The Backup plan

Yahoo

27-03-2025

This story was produced by Grist and co-published with Underscore Native News.
Anita Hofschneider and Jake BittleI llustrations by Jackie FawnGrist
PART III — The Backup Plan
In February of 2010, Jeff Mitchell shook California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's hand before reporters at the state capitol building in Salem, Oregon, with the governor of Oregon and the secretary of the interior looking on.
'Hasta la vista, Klamath dams,' Schwarzenegger said as he leaned over to sign the agreement to demolish the four dams, settle rights to the river's water, and return land to the Klamath Tribes. Beneath the capitol dome, the former bodybuilder joked that, even for him, the deal had been 'a big lift' to get over the finish line.
The mood in Salem that day was ecstatic. After years of protest and negotiation, the entire basin — the Yurok, Karuk, and Klamath tribes, the region's conservative farmers, and environmentalists — had come together behind a plan to take the dams down, and they'd brought both the federal Department of the Interior and the dams' corporate owner over to their side. Because the deal hinged on millions in federal restoration funding, as well as a legal directive to let Interior take the lead on dam removal, the last remaining step was for Congress to pass a bill that authorized the demolition and allocate money to restore the river to its original undammed state.
Later that year, the Republican Party scored a resounding victory in the 2010 midterm elections, riding a wave of backlash against the election of Barack Obama two years prior. Many of those elected to the congressional majority that emerged in the House of Representatives were partisans of the far-right Tea Party movement. They advocated a scorched-earth opposition to the Obama administration's entire agenda, rejecting bipartisan achievements like the Klamath deal, despite its origins in the Bush administration.
'I think there was a whole lot of just blocking of anything that could be a potential positive legacy for the Obama administration,' said Leaf Hillman, the former vice chairman of the Karuk Tribal Council. 'Congress was hell-bent on making sure he got nothing to be proud of.'
Like many legal settlements, the Klamath deal had an expiration date at the end of 2012. If Congress didn't ratify the deal and the settlement lapsed, the parties had to start all over again to negotiate a new one. After the 2010 election, a few years suddenly didn't seem like much time at all.
The Republican resurgence also elevated a man Mitchell knew well: Greg Walden, a longtime congressman for the Oregon side of the Klamath Basin and now an influential leader in the House Republican caucus. For years, Mitchell had known Walden as a fierce advocate for the state's agricultural interests and a critic of the Endangered Species Act. The two men had spoken about fish issues on the river, but Mitchell had never felt like Walden cared much about what he had to say. Still, Walden had expressed his support for the Klamath settlement when it came together in 2008, saying that the negotiators 'deserved a medal.''He kept saying, 'If you guys can develop an agreement, I'll do my job and I'll get it through Congress and get it funded,'' recalled Mitchell.
Walden had been engaged on Klamath issues since the 2001 water crisis, and had secured funding for financial relief and infrastructure in the basin. He had even enabled the dismantling of a very small dam on a tributary in Chiloquin, Oregon. As a high-ranking Republican and the member representing Oregon's side of the basin, he seemed to be in an ideal position to advance a bill that would ratify the settlement. But despite urging from farmers, tribal leaders, and other elected officials, Walden failed to push for the settlement — a decision that many advocates saw as an attempt to block dam removal. Before long, he became public enemy number one for the settlement parties, who soon found themselves forced to extend the ratification deadline to the end of 2015.
In the summer of 2013, after multiple years of stagnation in Congress, Oregon Democratic Senator Ron Wyden held a public hearing on the Klamath deal in an attempt to generate some forward momentum. Mitchell, Hillman, and Troy Fletcher of the Yurok Tribe came to Washington to testify in support of the deal and urge legislators to pass it.
'We hope that you will work with us to make sure that [the settlement] gets passed,' said Fletcher in his impassioned remarks to the Senate natural resources committee. 'People have got to move off their entrenched positions.'
Part of the reason for Walden's resistance to moving the agreement through the House was that the landmark Klamath agreement, which brought together dozens of parties, was still not inclusive enough for his tastes. The settlement, he said, had left a number of groups out, including local residents who lived around the dams. Most important to him were a small group of farmers and ranchers that worked land upstream of Upper Klamath Lake and had walked away from initial settlement talks.
