Time to Take Action
Our Klamath Basin Water Crisis
Upholding rural Americans' rights to grow food,
own property, and caretake our wildlife and natural resources.
 

 Testimony of Oregon SB 76 by Rex Cozzalio 2/3/09, at the Salem Senate committee hearing

Our family is located at perhaps the best location to determine dam impacts, being directly below Iron Gate and above any major confluence.  With 4 generations in that location, with ties prior to Klamath Project and dams, and personal experience before and after Iron Gate, I am in the water over 50 times per year for nearly 50 years, as my grandfather before me.

I can unequivocally say, the water quantity, quality, riparian stability, algae, and even temperatures are better now than before the dam.  I could regularly walk across the river in late summer without getting wet.  In spite of the rhetoric, there are physical facts.  By the time the salmon reach our property, they are virtually dead.  Retired Iron Gate Hatchery manager estimated the best salmon have reserves to reach Copco before dying.  In spite of what they claim, we lived the repetitive floods and riparian devastation prior to mediation by the dam.

Coho never existed in our midsection until the marginal 3rd attempt at planting after Iron Gate was built.

There has been no definitive scientific connection between dams and coastal regulatory shutdowns.  Tremendous numbers of salmon leave the Klamath each year.

With salmon never known to go in numbers above the present Copco location, when dams are removed, the failed actions will move upriver.  To date, the many proven cost economical options have been ignored.

The AIP puts into place unjustified costs upon the ratepayers that will not disappear when the purpose fails.

With the AIP in place, whether or not dams are determined to stay, those costs will actually compound, and the Klamath Basin will suffer, creating a second blow of added enforcements the public will bear.

Assurances of conflict resolution through the AIP are obtained through unrepresented asset reallocation, placing the burdens upon the ratepayers and public with no assurance of success and no consequence of decision.  Destroying an asset to force a settlement discarding a majority of vested interests against dams removal is not the answer.

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              Page Updated: Thursday May 07, 2009 09:15 AM  Pacific


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