ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW - Bureau of Reclamation...Let me start by asking you a little bit about your...

ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW

Rebecca Ann HaroldTown Attorney, Town of Fernley,

Nevada

October 9, 1995Fernley, Nevada

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Interview Conducted by:Donald B. Seney

Professor of GovernmentCalifornia State University, Sacramento

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Interview edited and desk-topped published October 2012

Oral History ProgramBureau of Reclamation

Denver, Colorado

SUGGESTED CITATION

Harold, Rebecca Ann. ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW. Transcript of tape-recorded Bureau of Reclamation OralHistory Interview conducted by Donald B. Seney, Professorof Government, California State University, Sacramento,October 9, 1995, in the narrator's office in Fernley, Nevada. Transcription by Jardee Transcription. Edited by Donald B.Seney. Desk-top edited and published by Andrew H.Gahan, historian, Bureau of Reclamation. Repository forthe record copy of the interview transcript is the NationalArchives and Records Administration in College Park,Maryland.

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Table of ContentsTable of Contents. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iStatement of Donation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iiiIntroduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vEditorial Convention. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . viiComing to Fernley, Nevada. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1Becoming Town Attorney of Fernley. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2How the Town of Fernley is Governed. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3Fernley as Part of the Truckee Diversion of the Newlands Project. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4The Federal Government’s Changing View Towards the Newlands Project. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6Fernley’s Perspective of the Newlands Project. . . . . . . . . . 7The Impact of Recent Drought Years on Fernley. . . . . . . . 8The Impact of Public Law 101-618 on Fernley and How that Law was Agreed Upon. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11The Question of the Cui-ui. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15Working as a Vista Volunteer at the Pyramid Lake Reservation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17Relations between Fernley and the Pyramid Lake Tribe.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19The Motives of the Federal Government. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21The Lahontan Valley Environmental Alliance.. . . . . . . . . 22The Alliance and the Settlement II Negotiations. . . . . . . . 24The People on the Newlands Project. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27The Proposal from LVEA at the Settlement II Negotiationsto Retain 43,000 acres of Prime Agricultural Land on theProject. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30The Non-Agricultural Interests in Fallon and Fernley. . . . 34More on the Settlement II Negotiations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39How the Negotiations Proceeded.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43

Newlands Project Series–Rebecca Ann Harold Oral History

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What Kept the Settlement II Negotiations from Succeeding.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45The Role of Farmers as the Negotiations Proceeded. . . . . 48When Did It Seem the Negotiations Would Fail?. . . . . . . 49Why Didn’t the Negotiations Fail?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50Current Discussions on Matters Raised at the Negotiations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52Keeping the Fernley Community Aware of Issues Related to Water . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54The Need for Municipal Water Supplies in the Newlands Project. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56The Impact of the November, 1994 Elections on the Settlement II Negotiations.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59Are Long Term Trends Running Against the Newlands Project?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61What Are the Federal Government’s Intentions?. . . . . . . 66The Use of Lawsuits by the Pyramid Lake Tribe.. . . . . . . 70Acting as Town Attorney for Fernley. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71Similarities and Differences Between Fallon and Fernley.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72Reasons for Water Shortages. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75The Recoupment Issue. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75There Is a Lot of Emotions Over Water Issues. . . . . . . . . 77Decisions Need to be Made Locally. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80Dealing with Federal Officials. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81Preserving the Record. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82The Impact of Environmentalists on the Negotiations.. . . 84Sierra Pacific Power.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85Disappointment that an Agreement was not Reached. . . . 85

Bureau of Reclamation History Program

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Statement of Donation


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Introduction

In 1988, Reclamation began to create a history program. While headquartered in Denver, the history program wasdeveloped as a bureau-wide program.

One component of Reclamation’s history program isits oral history activity. The primary objectives ofReclamation’s oral history activities are: preservation ofhistorical data not normally available through Reclamationrecords (supplementing already available data on the wholerange of Reclamation’s history); making the preserved dataavailable to researchers inside and outside Reclamation.

In the case of the Newlands Project, the seniorhistorian consulted the regional director to design a specialresearch project to take an all around look at oneReclamation project. The regional director suggested theNewlands Project, and the research program occurredbetween 1994 and signing of the Truckee River OperatingAgreement in 2008. Professor Donald B. Seney of theGovernment Department at California State University -Sacramento (now emeritus and living in South Lake Tahoe,California) undertook this work. The Newlands Project,while a small- to medium-sized Reclamation project,represents a microcosm of issues found throughoutReclamation: water transportation over great distances;three Native American groups with sometimes conflictinginterests; private entities with competitive and sometimesmisunderstood water rights; many local governments withgrowing water needs; Fish and Wildlife Service programs


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competing for water for endangered species in PyramidLake and for viability of the Stillwater National WildlifeRefuge to the east of Fallon, Nevada; and Reclamation’soriginal water user, the Truckee-Carson Irrigation District,having to deal with modern competition for some of thewater supply that originally flowed to farms and ranches inits community.

The senior historian of the Bureau of Reclamationdeveloped and directs the oral history program. Questions,comments, and suggestions may be addressed to the seniorhistorian.