In an attempt to satisfy Walden, Oregon's governor deputized Richard Whitman, the state's lead environmental official, to work out a separate deal that would resolve a water conflict between these farmers and the Klamath Tribes. Over the next two years, with the other campaigners waiting in the background, Whitman dutifully managed to negotiate an irrigation settlement the holdouts could accept.
Walden praised the settlement and suggested he would help push through the broader Klamath deal, including the dam removal, according to Whitman. Then he never did.
'Congressman Walden refused to move legislation notwithstanding that we had satisfied his conditions,' said Whitman. 'He never lived up to that commitment.'
Walden said he did not recall making this commitment to Whitman and defended his engagement on the settlement. He said that even if he had backed the settlement, it would never have made it through Congress with a dam removal provision. There were a slew of dam supporters in charge of House committees at the time, and since 2013 Walden's counterpart on the California side of the basin had been the far-right Doug LaMalfa, a former rice farmer and stalwart supporter of western agriculture. LaMalfa was dead-set against the dam removal agreement, and his constituents were on his side — residents of Siskiyou County, California, which was home to three of the dams, had voted 4-to-1 against dam removal in a symbolic local referendum.
'It just hit a brick wall, and that brick wall was just the realities of control of Congress,' said Walden. 'I kept saying … 'I realize you want to blame me, but tell me the path.''
As the extended deadline got closer, Fletcher, Mitchell, Hillman and other dam removal advocates escalated their pressure campaign. They held a rally in Portland, boosted an anti-dam campaign in Brazil, and organized countless meetings between irrigators, tribal leaders, and elected officials. But nothing happened in Congress. When Senator Wyden introduced a Klamath bill in the Senate in early 2015, with just months to go until the settlement expired, it went nowhere, failing to secure even a hearing in the chamber's energy committee.'In my lifetime, I've seen moments where Congress could really do bipartisan stuff, and try to really solve problems,' said Chuck Bonham, who participated in Klamath negotiations first as a lawyer for the fish advocacy organization Trout Unlimited, and later as California's top fish and wildlife official. 'When the negotiations started, that was the prevailing theory. By the time we got there, that was impossible.'
By the start of 2015, campaigners had been trying to pass the settlement for almost five years. Senior officials at the Department of the Interior, which had brought the deal together under the Bush administration, were desperate to get something through Congress before the uncertainty of the following year's election.
That fall, then-Interior Secretary Sally Jewell and longtime Interior lawyer John Bezdek decided to try a last-second gambit. They conveyed to Walden they would support a broader Klamath settlement bill without a dam removal provision. The bill would provide hundreds of millions of dollars to restore the river and settle the water conflict between the Klamath Tribes and the farmers, and it would even preserve the Klamath Tribes' land restoration agreement — but it would allow the dam agreement to expire, leaving the basin with no guarantee that PacifiCorp's dams would come down.
'We couldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good,' Jewell said.
Meeting with Bezdek in a side room in the U.S. Capitol, Walden again sounded an optimistic note. If the dam removal mandate disappeared, he thought the rest of the settlement could pass, despite hesitance from other Republicans. But it took him until the final month of 2015 to introduce a settlement bill, and that bill stood no chance of passing — it opened up thousands of acres of federal forest land to new logging operations, a carve out that Democrats and Indigenous nations dismissed as unacceptable. The bill went nowhere.
Walden said he didn't remember the specific conversation with Bezdek, but said he thought his final bill had a chance of passing.
'This one got away,' he said. 'I couldn't figure out how to do it.'
With the settlement's expiration imminent, the fragile coalition that had come together around the dams' removal began to fall apart. Leaders from the Yurok, Karuk, and Klamath Tribes had put decades of work into the negotiations, and some tribal leaders, like Fletcher, had made removing the dams their life's work. Watching all that progress vanish due to Congress's inaction felt like an echo of previous betrayals.
