The study also notes evidence suggesting that Nevada's senior U.S. Senator
Harry Reid, along with Interior officials, had quietly targeted for destruction the
Newlands Irrigation Project -- on which Fallon farms depend.
Although many Lahontan Valley residents have
long contended this, the allegations in this instance come from presumedly objective
outside experts.
The study was prepared for the Western Water
Policy Review Advisory Comission, which Congress established in 1992 to review water
resource activities by federal agencies in the nineteen Western states.
This particular 250-page analysis, The
Truckee-Carson River Basin Study, was prepared by a contractor, Clearwater Consulting
Corporation, and is to be incorporated into a final report to be presented to Congress and
the President in October of this year.
In a section of the study devoted to
"important lessons learned" from the Truckee Settlement negotiations, the
consulting firm said the talks in many ways were "a case study in how to alienate a
party to the extent that it is driven from the solution process."
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It was
significant, said the report, that Department of Interior representatives, when
interviewed, evidenced no inclination at all to recognize the interests of the Fallon
agricultural community.
"Even more fundamentally," said the
report, "nowhere in the stated purposes of [Senator Reid's initial enabling
legislation] are the interests of the irrigation communities elevated to be coequal with
the other major interests in the basins."
From the beginning of the negotiations, says the
study, the Newlands Project irrigation water "was targeted to meet the needs of [the]
other participants" -- the Pyramid Lake Indian tribe, Sierra Pacific Power Company,
environmentalists, Washoe County and the cities of Reno and Sparks.
The natural result was an impasse, when the
irrigation district said 'no,' But in the consensus generated by the Department of
Interior led negotiations, 'good negotiating' by irrigators would have been "their
agreeing to give up water."
The study noted that "accounts of the
history of events in the Truckee-Carson negotiations frequently state that the irrigators
withdrew from
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