Brit Allan StoreySenior Historian

Land Resources Division (84-53000)Policy and AdministrationBureau of ReclamationP. O. Box 25007Denver, Colorado 80225-0007(303) 445-2918FAX: (720) 544-0639E-mail: [email protected]

For additional information about Reclamation’shistory program see:

www.usbr.gov/history


mailto:[email protected]

http://www.usbr.gov/history

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Editorial Convention

A note on editorial conventions. In the text of theseinterviews, information in parentheses, ( ), is actually on thetape. Information in brackets, [ ], has been added to thetape either by the editor to clarify meaning or at the requestof the interviewee in order to correct, enlarge, or clarify theinterview as it was originally spoken. Words havesometimes been struck out by editor or interviewee in orderto clarify meaning or eliminate repetition. In the case ofstrikeouts, that material has been printed at 50% density toaid in reading the interviews but assuring that the struck outmaterial is readable.

The transcriber and editor also have removed someextraneous words such as false starts and repetitionswithout indicating their removal. The meaning of theinterview has not been changed by this editing.

In an effort to conform to standard academic rulesof usage (see The Chicago Manual of Style), individual’stitles are only capitalized in the text when they arespecifically used as a title connected to a name, e.g.,“Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton” as opposed to “GaleNorton, the secretary of the interior;” or “CommissionerJohn Keys” as opposed to “the commissioner, who wasJohn Keys at the time.” Likewise formal titles of acts andoffices are capitalized but abbreviated usages are not, e.g.,Division of Planning as opposed to “planning;” theReclamation Projects Authorization and Adjustment Act of1992, as opposed to “the 1992 act.”

The convention with acronyms is that if they are


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pronounced as a word then they are treated as if they are aword. If they are spelled out by the speaker then they havea hyphen between each letter. An example is the Agencyfor International Development’s acronym: said as a word, itappears as AID but spelled out it appears as A-I-D; anotherexample is the acronym for State Historic PreservationOfficer: SHPO when said as a word, but S-H-P-O whenspelled out.


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Oral History Interview Rebecca Ann Harold

Coming to Fernley, Nevada

Seney: This is Donald Seney, today is October 9,1995. I’m with Rebecca Ann Harold, thecity attorney of the city of Fernley, in herlaw office in Fernley, Nevada.

Good afternoon.

Harold: Good afternoon. And it’s town attorney. We're an unincorporated town.

Seney: Okay, good, that’s an important distinction. Let me start by asking you a little bit aboutyour background. Are you a nativeNevadan?

Harold: No, I’m not. I was born in Pennsylvania andgraduated from law school at the Universityof Colorado and then I came out here.

Seney: What brought you to Fernley?

Harold: I came out here as a Vista volunteer toPyramid Lake, to the tribe, and worked forthem for a year when they were establishinga tribal high school. After the year was up, Ijust stayed on in the area. So I’ve been heresixteen years now.


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Seney: So you were a Vista volunteer as a lawschool graduate? (Harold: Uh-huh.) Didyou do legal work for them up there?

Harold: Yes, uh-huh. I wasn’t licensed yet, I passedthe bar exam after I worked for PyramidLake.

Seney: What made you stick around? I meanpeople drive past here–I find it a lovelycountry, I mean it's very desolate and desert-like.

Harold: Yeah, I like it. It’s big and open. I like thecountry, I like the people, and there was, atthe time, opportunity here. I didn’t have anycontacts in Colorado, I had only gone toschool there. I just felt that this was a goodplace to start a career, and it’s worked outthat way.

Becoming Town Attorney of Fernley

Seney: How soon did you become Town Attorney? How did that come about?

Harold: A couple of years after I passed the barexam, I became a lawyer in the fall of ‘83 Iguess, and in ‘84 . . .

Seney: By then you had your license, in otherwords?


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Harold: Yes, in Nevada. I was here in Fernley, Ihung out my shingle and just sort of startedon my own. We were, at that time, lookingat forming a town board form ofgovernment. Up until then, the countycommissioners had been acting as thegoverning body for the town. So I wasinvolved with a group of people, we wereinterested in getting some home rule and wedid that.

So the district attorney at the timewas Bill Rogers and he hired me on a part-time basis to work as a deputy districtattorney but on the behalf of the Town ofFernley and that was in 1984, I think, in thefall. Then by ‘85, we had the Town Boardgovernment going and then, I think in Julyof ‘85, is when I officially started as TownAttorney. Before then, I was just a deputyD-A. working for the town.

How the Town of Fernley is Governed

Seney: So do you have a kind of charter here as atown, or is it defined by the county board ofsupervisors?

Harold: The town went through a petition processback in the 1930s that made them a town,and that’s why Fernley is different fromDayton or Silver Springs or other areas. They are unincorporated areas that have


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advisory committees that report to thecounty commissioners. Fernley, on the otherhand, went through the petition process,became an unincorporated town, which is atechnical term under the statutes, and so ithas the ability for home rule. And, in manyways, it’s a little bit different from anincorporated city but it’s different from theareas that don’t have the town board.

Seney: Well you have elected town council (Harold:Yes.) and an elected mayor.

Harold: We don’t have a mayor, we have an electedtown board of five volunteers, they’re notpaid for their time or efforts, and they are thetown board. They serve staggered four-yearterms.

Seney: I’ve heard Mr. [Robert] Kelso described asthe mayor of Fernley. (Harold: No.) Is thatnot an accurate description?

Fernley as Part of the Truckee Diversion of the Newlands Project

Harold: That’s not. (Seney: Okay.) There is nomayor; never has been. He is the chairmanof the town board.

Seney: Okay, right. Sort of the equivalent, butnot really. (Harold: Uh-huh, right.) Alright.


