Long Range Plan For The Klamath River Basin ... - KrisWeb

California and Oregon, and the visitors and fishermen-serving businesses throughout thevast Klamath region.A financial analysis of the prospective Restoration Program was performed aspart of this long-range plan. The analysis, which appears as an appendix to the plan,was based on values recently developed by the State of California's Advisory Committeeon Salmon and Steelhead. Those same values provided the economic basis of theState's new SB-2261 fisheries program.Both the financial analysis and the earlier Advisory Committee economic studypoint up one characteristic of fishery restoration efforts that is especially important torural areas of underemployment like northwestern California and southern Oregon:fishing brings new money into such areas and that money remains in the region, movingfrom fishermen to small businesses to their workers, longer than for most resourcebasedactivities. Even modest improvements to fish populations during the early stagesof the Klamath Restoration Program will bring significant benefits to the verycommunities for which Congress expressed its concern.THIS PLAN AND THE ONE BEFORE ITThe U.S. Department of Interior completed a "Klamath River Basin FisheriesResource Plan" in 1985. It was that plan that Congress had before it when it discussedthe proposal that became the Klamath Act. The 1985 plan covered the entire Californiaportion of the Klamath River watershed, including its main tributary, the Trinity River.Recognizing that the Trinity River Fish and Wildlife Management Program was welllaunched,Congress deleted Trinity restoration from the proposed Klamath Task Force'sduties.When it was organized in July, 1987, the Klamath Task Force recognized theneed to update the information presented in the 1985 plan and, considering the deletionof the Trinity, to review the earlier plan's restoration approach. This long-range plan isthe result of that review.HOW THIS PLAN WAS DEVELOPEDPublic involvement was emphasized in the development of this plan. The TaskForce held public "scoping" meetings in Eureka and Yreka, California, and KlamathFalls, Oregon attended by more than 200 interested citizens who came forward to sharesome 700 suggestions, expressions of concern, need and so forth. Copies of a draft planwere mailed in June, 1990 to 100 State, Federal, and local government agencies andpublic interest groups for their review and comment. Copies of the draft were placed, aswell, in 30 libraries and other public places in California and Oregon, and publicmeetings to review the draft were held in a half-dozen communities throughout the Basinin late summer, 1990.Other anadromous fishery restoration programs in Canada, Washington, Oregonand elsewhere in California were reviewed in a search for good models of science,management and public participation.