'There was a sense of extreme frustration, because these agreements were very difficult to negotiate,' said Amy Cordalis, a Yurok Tribe member who came on as its lead counsel in 2014. Cordalis had decided to go to law school after witnessing the mass die-off of salmon on the river in 2002. Most of her work since then had led up to this moment, and now it was about to vanish.
In September of 2015, the leadership of the Yurok Tribe announced that it was withdrawing from the Klamath deal, essentially dooming the watered-down agreement. In a press release, the tribe said that the 'benefits of the agreements have become unachievable.' The Karuk and Klamath tribes said they would follow suit by the end of the year if Congress didn't act.
A few weeks after Yurok leadership announced they were pulling out of the deal, Yurok Tribe biologist Mike Belchik met up with Fletcher on a scorching day while the Yurok director was hitting golf balls. Belchik was frustrated with Fletcher for abandoning the deal, but Fletcher was adamant that the move was a strategic maneuver designed to bring everyone back to the table.
'The dam removal deal won't die,' he told Belchik. 'It's got too much life in it. It's going to happen.'
Two weeks later, during a meeting on Klamath water issues on the Yurok reservation, Fletcher suffered a fatal heart attack. His sudden death at age 53 was a blow not only to the Yurok Tribe but to the entire Klamath Basin: The breakthrough deal to restore the river was no more, and the man who had done so much to bring it together was gone.
'It was just such a terrible shock, it was awful,' said Belchik, who had spent countless hours with Fletcher — driving to and from PacifiCorp meetings, playing poker and golf, and strategizing about how to bring the dams down.
'He really in a lot of ways gave his life to Klamath dam removal and to the river,' said Cordalis.
With Fletcher gone and Congress having failed to pass the settlement into law, it seemed like there was just one strategy left for the Klamath, albeit one that negotiators had rejected a decade earlier.
PacifiCorp's overriding priority was that some other entity — any other entity — take responsibility for demolition of its dams, allowing the company to avoid legal liability for the removal process. The Klamath settlement deal had come together around the appealing idea that the federal government would be that entity — having the Interior Department take the dams down had always made the most sense, given the federal government's sheer size, expertise, and funding.
As Congress stalled, longtime dam opponent and tribal counsel Richard Roos-Collins thought back to the early days of the settlement talks. He had been involved in Klamath negotiations for more than 10 years, and had been one of the tribes' only representatives at the tense West Virginia talks back in 2008. He recalled that, during those early stages, before the Bush administration had signed on to the deal, environmental groups had proposed that PacifiCorp transfer the dams to a new corporation run by the tribes or by the states — essentially a holding company that would accept the dams only to destroy them using money from PacifiCorp and the states.
At the time, PacifiCorp had rejected the idea as ridiculous and unproven, and negotiators had given up on it, putting their hopes in the Interior Department. But Roos-Collins remembered that a group of environmentalists and local organizations in Maine had created a nonprofit trust to purchase two dams on the Penobscot River back in 2004. The trust had since destroyed those dams, reopening the river for fish migrations. He thought there might be a chance that the same idea could work with PacifiCorp: The utility would apply to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for permission to transfer the hydroelectric dams to a nonprofit entity, and that nonprofit would take them down, shielding PacifiCorp from liability and costs.
It was still an outlandish plan. The Klamath dams were several times the size of the ones in Maine, and far larger than any other dams that had ever come down in the United States. FERC had a history of support for hydropower, and there was no way to know if it would endorse the idea of demolishing an active power facility if the Interior Department wasn't the one doing it. Neither the states, the tribes, nor the environmental groups wanted to take ownership of the dams, which meant the 'removal entity' would have to be a bespoke nonprofit created for that express purpose.
'There was resignation, and kind of a demoralization, that was, 'Well, we only have one option left, and that is FERC,'' said Chuck Bonham, who had helped negotiate the original settlement at Trout Unlimited and was now the lead Klamath negotiator for the state of California.
PacifiCorp executives worried the system was a Trojan horse to keep the utility involved: If the process cost more than projected, would the dam removal entity come back to the company for more money? If the sediment that got released from behind the dams turned out to be toxic enough to kill off downstream wildlife, would lawsuits drive the removal company into bankruptcy? Federal, state, and company negotiators went back and forth over the details for months toward the end of 2015 as the settlement fell apart in Congress. They made little progress.