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How did you get drawn into the waterquestion here?

Harold: (chuckles) It’s how did Fernley get drawn into the water question.

Seney: I guess, right, yeah.

Harold: Fernley is in the Newlands Project. It’s partof the Truckee Division of the NewlandsProject, and some years ago the PyramidLake Tribe, the federal government,different interests, began trying to dosomething different with management of theTruckee River and the diversions at DerbyDam. Trying to cut down those diversionsaffects Fernley. We were concerned aboutour ground water, water quantity, waterquality–all of those issues–as well as thewetlands here, the wildlife, just a myriad ofproblems that it would cause. So we didn’tjoin it voluntarily, we were forced into itbecause these other parties were trying tomake changes here.

Seney: Does this begin with the Pyramid LakeTribe v. Morton, the first OCAP [Operating


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Criteria and Procedures] case.1

Harold: That’s one of it. This has been going on forninety years. (laughs)

Seney: That was well before your time. (Harold:Right.)

The Federal Government’s Changing View Towards the Newlands Project

Harold: There have been problems and contentionspretty much ever since the Newlands Projectstarted. Good, bad, or indifferent, it wasstarted at the turn of the century and forninety years it’s been here. There are peoplewho are fourth and fifth generation in thisarea because they came here at the request ofthe federal government, they built theirfarms and communities at the request of thefederal government, and now the federalgovernment is saying, “Oops, sorry, wemade a mistake, we need to rethink this.” Well, that's a little late, generations and time

1 In Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe v. Morton, 1974 “a federal

district court ruled that the allocation of water by the Interior

Department violated the government’s trust responsibility toward the

Indians,” see Steven L. Danver, “Pyramid Lake Paiute v. Morton,”

ABC-CLIO, 2008, www.historyandtheheadlines.abc-

clio.com/ContentPage.aspx?entryId=1171824&currentSection=116146

8 (accessed 10/25/2012).


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and money and heartache and investmentslater.

Seney: Are you a water right holder, by the way?

Harold: No, I’m not.

Seney: Many of the property holders in Fernley are. (Harold: Uh-huh.) Do you live in the townof Fernley?

Harold: Yes, I do.

Fernley’s Perspective of the Newlands Project

Seney: Give me the perspective. I mean, you hinteda little bit about the way you see it. I meanobviously the people in Fernley fell stronglyabout it (Harold: Certainly.) and you do too. (Harold: Of course.) Give me a little historyof the project and the problems with it fromthe point of view of Fernley, if you could.

Harold: Well, the history is, is the Truckee River is ariver in a desert. It flows from [Lake] Tahoeto Pyramid [Lake], and at the turn of thecentury there were not as many competinginterests for that water, but growth anddevelopment and natural evolution havechanged things over the course of ninetyyears, and now there are simply a lot ofcompeting interests who want the water.


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And, as I say, Fernley is dependent solely onthe Truckee Canal. The canal comes out atDerby Dam, that is the lifeblood, the onlysource of water for Fernley. Fallon can relymostly on the Carson River, but Fernley hasno alternative source.

Seney: Well, that’s not only for meeting theirrigation duties here, but that’s also forground water recharge (Harold: That’scorrect.) and for M&I [municipal andindustrial] use, isn't it? (Harold: That’scorrect.) What was the effect–this year ofcourse there's been a bumper crop ofwater . . .

Harold: Yeah, this has been a good one. (Laughs)

The Impact of Recent Drought Years on Fernley

Seney: More than anyone knows what to do with insome cases. But last year things were sovery different, when we were well into thedrought. What was the impact at that pointon the ground water in Fernley?

Harold: Fernley farmers got what is called a twenty-eight percent year. They got twenty-eightpercent of their entitlement, of the water thatthey are allocated by law. You can imaginetrying to grow a crop or do anything withonly twenty-eight percent of the water


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you’re suppose to have for it, in an averageyear, not a good year, but in an average year.

Seney: And the water was cut off the twelfth orthirteenth of June, something like that lastyear, wasn't it?

Harold: Yes, yes, very early.

Seney: So after that there was no more irrigation?

Harold: No, there was[n’t]. And this was not afterseveral years of good years, this was aftereight years of drought. (phone rings,comment about answer machine).

Seney: What was the implication of last year on theground water and on the municipal andindustrial supplies for Fernley?

Harold: Well, it was a reduced year. I can’t give youan exact figure of how much, but twenty-eight percent of a normal recharge. In fact,less than twenty-eight percent because thenatural recharge is from the canal itself fromseepage and just the fact that the water’spassing through, but also from the irrigation. Being such a low water year, a lot of farmersnever did irrigate, there was no point startinga crop and watching it burn up. So therewas even less than twenty-eight percentirrigation.


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Seney: What about the impact on the municipal andindustrial supply? Could you water yourlawns, for example?

Harold: With town water, yes, we did allow that. The town wells are deep enough and oursupply was alright last year. So yes, wewere able to do that.

Seney: As I read about the Fernley water supply,(Harold: Uh-huh.) the bulk of it, somethingaround 23,000 acre-feet is figured to comeout of seepage from the Truckee Canal, is itnot?

Harold: I don’t think so. I’m not sure of the exactfigure, but it’s a combination of the canaland the irrigation, it’s not all seepage.

Seney: But natural rainfall . . .

