A KBC editor responds to Ms Becky Hyde

by "a neighbor"

The bottom line, Ms Hyde, is more than 300 people came to the public input meeting on the KBRA/Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement. 81 people spoke. They came to tell their elected officials, commissioners, and others their solutions. They wanted to ask to work with those on the Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement and give them input.

Unlike your secret meetings negotiating our water rights, Legislators Gilman and Garrard and Senator Whitsett invited you, the tribes, Klamath Water Users Association, PacifiCorp, Klamath County Commissioners, and the entire public, and you chose NOT to listen to your neighbors and the people you claim to represent.

Instead you met with the Klamath Water Users, County Commissioners, PacifiCorp, Tribes, and other secret negotiators behind closed doors that very afternoon. You devalue the old professor, the young father, the Project irrigator, the off project irrigator, the businessman, the elected city official, the young woman trying to make a go of ranching, because you don't care enough to listen or include them. One elderly man who spoke is a Lifetime  Honorary member of Oregon Water Resources Congress  and  National Water Resources Assoc, served on  Governor Aiteh's DEQ (1976) and Water Policy Review boards (1983).You didn't listen! You say they have 'rampant fear" and anxiety" and are 'upset' and 'scared' and blasted their pathetic "3 minute sound bites." You make me sick!

Klamath Resource Conservancy, a group representing every off project irrigator in the adjudication, and tens of thousands of acres of land, was not allowed at your elite KBRA negotiation table. Why? And why are you at the table with your new little group? Surely it has nothing to do with the fact that you were paid by Sustainable NW $63,835 in 2007. Surely it has nothing to do with the fact that SNW works for the Klamath Tribe who wants our land and water and has an easement on your property. Surely it has nothing to do with the fact that they've paid your parents $77,557 in 2006, Natural Beef Coop, and pay your new little off project group's attorney bills. Yet you claim to be at the table representing these neighbors who you won't listen to. Who did not elect you. Who do not want you, an employee of the groups trying to take their water and groundwater and land, to 'represent' them. Have you no shame, conscience or soul?

You condescendingly say they should pull on their little boots and change the situation, "work very hard", and do important complex things like you do, while you ban them from the negotiations, and won't let them read your plan for them.

You say, "hope for a strong future in agriculture?!" when the government agencies have already taken more than 100,000 acres of their agricultural land, flooding and evaporating twice the water they use, and your 'agreement' demands they retire tens of thousands of acre feet more water, gives them no break on regulations, and further controls their ground water.

These pathetic little people that you are too important to listen to are not stupid. Many have read the draft agreement they were allowed to see nearly 2 yrs ago, even though most of it has changed since then, the part they are not allowed to see.

"Simply letting the adjudication run its course—without working on a settlement at the same time makes little sense." Ms. Hyde, remember, you are not allowing us to work on a settlement. Many are real stakeholders who have lived here for generations, unlike you. They don't work for an environmental group, and the tribes don't own the easement on their property, like you. They are real farmers and ranchers and businesspeople, and if you had been big enough to hear their voices, you would have heard their continuous requests to be allowed to work on a settlement and many, believe it or not educated, solutions.

You call it a "fair process"? When their so-called leaders won't allow them at the table, won't allow them a voice, much less a vote, and won't even listen to their miserable little 3 minute "sound bites" at "rallies"!?! Who do you think you are? These 6 hours of solutions, testimonies, scientific information, and yes, feelings too, are more than you or your fellow negotiators have offered the people.

When nearly 2000 people signed petitions opposing the KBRA, people from Modoc, Siskiyou, and Klamath Counties, as well as many members of the Karuk Tribe, you wouldn't listen.

When our elected officials hired a professional poll to be conducted in Klamath county that showed:

* Only 11%  favor Klamath dam removal,
* 7% favor public purchase of reservation land for the Tribes   
*  5% favor the closed and confidential negotiations involved in developing the KBRA and the AIP,

you criticized the elected officials and the poll.

So when the elected officials welcomed everyone to attending the public input meeting to be sure the poll got it right, and when the public unanimously opposed the dam removal and KBRA mandates, you only devalue them with your condescending words "rally" and "soundbites" of stupid people "crossing (their) fingers" and "being scared," and you would not listen. Who is scared?

Now that you, in all your wisdom, have supported a closed-door, non transparent 'settlement', opposed legitimate stakeholders being at the table, supported an "agreement" with no water storage for agriculture, planting fish parasites/lamprey in the Klamath basin along with other endangered fish, supported water transfers, downsizing agriculture, agreeing to upholding everything in the ESA and biological opinions, giving land to the Klamath Tribe that they sold, supported a group of government agencies, tribes and NGO's and only 2 farm reps in a non-consensus, newly unelected government, decimating not only your community but also your neighbors, except for the few in your little group with attorney's paid for by the environmental group you work for, rumor has it you've sold your soul.

I'll pray it ain't so.

Your neighbor