First, who is Craig Tucker? and Glen Spain?

From our Who's Who page of "Stakeholders" allowed at the closed-door Klamath settlement negotiations:

Karuk spokesman "Craig Tucker "gave up laboratory science for a career as an environmental and social justice activist. In 2000 Craig joined Green Corps, the field school for environmental organizing. While in Green Corp, Craig learned fundamental grassroots organizing skills. After Green Corps he worked as Outreach Director at Friends of the River, developing grassroots campaigns on a variety of California water issues. Each campaign was based on the connection between sustainable environmental policy and social justice. Currently Craig is the Campaign Coordinator for the Karuk Tribe's 'Bring the Salmon Home' campaign. The goal: removal of four dams on the Klamath River which would represent the largest dam removal project in history."

International River wrote an article, Learning from the Pros, featuring an Interview with Craig Tucker on how he pulled off this dam removal scheme that downsizes agriculture in the Klamath Basin.

Tucker along with Glen Spain, were involved in campaigns against PacifiCorp's dams, including organizing trips to Scotland when Scottish Power owned the Klamath dams. He is involved with groups financing the campaign and films to promote the anti-infrastructure agenda. See more on our Whose Who Craig Tucker page.

Eugene attorney Glen Spain is Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen regional director.

He has claimed we are irrigating a desert, when in fact our valley was a lake up to 30 feet deep in a closed basin. We had to divert our water OUT of the basin into the Klamath  River so we can farm, artificially elevating the historic river flows.

Spain and Klamath River tribes petitioned against the irrigators' power rate so they would "reduce irrigation," according to a 2005 report: "the Klamath Basin is so water-starved that every effort should be made to conserve rather than provide economic incentives to waste...''

Another quote from Spain: Fishy Politics; Utility regulators face fishing-or-farmers decision, Willamette Weekly 4/12/06. "Spain argues that providing a cut rate to Klamath farmers worsens the underlying salmon problems by letting farmers get off too cheaply for water use...'A heavily subsidized power system promotes water waste when we need every drop,' Spain says.'

In today's status quo article, Spain sells his pitch by pretending he supports "affordable power rates" for irrigators.

So there is the blackmail...the tribes and PCFFA petitioned against our reasonable power rate. The blackmail is, if we agree to dam removal and permanently downsizing agriculture and planting endangered fish in the basin, and agree to having Fish and Wildlife swamps next to our property and agree they are not liable to any home or crop damage, if we agree to a non-consensus group to rule our communities, with permission to change the water allocations if fish don't thrive or their climate change studies demand it, if we agree to the secret negotiations with no transparency to the communities, giving land to the Klamath Tribes that they sold, giving senior water rights to the Klamath Tribes, downsizing off-project irrigation while disallowing them to be at the table, changing the purpose of the Klamath Project to include fish and wildlife, and agreeing with their drought plan for farmers that they have not yet created in this non-consensus group, then they will agree to give irrigators $30 million of this billion dollar deal to create an affordable power source.

When Klamath irrigators were meeting with coastal fishermen to work together for solutions, PCFFA's spokesman Glen Spain wrote them a letter to persuade them to abandon talks with the irrigators: Dear Oregon Trollers and Oregon Fishing Industry Leaders, from Glen Spain, Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen (PCFFA) April 16, 2005. "to be blunt the leadership of the Klamath Water User's Association (KWUA) do not care about fish -- they care about making sure they have all the irrigation water they want, and the fish be damned. The current closed door efforts of the KWUA to "woo" certain salmon trollers on the Oregon coast to their cause is one example of how they hope to use fishermen for their purposes."

PCFFA has sued against Klamath River suction dredge mining along with the Karuk Tribe, sued against irrigators being compensated  when the federal government took their legally-deeded water in 2001, and they oppose the farmers in Central California getting needed water to keep their farms alive. They, along with Klamath Riverkeeper, were part of a continued lawsuit (2009 Court petition HERE) to demand California Water Board enforce water quality mandates against the farmers and ranchers. Tucker is on the Riverkeeper board of directors.

Go to Glen Spain page for more on PCFFA at the secret Klamath settlement negotiations.

Tucker, Spain, and their environmental groups, filed constant lawsuits against the power companies and irrigators to blackmail them all into submission with verbal promises to the irrigators for a "resolution to the water wars," wars they have created with their lawsuits. 

So our farm leaders have been blackmailed into an "agreement,' with no vote from their constituents, to support a several-hundred-page final document by the first of September that the negotiators have not yet seen. It will bind individual Klamath Project Water Users to cede rights and water that they have not individually agreed to.