Harold: Natural rainfall is practically nil. (Seney:Right.) The U-S-G-S [United StatesGeological Survey] did a survey or a reportback in the 1970s and they said there’ssomething like 600 acre-feet per year ofnatural recharge. (Seney: Right.) Virtuallyeverything else is the canal and the irrigationfrom the fields.

Seney: So one way or the other, (Harold: Uh-huh.)it’s from the canal.


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Harold: Right, but it’s not seepage from the [canal],it’s the use of the water. The canal is justthe delivery system.

Seney: So the Truckee Division Project and thecanal itself are absolutely essential to thetown of Fernley?

Harold: Oh, yes, yes.

The Impact of Public Law 101-618 on Fernley and How that Law was Agreed Upon

Seney: Right. I want to talk to you about what wenton in the Settlement II negotiations and soforth. But I’d like to talk to you about whatled up to that. I don’t know exactly where tostart here, so if I don’t ask the rightquestions, don’t be embarrassed to tell methat I haven’t (Harold: Okay.) asked theright questions here. Because my ego is notthe point; we want the record to becomplete. (Harold: Okay.)

From your point of view, what wasthe impact of Public Law 101-618 onFernley? How do you see that legislation?2

2 Fallon Paiute Shoshone Indian Tribes Water Rights Settlement

Act of 1990; Truckee-Carson Pyramid Lake Water Rights Settlement

Act.


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Harold: Well, we felt that it didn’t help us, that itwas damaging to us and to all of LahontanValley. We consider ourselves part of theNewlands Project; the Lahontan Valley area. And we’re also part of the Truckee Riverarea, we are geographically in the middle. We’re caught between both, we’re reallypart of both systems.

We felt that the law didn’t help a lot;it put a lot of emphasis on the cui-ui at theexpense of water rights and water uses downhere. In the events that led up to thatlegislation, we tried to get some language inthere about mitigation, taking care of things. There’s some language that refers to thefederal government may mitigate but there’sno requirement. They didn’t put much inthat would help us.

Seney: Mitigate what?

Harold: The damages that would be done by theremoval of large quantities of the irrigationwater from the project.

Seney: What form would that mitigation take?

Harold: Well, we hadn’t clarified it at the time–Imean we didn’t know what we would needto mitigate. Of course a lot of it woulddepend on what the impacts turned out to be. Was it a shortage of supply? Was it a


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change in water quality? There were anumber of things that we would of had toevaluate. The mitigation could have takenthe form of water treatment, alternativewater supplies, whatever would need to bedone.

Seney: Did you take part in any of the negotiationsthat preceded 101-618? (Harold chuckles) Why do you chuckle?

Harold: Well, we find it ironic and a misnomer tocall it “the Negotiated Settlement.” It was aprivate agreement that was done between thefederal government, the Pyramid Lake Tribeand Westpac [Utilities] in Reno. TheNewlands Project was kept out of thosenegotiations: they–being the upstreampeople that I named–claimed that thefarmers walked out. We know better, weknow that we were forced out and notallowed actual and effective participation,and those negotiations were mostly privatedeals between those entities.

Seney: How were you forced out?

Harold: They simply wouldn’t let us attend. Theyhad meetings, they had negotiations, they cutdeals with each other, and we only found outabout them after the fact. People from ourtown board went to meetings and were told


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they weren’t allowed in. That’s how strongit was. That’s how blatant it was.

Seney: The Preliminary Settlement Agreement,which I guess precedes the NegotiatedSettlement, (Harold: Uh-huh.) was really adeal between the Pyramid Lake Tribe andSierra Pacific Power, (Harold: Uh-huh.)over–among other things–primarily the useof Stampede Reservoir water (Harold: Uh-huh.) and what water could be put in thereand when it could be used and so forth. 3

That is then followed by the NegotiatedSettlement which is . . .

Harold: The so-called Negotiated . . .

Seney: So-called, alright, (Harold: Yes.) whichreally results in Public Law 101-618. (Harold: Right.) And you know and I knowthat the farmers and the people on theproject, and I guess by implication, the townof Fernley, too, and the Truckee Division aswell, have kind of been tarred by the otherparticipants as being unwilling tocompromise and unwilling to negotiate. I

3 For information on the Preliminary Settlement Agreement see

Westpac Utilities, Analysis of Preliminary Settlement Agreement

between Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe of Indians and Sierra Pacific

Power Company Utilizing Truckee-Carson Negotiations Model

(Westpac Utilities, 1989).


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take it you have a very different perspectiveon that? (Harold: Certainly.) Give me yourperspective on that.

The Question of the Cui-ui

Harold: Well, there was no compromise on the otherside. There was an agenda ahead of timebefore those negotiations that basically thiswas all about reducing diversions at DerbyDam. It was already preconceived that theywere going to take water away from theNewlands Project, put it in Pyramid Lake,and yet, things were not done, in our mind,that justified that. The cui-ui recoveryplan–I'm sure you're familiar with that–thatdocument is still being revised. Somebody4

dreamed up the idea that they needed thesehundreds of thousands of acre-feet of waterwithout the scientific justification for whythat was truly needed.

So this became a water grab, just likea land grab, that’s what this was about. Andwe tried to come up with negotiations, withplans that would allow the farmers, theranchers, the irrigators, the municipal andindustrial users–everybody down here–to

4 For information on the Cui-ui Recovery Plan see U.S. Fish and

Wildlife Service, Region 1, Cui-ui (Chamistes cujus): Recovery Plan

(Portland, Oregon: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 1992).


