MEDFORD, Ore.--Quietly--and sometimes not so quietly--the Rogue River basin in southern Oregon has become ground zero in a battle over dams in the West involving federal agencies, environmentalists, and local officials.
Determined to save the wild and scenic Rogue basin from human encroachment, local and national environmentalists have spent years trying to dismantle two dams near Medford: the Savage Rapids Dam, an old irrigation facility located up the highway in Grants Pass, and the Elk Creek Dam, a partially built structure in nearby Shady Cove, Ore. Standing firm are a much larger assortment of local residents who argue that dismantling those dams threatens their way of life.
"What you have is a very conservative area that believes dams are like the American flag," says Bob Hunter, an attorney with Water Watch of Oregon, an environmental group. "It's how the West was tamed. People believe that whenever you can get the money, you build one, and future generations will thank you."
Consider the Savage Rapids Dam. Built on the main stem of the Rogue River in the 1920s, the dam was designed to siphon water for agriculture. For years the system worked well, but critics such as Hunter now say that so much of the area has been developed for homes that the dam's agricultural benefits have shrunken to almost nothing. But despite efforts to build modern fish ladders, Hunter says, the dam continues to hinder fish passage.
Supporters of the dam--including Dennis M. Becklin, head of the Grants Pass Irrigation District, which owns the dam--counter that the dam's hindrance to fish is overstated and that its benefits for recreation are underappreciated. Becklin adds that incautiously removing the dam could release so much backed-up sediment that the downstream environmental consequences could be worse than simply keeping it in place.
The face-off over the Savage Rapids Dam--punctuated by periods of mutual convergence usually followed by dashed hopes--has raged continually through the 1990s. But even that dispute pales in comparison to the battle over the Elk Creek Dam, located about a dozen miles north of Medford. Fought by proxy in Congress, the courts and the federal bureaucracy, the dam's history is tortured.
Originally planned as the third of a three-dam project on the Rogue, the Elk Creek Dam was designed to provide a reservoir for storing and releasing water. The primary goal was to ease flooding in the area, though planners also expected benefits for recreational and agricultural uses.
By the early 1980s, after the first of the project's two dams had been completed, criticism of the Elk Creek Dam began to mount. In the early 1980s, a General Accounting Office audit concluded that building the dam wasn't justified, and Congress came just 10 votes shy of axing it entirely. Even the Army Corps of Engineers--which for decades had advocated building just about any structure that was technically feasible, regardless of it environmental consequences--decided that it would really rather not build this one. Corps officials threw their weight against building it.
The one key official who dissented was Sen. Mark Hatfield, R-Ore., a powerful Appropriations Committee member. Like many of his constituents, Hatfield--who had witnessed devastating floods in the Medford area during the 1960s--remained firmly in support of the Elk Creek Dam. Even after the Corps stopped budgeting for the dam, Hatfield made sure funds were earmarked for its construction. As a result, the Corps between 1986 and 1988 found itself pressured by Congress into beginning construction.
"The Corps' official position was, and remains, that we didn't recommend going forward with it," Davis G. Moriuchi, the Corps' deputy district engineer for project management, said in an interview at his Portland office. "But because Sen. Hatfield was giving us directions to move forward, we needed to overcome the environmental hurdles."
By the time workmen had finished one-third of the dam's planned height, construction came to a halt because of a drawn-out series of legal challenges initially filed under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). "Basically," as Moriuchi put it, "we had to fight a legal battle-at probably several million dollars in costs-to do something that we didn't want to do."
Construction halted while the legal proceedings dragged on during the rest of the 1980s and the early 1990s. Then, when Congress wrote its fiscal year 1993 budget package, it gave the Corps an additional $2.5 million to design and complete the dam, subject to judicial approval-"a clear message that we should continue," Moriuchi said.
Later that year, however, the Corps, the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management were hit with a new suit filed under the National Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. In 1994 and 1995, a series of conflicting judicial rulings threw the Corps' efforts into disarray; when the dust settled, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the requirements of the original NEPA suit hadn't been met. In other words, Moriuchi said, the Corps "had to start all over again."
So, stuck with the prospect of spending even more time and effort to justify a project it didn't want to build, the Corps decided to leave the dam as it stood--a structure that, in its current state, does essentially nothing. When the flow of water on Elk Creek is light, the water sails right through the dam unhindered; when the flow is heavy, it backs up for a while, then spills over the top when the flow gets high enough.
To the chagrin of environmentalists, federal officials and the Corps itself, however, the dam isn't totally benign. The structure, they say, continues to make life difficult for fish. To remedy this, Elk Creek has a "trap and haul" system in place: During the spawning season, fish are trapped, placed onto Oregon state government trucks and driven a few miles up the river to be released. During the height of the season, this is done several times a day. The original idea was to collect adults and take them to a nearby hatchery for the first five years, until the fish stopped coming back.
But in the years since those plans were drawn up, wildlife biologists began arguing that hatchery fish are not as robust as wild ones. Those arguments, combined with the recent listing of the Rogue River coho as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, convinced Corps officials that they needed a permanent fix.
With the current trap-and-haul facility long past its intended life span, and with a permanent facility looming with a price tag of $7 million to $8 million, plus $150,000 a year in operating costs, the Corps decided to propose "notching" the dam-that is, blasting a hole through the top of it, in order to restore the original channel as best it could. Corps officials considered that solution cheaper than removing the entire structure, and also less irreversible, in case future generations wanted to continue building the dam.
That reasoning didn't cut it with dam proponents; indeed, they were furious. With Hatfield retired from the Senate, they found a new champion in Rep. Bob Smith, R-Ore., a conservative seven-term member whose district includes Elk Creek. Sources say that Smith approached Rep. Joseph M. McDade, R-Pa., chairman of the Appropriations Energy and Water Development Subcommittee, who made sure that the Corps was prevented from reprogramming existing monies in its budget toward notching Elk Creek.
Part of the backlash against the notching of Elk Creek Dam stems from practical arguments: Proponents argue that local growth rates will eventually require more water; that flooding will persist without a completed dam; and that agricultural producers could benefit from additional water. But many here agree that an equally significant impetus is symbolism. Many dam supporters feared, more than anything else, that notching Elk Creek Dam would set a terrible precedent for the region.
"A lot of policymaking revolves around the symbol, regardless of the act," said Jackson County Commissioner Sue C. Kupillas, a Democrat who staunchly supports the Elk Creek Dam. "But the national policy issues sometimes don't reflect the actual conditions on the ground. With dams, one-size-fits-all policy does not work." And, Kupillas added, "each side of the debate is inextricably linked to politics."
NEXT STORY: California's movin' on up