science Over Fiction

The rejection of science and the triumph of political pandering lead to deadly results for salmon. In September of 2002 more 33,000 salmon died along the lower Klamath River. The environmental disaster left one of the state's major rivers stacked with rotting salmon, some up to three feet long, from the mouth of the Klamath River near Crescent City for 36 miles upstream. It was the largest die-off of adult salmon ever recorded in the West.

Investigation by biologists at the California Department of Fish and Game (DFG) would later confirm that the fish-kill was directly a result of the Bush administration's decision to siphon off water for the irrigators. Extremely low-level of river water flow and the volume of water in the fish-kill area, combined warm water temperatures and higher fish densities due to the lower river level created ideal conditions for bacteria which can be deadly for fish to occur. The fish densities caused by the low-water level caused a rapid amplification of the pathogens.

The total fish-kill estimate of 34,056 fish was conservative and the DFG analyses indicate that actual losses may have been more than double that number. By October, Michael Kelly, the biologist with the NMFS sought federal whistle-blower protection over the earlier his agency pressuring by the Bush administration to accept water flows in the 10-year plan that were too low to support fish. The next month, Gordon Smith won re-election in no small part because of spun-up rural Oregon voters whose water Smith literally and figuratively carried for them, despite the unfolding damage.

After the initial investigation indicated in early 2003 that the fish-kill was caused by the actions taken by the administration to divert the water for irrigation the previous summer, the Bush administration sluffed off the reports conclusion of the causality between the low-water levels and the fish-kill. Patricia Foulk, an information officer for the USFWS put it in almost absurd terms, she was quoted as saying "We don't disagree with it. We don't agree with it''.

That summer, the BuRec in Klamath Falls warned irrigators on June 25, 2003 that the department would need to curtail the irrigation flow. Immediately Republican Rep. Greg Walden (OR-02) began making irate calls in protest. His first one went to Rove's office and within hours, the idea was dropped and the decision is reversed later that same day.

On July 17, 2003, Saundra Brown Armstrong a federal judge on the United States District Court for the Northern District of California who was appointed to the bench by George H. W. Bush Sr. administration, ruled that his son's administration violated the Endangered Species Act in its water diversion and ordered the plan be revised.

Aftermath

By 2007 and a change in control of Congress after the 2006 elections, investigations have begun into the political subversion of the law by the Bush administration at the behest of Gordon Smith. In the ultimate irony, Smith recently touted his efforts to help Oregon fisherman with assistance because of the "government shutdown of fisheries". A "shutdown" caused by the fish-kill his previous actions helped bring about that have left the industry decimated. It is analogous to claiming credit for helping someone eliminate litter-box odor by running over their cat.

The campaign ad below from 2002 might be one Smith wishes would disappear down the memory hole:

"Carried their water" indeed. There are fair and cost-effective solutions for the Klamath basin. Phasing out commercial farming on the Tule Lake and Lower Klamath National wildlife refuges would improve habitat for wildlife, cut pollution entering the Klamath River and reduce the demand for water. Removing the lower four outdated Klamath dams —a move favored by Republican California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger— would boost salmon numbers by opening up 300 miles of former habitat. A federally funded voluntary program to compensate farmers willing to reduce water use in the Klamath and restore rivers and streams would not only help the environment, but would also ensure a more stable water supply for irrigation for remaining farmers. To do this however, Oregon needs a Senator whose commitment is to conservation and finding solutions, instead of employing the politics of division and electoral pandering.

When it comes to conservation, and protecting the resources and natural beauty of Oregon, Gordon Smith's D.C. votes don't match his Oregon quotes.

Oregonians need a progressive Senator who can find solutions. Klamath farmers, anglers and sportsman, and all Oregonians who want to protect the natural splendor of the state's wilderness, which is a heritage for our children, deserve better than Gordon Smith.

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