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survive, and we had to address the shortagesthat would result and a lot of other factors,and we feel it was the other interests whowouldn’t compromise. They played with thefigures, they had people running model runsrepeatedly and changing factors and yet notplugging-in the important factors, butrunning them so that they would come upwith water for Pyramid Lake.

Seney: Do you quarrel with the idea that the cui-uiis an endangered species still?

Harold: Yes, I do.

Seney: Why is that?

Harold: (sigh) There’s a number of reasons. Wedon’t have the scientific, unbiased evidencethat would prove that it is.

Seney: Let me stop you there. (Harold: Okay.) Asyou know, there's been this cui-ui recoveryteam (Harold: Uh-huh.) made up of anumber of individuals from various federalagencies with scientific backgrounds, tosome extent in all of this, but you don’t feelit's credible?

Harold: To some extent, but they put somethingdown in writing without citing their sources,without proving or verifying the results of


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tests. Once they put it in writing, they thinkthat makes it gospel. Well, I’m sorry, butsome of us are more skeptical than that; thatjust doesn’t cut it.

Seney: Do you feel in your mind and in your heartthat this is a manipulation on their part(Harold: Yes.) to get more water withoutreally needing it?

Harold: Yes, I do. There are tribal members ofPyramid Lake who’ve indicated that the cui-ui have survived, they spawn in the lake, allthis business about getting them upstreamisn’t as critical as it’s made out to be. Thefederal government and the tribe refuse to dothe fixing of the lower river–they just wantto pour more water into it, they don’t wantto spend the money or the effort on scientificapproaches that would give the same results. That's my opinion.

Seney: When you mean, “fix the lower river,”replant the trees that were taken out.

Harold: Part of it, the canopy, but fixing the fishwayinto the river itself: the delta problems,fixing the delta.

Working as a Vista Volunteer at the Pyramid Lake Reservation


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Seney: When you said that you had come out andworked as a Vista volunteer at the PyramidLake Tribe, what was that like for you towork there?

Harold: Oh, it was interesting, I enjoyed it. I didn’tknow much about them. I took a water lawcourse and an Indian law seminar when Iwas in law school, so I had read one of thePyramid Lake cases as a textbook study, butthat was about all I knew. When I workedfor the tribe I wasn’t involved in the waterissues, it was simply the high school, thingslike that. So I didn't have much contact withor knowledge about the water issues at thetime.

But being a Vista volunteer wasinteresting. It was tough; the tribe nevercame up with the housing they weresupposed to, so they had me living with anelder for a while. When she had relativesvisit then they kicked me out, then they hadme in an old house in Little Nixon with noheat, no running water, no facilitieswhatever. I’d have to hike to somebodyelse's house to take a bath or use thebathroom, and this was in the middle ofwinter. That was a lot of fun. (chuckles) So it was tough.

Seney: You know, frequently when people work inthat way, they become sympathetic (Harold:


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Uh-huh.) with the people that they'reworking with. Did you find you did that?

Harold: Oh, yeah. I liked the people out there, Iliked the people I dealt with. Well, most ofthem. Like anyplace else, there's somepeople you think are not the best in theworld and others you just love dearly.

Seney: Even though you didn’t really work on thewater issue, there must have been talk aboutit around you. Did you absorb anythingabout it?

Harold: I suppose. I mean of course, naturally, youwould some, but . . .

Seney: There’s a point to these questions in aminute, (Harold: Okay.) we’ll get to that. What I’m trying to suggest is that I guessmaybe I’m thinking that you might havebecome sympathetic, kind of, to the tribe asyou're out there in that first year. Then youmove to Fernley and you kind of have toshift gears. Did you take on a differentperspective?

Relations between Fernley and the Pyramid Lake Tribe

Harold: Well, I don’t think it's fair to assume thepeople in Fernley are not sympathetic toPyramid Lake Tribe. We are, were


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connected here. People in Fernley haverelatives on the reservation, their kids cometo school here, they play together. We worktogether. There are Indian and tribalmembers working in Fernley. We all shopat the same stores. I mean, they’re ourneighbors. People here love the lake, theywant to see Pyramid Lake survive, but theydon’t feel they should have to sacrifice theirown livelihoods.

And that’s what this all boils downto, is the tribe and the federal governmentwant to take water by regulation, but theydon’t want to condemn it and pay for it. Well, you can’t have it both ways. If youwant to take it, then you pay for it–you dothe fair and the honest and decent thing. Butthis playing games and manipulating andregulating to accomplish those ends arejust–in my opinion–unfair. So it is tough,I’m sympathetic to the people of PyramidLake, I’m sympathetic to the people inFernley and Fallon.

Seney: I take it you don’t see this, though, as a kindof a straightforward piece of business.

Harold: No, I don’t.

Seney: Tell me why you don’t. We’ve covered thefact that you don’t really trust the cui-uinumbers (Harold: Uh-huh.) and whether or


21

not the cui-ui is really in danger–andfrankly, others have said this to me on theproject as well.

Harold: Oh, sure. You have the Lahontan cutthroattrout. The tribe, look at the billboardsthey've put up in the area. They’re trying toget people to come to the lake. They’re nottrying to preserve the lake for cui-ui, they’retrying to make a fishery and economicdevelopment out of it. Well, (ironicchuckle) I’m sorry, but you can’t try toprotect an endangered species byencouraging boaters and fisherman andeverybody else to come on top of them. Itjust doesn’t make sense. So it’s all thosefactors.

