Beware of fables and fairy tales about water compact
Letter to the Editor:
A recent letter to your paper from Susan Lake attempts to justify the Confederated Salish Kootenai Tribes Water Compact to Lincoln County.
Readers beware. What Lake is saying is the same thing she tells the on-reservation community: “It will be good for you to give up your water rights, oh, and besides, they could have taken more.”
She urges the off-reservation community to keep drinking the compact Kool-Aid.
Ms. Lake complains about broad statements that she calls fables about the compact. Does Ms. Lake know that the compact clearly shows that the owner of the water to 75 percent of the flow in the Kootenai River is now the federal government? Previously that entire 6 million acre-feet of water now in federal ownership was owned by the State of Montana for use by its residents. How is that not a taking of property rights formerly owned by the State for the benefit of its citizens, both now and into the future?
The status of Libby Dam, FERC, Hungry Horse and whatever other noise she threw into her letter is irrelevant. Libby Dam or no, the federal government now owns huge volumes of water in the Kootenai, Flathead Lake, the Clark Fork River, the Swan and the Bitterroot. It’s not a fable, it is a fact.
Ms. Lake’s fairy tale that the ‘same amount of water will be available before the compact and after the compact’ reflects a deep misunderstanding of the compact’s reallocation of western Montana’s water from the state to the federal government. When all of Flathead Lake is determined to be federally owned, with a time immemorial priority date, how does that make water available for anybody? Without the compact, that water still belonged to the state and could still be used to meet a number of needs. Now it belongs to the federal government, and must be purchased from the Tribes.
Why poker? Because some play politics like poker, and when necessary, cash in their chips. What better way than to have letters written singing praises about a deal that divides and hurts everybody across the state?
— Robert Starks,
St. Ignatius