Did it take some research or experience to get used to dealing with the Bureau of Reclamation and U.S. Fish and Wildlife after being used to the Forest Service and BLM?
A little bit, but I’m sure my experience with the Forest Service and BLM in dredging out their problems [helped]. In some ways it’s the same approach. It’s asking the questions and keep asking when something isn’t right. As an example, when I first came down to the basin it was marsh restoration, rah, rah. We looked at the ag lands and [asked] “Why do you have these agricultural lands?” [The response was] “The Kuchel Act says that we have to.I1 And then I read the Kuchel Act one day and found it doesn’t say that at all–it said that agriculture was permitted but had to be consistent with wildlife. For years I was told that we have to have this [or that] because the law says it. The refuge would say it as much as the farmers or the Bureau of Reclamation. They were all hiding behind that. So then we asked, “What do they do with crops?” Well, they spray them. [We then asked] “What governs what you’re going to spray?” [The response was “We have this committee and it’s supposed to review it.” [We asked] Where’s what they reviewed? [The response was] “Well, they don’t review it, really, we [let them] go ahead and spray.
Similar to a BLM advisory council?
If you play their game [and ask] whether they are following the rules and find, no, they’re not, they just change the rules. So that’s why administrative solutions have never really been our [preference]. We have to demonstrate to Congress that we’ve tried to play the game and here’s why the game is skewed and so this is why you, Congress, need to change the law to tighten the rules where you’ve left too much discretion and the commodity interests always have their way. There was a committee that was set up where all federal agencies which use toxic chemicals had a representative from each agency. This was in Washington, D.C. We found out that they were not approving the pesticides that were being used on the Tule Lake and Lower Klamath refuges. Sometimes they [the pesticides] would be submitted to the group [the committee in D.C.] but before they had a chance to review these chemicals, they were approved by lower levels in the agency [U.S. Fish and Wildlife]. The highest level it ever went was [the state office in1 Sacramento, if it ever got out of the basin at all. We had Freedom of Information Act requests showing that they [the Fish and Wildlife Service] were looking the other way as much as the Bureau of Reclamation was, so we got Kathie Durban, who was with the Oregonian at that time, and she did a big story the first year I moved down here [1993].