Seney: This would mean for the Lahontan cutthroattrout as a sport fish?

Harold: Right, uh-huh.

The Motives of the Federal Government

Seney: And I take it you don’t really trust thefederal government’s motives here?

Harold: I'm puzzled by the federal government'smotives. I always thought the federalgovernment worked for all of us and theBureau of Indian Affairs watched out for


22

Indian interests; and the Bureau ofReclamation looked out for irrigators’interests; and Fish and Wildlife looked outfor all of us as the public for our interest inwildlife, and it just doesn’t seem to be thatway. It seems that there's collusion, thatthere’s not that balance. The BoR [Bureauof Reclamation] often times seems to bewatching more out for perceived tribalinterests than they are for anything else. Soit does seem slanted, it’s not a level playingground and you have the federalgovernment, with its virtually unlimitedmoney, manpower, resources–all of thosethings–and here we are a bunch of small-time farmers and citizens in a couple ofsmall areas and it’s hard to fight that.

The Lahontan Valley Environmental Alliance

Seney: Let’s talk about how the Lahontan ValleyEnvironmental Alliance [LVEA] got started. (Harold: Okay.) How did that come about? I know Mary Reid was involved, but tell meabout your involvement?

Harold: Well, there were a number of people. Agroup of people got together and said, “Weneed to be united.” We are being picked atand bites taken by all of these differentinterests and if we're going to defendourselves in any effective way, we need to


23

do it in a united way, and we have similarinterests. We have a lot of people here whoaren’t being heard because they don’t have aforum for expressing their views. So agroup of people said, “Well, we need to gettogether an alliance. We need to be unitedon this and to make sure that all of ourinterests are heard and evaluated in theprocess.” So the Alliance was formed.

Seney: Now, this is in part a judgement that theTruckee-Carson Irrigation District [TCID]couldn't really represent everyone’s interests,I take it?

Harold: No, TCID is an irrigation district and theyare certainly greatly involved but there aremore to us. There are a lot of people in theFernley and Fallon areas who don’t haveland that have water rights on them, they’renot irrigators, but they still have to drink andthey still have to survive. So the interestgoes far beyond just the irrigators.

Seney: Was some of this a tactical judgement, doyou think, too, that given what we weretalking about a few minutes ago, that is, thatTCID had kind of been seen as unwilling tocompromise, however others may see this? (Harold: Uh-huh.) That they kind of got areputation for this? (Harold: Uh-huh.) Wasit, do you think, a kind of tactical judgement


24

on the part of yourself and others that maybeif we're going to be effective we need topresent ourselves in a different way in thesenegotiations?

Harold: Tactical?

Seney: Use another word if you like, I mean thatone might not have been the best choice.

Harold: I think there was an element of that, but Idon’t think it was formed just because TCIDhad a bad rap and we wanted to start withsome new organization. I don’t think thatwas the primary goal. The goal was, wehave so many diverse interests, we havepeople interested in the wetlands, we havepeople interested in the fish and wildlife andStillwater [Wildlife Refuge]. We have theM&I users, we have the local governments. There were just so many diverse interests inthis valley, and yet, if you read the Renopaper or you talk to anybody from upstream,they simply refer to them as “Fallonfarmers,” like that covers the whole run. Well, it’s oversimplification. So theAlliance was formed, as I have said, and as Ifeel, it was more to get everybody’s interestsinvolved–not just to come up with a newentity for the sake of having a new entity.

The Alliance and the Settlement II Negotiations


25

Seney: Did the Alliance have enough time to getitself formed before the Settlement IInegotiations began?

Harold: Not really, it was done very quickly. Thenegotiations did not give us much time. Itwas a rush-through job by the powers thatbe, and we had to react as quickly as wecould. Try to picture it in Carson City orsomewhere, getting all of those diverseinterests together in an organization. I don’tknow that we succeeded one hundredpercent but I think it turned out pretty well. I like the Alliance. I respect the people in itand the way it’s been formed, and I think it’sdone a good job. I’ve been proud to beassociated with it.

Seney: Are you going to continue with it?

Harold: Oh, certainly.

Seney: When you said it was sort of a rush-throughjob–the negotiations–that’s how you feelabout it I take it, that this came about waytoo quickly?

Harold: Oh, yeah. It took ninety years to create theseproblems, and there was this arbitrary,“we've got to solve it and if you don't comeup with something, we're going to ramrodlegislation through,” and they gave us a few


26

months, not years, not any effective time,but a few months to try to come together andrespond.

Seney: My understanding is that you were a regularparticipant in the meetings that led up todefining the position for the Alliance interms of the negotiating position.

Harold: Right, yes.

Seney: Describe for me how you saw that. How doyou think that worked out in terms of amechanism for the community to kind ofresolve its differences and present a unitedfront?

Harold: Well (chuckles), we had an awful lot ofmeetings. And keep in mind, most peoplewere working as volunteers. They werefarmers, ranchers, people like me, part-timeemployees of local governments. Therewere all kinds of people involved who hadreal lives and real jobs that they had to do,and this was something they had to givetheir time to voluntarily. It’s not like thefederal government employees who werepaid to put their time into it. These peoplevolunteered it–most of them did, only a fewwere paid. I was one of the fortunate ones, Iwas paid for most of my time in it.

