Transcript

John Tracy: What are the consequences of going down this path?

Again, dealing with the issue of addressing things on the watershed and the stakeholder involvement, one of the things that I think needs to be stressed, and maybe it needs to be stressed in terms of the State Engineer's Office as well as the Bureau of Reclamation, is increasing the science capacity. I think that the Klamath is a classic case here. I was up in the Klamath in '97. They had a watershed council, they still do. They got together, they talked about the issues, they were developing plans, and then the drought hit and it all fell apart. One of the reasons was if you looked at who was on the watershed council, there was a lot of well-meaning people and every time the scientists said, "That won't work, everything you want cannot be had in that situation," they said, "Well, you are kind of negative, get out of the room." So when I look at developing these, I think you need to get to the point of increasing the technical planning capacity for multi-objective planning that we are talking about here, which means meeting instream flow rights, meeting agricultural water demands, meeting cultural restoration, say at the mouth of the Colorado River, and actually not asking the question of what it's going to take to do it all but getting back to what are the consequences for going down this path. When we look at the development that occurred by the building of the reservoirs, the one thing that never really got addressed was what are the consequences of building this much agriculture in the West. If we are talking about restoring it to more natural conditions or meeting prior claim water rights, I think asking the questions first of, "What are the consequences for meeting these goals?" will help avoid the problems that we will see 30 years from now for not thinking of that.

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