Farmers vs. fish: Water war heats up with probe into who got millions of dollars

The site of some of the fiercest environmental wars over water in recent years is now the subject of a federal investigation into millions of dollars that whistleblowers say were intended to secure water for drought-stricken fish but flowed instead to farmers and ranchers. The Office of Special Counsel, the small federal office that investigates disclosures by whistleblowers, has found enough of a likelihood that $48 million was spent improperly by the Interior Department in the Klamath Basin that it directed the agency to do a formal investigation. The basin, which begins in the mountains east of the Cascade Range in southern Oregon and flows to northern California, has long been a flashpoint for conflicts over water use and fish conservation. Farmers and ranchers have fought with environmentalists and Indian tribes over the scarce water supply in this enormous watershed, one of the largest in the western U.S. In recent years, though, the area has been stricken by drought, which has only sharpened the tensions. Two biologists for the Interior Department’s Bureau of Reclamation, which supply farmers with irrigation water and farmland in the Klamath Project, became suspicious a little more than a year ago of a contract between the bureau and an organization called the Klamath Water and Power Agency, according to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), a watchdog group that brought the scientists’ claims to the Office of Special Counsel. PEER says at least some of the $48 million contract was supposed to pay for a feasibility study for fish and wildlife of whether farmers could use groundwater instead of pulling water from the rivers. But instead, the group says, the money was used for office space, equipment, salaries and other expenditures to defray expenses of the company, an association of Klamath Project irrigators. The biologists discovered that money also was used to pump large amounts of groundwater to supply farmers during drought years until private wells went dry. All of these expenditures were made without any apparent legal authority to do so, PEER claims...more