But there were a lot of meetings and


27

the Alliance decided early on to act out ofconsensus that it wasn’t going to be “thetyranny of the majority” or whatever yourwant to call it, that everybody agreed, thatwe had to reach agreements that everybodycould live with and could support. And thattook an awful lot of talking, it took an awfullot of exchange of information, exchange ofviewpoints, debates, using each other forsounding boards–all crammed into a shortamount of time.

Seney: Let me turn this over.

END OF SIDE 1, TAPE 1.BEGINNING OF SIDE 2, TAPE 1.

The People on the Newlands Project

Seney: Mary Reid had a series of meetings after thenegotiations failed down in theLahontan . . .

Harold: Well, wait, stop right [there], thenegotiations didn’t fail.

Seney: Okay, however you feel, I just want to get tothe meetings for a second, (Harold: Okay.)and you can tell me what you thinkhappened to them? (Harold: Alright.) Theydidn’t work out at any rate, I don’t knowexactly what happened but we’ll get to that.


28

She was good enough to loan me thosevideo tapes (Harold: Okay.) so that I couldhave a look at them, and I saw you speak tothe group, and whatnot, and I formed ajudgement about the people in Fallon interms of watching these video tapes. I’veformed it already because I’ve spent a lot oftime in the community interviewing people(Harold: Uh-huh.) for this, and I’m curiousas to what general impression have youdeveloped about the people in Fallon–and Isuppose it would apply to Fernley as well–interms of these water rights issues as you'veobserved them? Clearly you had a lot ofmeetings, and I know this was volunteer ontheir part, (Harold: Uh-huh.) and they camenight after night to these long meetings andexchanged their views. But what generalimpression have you formed of the peopleon the project?

Harold: I think they’re people who are fighting fortheir lives. That’s the way they perceive it. This is not about just reducing the amount ofwater they get, this is taking away enoughwater where's it’s really going to damage thecommunity, the environment. It’s a drasticthing that they’re facing, and it’s not a one-time hurricane blowing through that they canfix themselves up afterward, it’s devastationthat will result in permanent damage and Iguess you can think of it kind of as a siege


29

mentality. So it’s like any crisis, it bringsout the absolute best in some people–and I’dsay in most people. In a few it brings outsome of the bad traits, the paranoia andthose things. But for the most part, its madepeople work together, cooperate,compromise, do whatever it takes to comeup with viable solutions.

I think that the people in Fallon andFernley living in the project have a betterperspective and understanding of what thiswater means, than somebody in Reno, or afederal bureaucrat who doesn’t live here anddoesn’t know the difference between a wetyear and a dry year. These people live withthe cycle, they live with the weather, thenature, the circumstances here, and I admirethem. I think most of the people inLahontan Valley are wonderful people, andthey’re in a tough spot.

Seney: Are they pretty knowledgeable, do youthink, about these issues?

Harold: Um, that’s a mixed bag. Some are veryknowledgeable, some have thrownthemselves into it and becomeknowledgeable in an extremely short time. Others are not. Some people simply have tofarm and milk the cows and raise the hayand do whatever it takes, and they haven’thad the time to get as knowledgeable as they


30

would like to be. And, like any community,there are people who simply don’t knowwhat's going on, there are some who don’tcare. They’ll care when the water stopscoming out the tap, but they don’tunderstand quite all of it. Some people relyon other ones to–they figure, “Okay, there’sa group of people who are involved, let themhandle it. We’ll support them, we’ll helpthem with money and whatever we can do,”but they simply don’t have the time or theability to get as knowledgeable as theywould like to be or as we would like them tobe.

The Proposal from LVEA at the Settlement IINegotiations to Retain 43,000 acres of Prime

Agricultural Land on the Project

Seney: You know, I know that one of the elementsyou came up with to present was theretention of 43,000 acres of primeagricultural land on the project. How wasthat figure arrived at?

Harold: After a lot of study and discussion andinvestigation of the financial picture in thearea, that seemed to be the figure that wouldsupport the communities, that would allowFallon and Fernley to continue to exist ascommunities and survive and allow peopleto survive economically and financially and


31

yet be enough of a reduction that would callfor reduced water.

Seney: [Public Law] 101-618 calls for 25,000 acres,on average, of wetlands. (Harold: Right.) Carson Pasture, the Stillwater WildlifeRefuge, a little bit on the Fallon IndianReservation. They don’t count what youregard as wetlands up here, in the calculationto do that.

Harold: No, they actually left the Fernley wetlandsout of it: the Fernley Wildlife ManagementArea.

Seney: How many acres is that?

Harold: I don’t know the answer to that.

Seney: Okay. Of course, that’s 125,000 acre-feet ofwater, on average, (Harold: Uh-huh.) tosatisfy the needs of that. Now 101-618 alsomandates the cui-ui recovery plan, (Harold:Uh-huh.) which we spoke about earlier. That has been done, at least there’s a revisedone out, and apparently that’s not the finalword on it.

Harold: Oh, no, they’re working on the revised one. They had a draft out, but even the federalofficials will tell you they’re still working onrevising it.


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Seney: That calls for 100,000 acre-feet of additionalwater for Pyramid Lake. Am I right aboutthat?

Harold: That last version, yes.

Seney: So when you add those two together, youcome up with 225,000 acre-feet that’s got tocome from somewhere. (Harold: Uh-huh.) And I’ve heard it suggested that 101-618, ifit’s applied the way the law is spelled out,that that’s pretty much the end of the project,that there’s not going to be 43,000 acres ofprime agricultural land.