Remembering his meeting with Fletcher back in 2008, when Fletcher demanded that the Bush administration bring PacifiCorp to the table on dam removal, Interior lawyer John Bezdek called another closed-door meeting at the same remote site in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. Once again, he bartered with PacifiCorp official Andrea Kelly late into the night, pushing her to endorse the idea of transferring ownership of the dams. She refused to commit: The proposal left PacifiCorp too exposed to liability.
As Kelly and Bezdek debated utility law, they grew increasingly frustrated. After dinner one evening, the two got into an argument and stormed off to their respective dormitories, fed up with one another.
'I actually thought for sure it was done,' Bezdek said. 'I went back to my room, and I called my wife, and I said, 'I think it's done. I don't think we can get there.''
Some time after midnight, Bezdek got a call from Kelly, who couldn't sleep either. They threw on their coats, met on a bench outside the dormitories, and started talking again. Bezdek emphasized that the entire Klamath Basin, from the tribes to the farmers, had come together in the belief that the dams needed to go. It was time for PacifiCorp to do the same; the fight would never be over until the company let go.
By the time the sun came up, Kelly had agreed to the new plan. California and Oregon would endow a joint nonprofit dedicated to the dams' removal, and PacifiCorp would apply to FERC for permission to transfer the dams to that nonprofit. Bezdek took the agreement to his boss at Interior, Sally Jewell, who approved it. There was no need, with this new arrangement, to get Congress involved.
Walden said he wishes he had known it was possible for the dam removal to take place without Congress' involvement. If he had, he said, he would have pushed to pass the rest of the Klamath settlement and advocated for the FERC path toward dam removal, potentially saving the settlement and speeding up removal by several years.
'Had I understood that, dam removal would never have been a federal issue, because it didn't need to be, and we might have been able to find a different solution,' he said. 'That's my fault.'
A few months after the second Shepherdstown summit, on a hot April day at the mouth of the Klamath River in Requa, California, tribal leaders gathered with Jewell, Bezdek, and the governors of California and Oregon to celebrate the revived dam removal agreement. They signed the documents on a traditional Yurok fish-cleaning table, a long white plank of stone that tribal members had cleaned for the occasion. Then the dam removal advocates took the group on a boat up to Blue Creek, the same part of the river where the devastating fish kill had occurred in 2002.
There was a notable absence: Jeff Mitchell of the Klamath Tribes was not part of the celebratory photo op at the fish table. There was still a path toward dam removal, but the broader Klamath settlement had died in Congress, dashing hopes for a water accord between the Klamath Tribes and the irrigators. The Klamath Tribes did not sign the amended dam removal agreement because it did not have the same protections for their treaty rights as the original deal.
'I wish that we would've been able to work through that,' Mitchell said. 'The price that we paid for that was pretty, pretty deep — pretty, pretty big price — because it took us away from the table.'
For the other tribal leaders who had been fighting for dam removal, the day felt momentous.
'I was naively stoked,' said Amy Cordalis. To her, the memory of the dead salmon was still fresh, even 15 years later — she could still smell the rotting flesh. It had been a moment of clarity of her life's purpose.
'I felt like my great-grandmother, who had passed away when I was 6, came to me and was like, 'You need to make sure that this never happens again,'' she said. Cordalis was part of a new generation of tribal leaders and their allies who were determined to carry on the fight.
But neither Sally Jewell, nor the governors of California and Oregon, nor the tribal activists knew whether or not FERC, a government body that operates independently of the presidential administration, would accept the new transfer proposal. It would take years to refine the details of the new agreement, and it was far from certain that the coalition would hold together: Not only was Fletcher gone, but PacifiCorp's Kelly was about to retire. Bezdek was about to leave the negotiations as well, since the Interior Department would no longer have direct involvement in the dam removal.
More than a decade after the fight to remove the Klamath dams began, none of the campaigners could have known that the new agreement would next have to survive a global pandemic.
This is Part III of a five part series. This story was first published by Grist.