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 World of Hurt |
 High honor in Hoopa What the FERC?! |
Kim Yerton Memorial Library, in Hoopa. Photo by Kristen Freeman.
On a recent fall afternoon at the Kim Yerton Memorial Library, in Hoopa Valley, library branch manager Kristin Freeman described over the phone the scene inside the warm, wood structure which is shaped to resemble a xhonta, a traditional house of the Hupa people. A carved wood eagle perched in the round window, through which early winter sunlight slanted. More light flooded down from skylights onto the tables.
“We’ve got some elders reading, a couple of people are on the computers,” Freeman said. “I’ve got some students that just arrived from the school bus from Trinity Valley. Their parents pick them up here. I had nine to 10 kids here earlier. And this morning we had a group that meets here every week, on Fridays from 11 to 1, called Threadbenders — three people were knitting, two were quilting, one had some sewing work and one was preparing wool for spinning. Now a mom just came in with two little kids; they love the kids book section, and she goes to do the computer. Hang on a sec — I’ve gotta check a book out here.”
OK, sounds kinda like a typical library. But the Hoopa Valley library’s unique. Earlier this year, it was one of five libraries in the nation, and five museums, selected by the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) for the 2007 National Medal for Museum and Library Service. It’s the highest of honors, comes with a $10,000 award, and the little Hoopa library, tucked in the rumpled deeps of the Klamath Mountains, keeps company with big-city institutions in places like Memphis, Georgetown, Chicago and Washington, D.C. What, did the IMLS just happen to stumble down the Bigfoot Highway one day and discover the little outpost hidden away on Loop Road?
In fact, no. Someone in the Indian Education Office in Sacramento realized Hoopa had something special, and Sally Biggin, of the Friends of the Library, ran with the idea and put together an application. The IMLS liked it. Here’s what it said:
“As California’s only joint county-tribal library on an Indian reservation, the Kim Yerton Branch of the Humboldt County Library has become a center for the rural community of Hoopa Valley, connecting thousands of residents of all ages with Native American reading materials, computer access and the prospect of a better life through literacy. With a poverty rate of 30 percent and unemployment at 27 percent, residents and elders in this remote region demanded something more in their library than a repository for books — a gateway not only to their heritage, but to the outside world and to upward mobility for future generations.” The IMLS noted that the library, with the biggest collection of Native American materials in the county library system, is invaluable to a tribe that has only 70 living speakers of its native language left.
Freeman got back on the phone. It took awhile to check out the book. “The computer’s slow,” she said. “I’m hoping we can use the money to upgrade the Internet from dial-up to broadband. That’s my personal dream. We’re 56K — I run a circulation system on that and two staff computers and four public computers.”
It’s frustrating, because she’s constantly ordering new materials for people, or filling requests from other branches. For instance, the kids in the region seem to be hooked on Japanese anime and manga — animation and comic books — right now. “We have a pretty good collection here; in fact, we get requests from other branches in the county,” she said.
Freeman put one of her daily visitors on the phone, 8th grader Callista Ruiz. “Everyday I check out tons of cool Japanese books and manga books and anime,” Ruiz said. “I think I would go home very bored and unhappy if I didn’t have a library.”
Finally, the Hoopa library may have the most generous open hours of any rural library around. “Generally, a library has open hours based on their book circulation,” Freeman said. “We have open hours based on an agreement between the tribe and the county that this building needs to be used. It’s an important gathering place, regardless of the number of books checked out.”
— Heidi Walters
What the FERC?!
[Corrected from published edition.]
Driving down U.S. Route 97 this past September in the Lower Klamath Basin in Oregon, Klamath Water Users Association Executive Director Greg Addington told me he expected the settlement talks to end in November.
“The settlement talks?” a reporter with the California Farm Bureau asked from the front seat of Addington’s Suburban. Do you live on the moon? I thought. Addington explained the two-track process to her: As the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) decides whether or not to relicense four PacifiCorp dams on the Klamath River, 26 disparate stakeholders, including tribes, farmers and fisherman, are trying to come to an agreement as to what they want to see happen in the watershed.
Two months later, when Nov. 1 rolled around, I wrote Addington an e-mail asking if the settlement talks had reached a turning point or not. He wrote back: “Still working very hard. Can’t give you an exact timeline, safer to say by end of the year I think. Its just long, and hard work.”
I thought nothing of it. After all, the talks are shrouded in secrecy and chronically off-schedule. But then, come mid-November I read that FERC staff had already issued their recommendation in the form of a final environmental impact statement (EIS): A Nov. 17 Los Angeles Times’ headline read, “Feds recommend keeping Klamath dams.” Hold on, I thought, what about the as-of-yet incomplete settlement talks?
According to Craig Tucker, Klamath campaign director for the Karuk Tribe, it’s not as bad as it sounds. A lot of stories “buried the lead,” he said, making the decision sound like a fait accompli at first glance. The real news is that FERC admitted that removing the four dams rather than fitting them with fish ladders is the cheaper option. FERC staffs’ final EIS was a way of “ducking making the hard decision,” Tucker said, “so they made a decision that doesn’t comply with federal law, to push the decision onto the commissioners.”
Federal law requires dams to adopt adequate fish passage when relicensed, but the FERC report recommends trapping and hauling fish around the dams rather than building expensive fish ladders to help spawning salmon.
“This is just a staff decision,” FERC spokeswoman Celeste Miller explained. “When it comes to licenses, mandatory conditions are required.” In other words, if the FERC commissioners decide that the dams stay, PacifiCorp will have to install fish ladders.
So what comes next? More settlement talks, for one. But FERC isn’t going to wait around for them to finish, according to Tucker. “The settlement group has to beat the FERC timeline,” he said. Hopefully by the end of the year, the stakeholders will send their recommendations to FERC, whose commissioners will adopt or reject them.
However, Steve Pedery of OregonWild, a Portland-based environmental non-profit, thinks it’s unlikely FERC will wholeheartedly adopt the settlement talk’s recommendations. “This will be the first time ever that third parties apply to FERC with their idea of a settlement and try to convince the agency to force it on a utility,” he said. “Pie in the sky would be an understatement.”
OregonWild used to be one of the 28 stakeholders involved in the talks, but they claim they were “excluded” because they refused to compromise on “commercial agricultural development” on wildlife refuges in the Upper Basin.
Tucker admits that it won’t be easy. “This would be the biggest peacetime dam removal in the history of the world,” he said. Still, he’s optimistic it’ll happen. The FERC report stated that removing the four dams would be less expensive, to the tune of $7 million dollars a year, than keeping them in — a small victory for people with interests in Klamath River salmon.
Tucker is hopeful for other reasons too. It turns out that PacifCorp, which is owned by MidAmerican Energy Holdings Co. and controlled by billionaire Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc., could potentially pass capital improvements, like building fish ladders, onto electricity ratepayers. But since FERC staff’s final EIS states that removal is the cheaper option, PacifiCorp will be hard-pressed to convince Oregon utilities regulators that modifying the dams is the prudent thing to do. And if the utilities regulators don’t buy it, then PacifiCorp will have to eat the cost.
That gives Tucker a feeling of vicarious pleasure: “I want to be a fly on the wall when someone at PacifiCorp has to call Warren Buffet up and say they made a $400 million mistake,” he said.
— Japhet Weeks
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