Harold: That’s correct. If you took the full amount,yes, we’d be gone, we’d be history.

Seney: That must put you in a very tough position Iwould think.

Harold: (chuckles) Yeah, you could say that.

Seney: (chuckles) I’m very sympathetic, (Harold:Uh-huh.) I mean I’ve certainly talkedenough to the farmers and sat at theirkitchen tables and recorded their commentsand so forth, and I can appreciate how thefarmers feel about this. But that’s a verytough bind, I would think, to be in.

Harold: Sure it is.


33

Seney: I guess I say that asking, what did you reallypractically hope to achieve out of thenegotiations? Did you think really that youcould maintain 43,000 of prime agriculturalland?

Harold: Yes, we did. Take one example, the cui-uirecovery plan. That’s 100,000 acre-feet orthe equivalent of that. So that’s what I’msaying. There were a lot of equivalents thatcould have been, should have beeninvestigated. There’s a lot of work thatcould be done that would decrease theamount of water they felt is necessary.

Seney: Be specific about those equivalents.

Harold: The things we talked about before. (Seney:Okay.) The improving the delta, taking careof that, fixing up Marble Bluff [Dam] andall of its problems. The restoration of theriver.

Seney: What are the problems of Marble Bluff, doyou think in this regard? I know the fishladder’s a problem.

Harold: Uh-huh. I don’t know, it’s a lot ofengineering and technical things. I don’tknow. But I mean that’s the bulk of it, is thefish can’t get through it or over it. So it’s amatter of fixing it, but I guess I don’t know


34

how to explain that in any better detail.

Seney: That’s alright. Then the canopy, thereplanting the trees along the bank to shadeand cool the water.

Harold: It’s the trees, it’s the shape of the river, it’sthe nature of the vegetation, the shape of thebanks. It’s a whole lot of things, it’s morethan just planting some trees in, but it’sactually restoring that whole lower area ofthe river.

Seney: How much water did you figure that thatwould save? Did you have a number forthat?

Harold: (sigh) We looked at various numbers ondifferent proposals. I couldn’t tell you offthe top of my head what those were, I don’tknow.

The Non-Agricultural Interests in Fallon and Fernley

Seney: You know, I know that there are otherinterests in the Lahontan Valley: there’s thetown of Fernley, certainly, and thenonagricultural people within Fallon itself. Both of these communities are growing,aren’t they?

Harold: Oh, certainly.


35

Seney: Tremendously, the population is what here?about 8,500 now in this area?

Harold: Right, that’s all of Fernley, right.

Seney: That’s all of Fernley. (Harold: Uh-huh.) And what are the projections for the next,say, twenty years for Fernley?

Harold: Anywhere up to 30,000 people.

Seney: Right, very few of whom will be involved inagriculture, right?

Harold: Oh, right, less and less all the time.

Seney: This will become a bedroom community, doyou think for Sparks and Reno?

Harold: It already is, and to some extent it alwayswill be, but no, not only a bedroomcommunity. Fernley has industry, we have anew industrial area being developed now. Fernley’s at the verge of the Interstate, theroad to Las Vegas, Highway 50 to the east. It’s got the potential, it will have a lot of itsown industry, it’s not just all peoplecommuting into Reno.

Seney: Right. I guess what I’m getting at, is overtime as Fernley grows, is it likely to be lesscommitted maybe to the interests of Fallon


36

and seeing itself as part of the LahontanValley and more concerned maybe withobtaining its own water maybe at theexpense of Fallon do you think?

Harold: Well, again that’s an oversimplification. The key word there is “over time.” There’sa natural growth and evolution that willhappen anyway. What all of these federalprograms for acquiring water rights do, isthey accelerate that. They’re talking aboutmajor impacts, major devastation andchanges without the mitigation and withoutthe time to adjust to those changes and toabsorb them. So that’s part of the problem.

The other problem is, how do you define agriculture? Certainly there aren’tgoing to be the larger ranches, many of themwill be subdivided and paved over. ButFernley and Lahontan Valley both have a lotof areas where people have the smallerfarms and ranches, and they raise their ownsteers for beef for the winter to keep in thefreezer and feed their families. They raiseenough hay to keep horses or to supplementtheir income. Many people are part-timefarmers; they don’t have the land or theability to rely solely on that, but they do thatin addition to some other job. So I guess, tosome extent, it’s a matter of degree as towhat is agriculture. But certainly an arealike Fernley, even a town of 30,000 people is


37

not going to be the same as Reno. It’s adifferent lifestyle, it’s a differentcommunity, it’s a different way of living.

Seney: I guess what I’m trying to get at, is over timeI wonder if the consensus that was achievedrecently over water with the EnvironmentalAlliance, will begin to breakdown as thereare natural demographic changes.

Harold: I don’t see it breaking down. As long as weneed water to survive, we’re going to havean interest in the canal and in the project. However, it might be changed or modified.

Seney: Well, I’m not saying not having any interestin the water–obviously you’re going to havean interest in the water . . .

Harold: Well, but we’re also going to have the sameinterests. I mean the same thing I said aboutPyramid Lake is even more true aboutFallon: we have relatives, the kids marry, thefamilies are interrelated, we do our shoppingin each other's towns. There’s just a wholenumber of ties between Fernley and Fallonthat are always going to be there. The sizeof the schools, the kids’ leagues in footballor whatever, that are going to keep ties therethat we’re never going to have with theTruckee Meadows area, with Reno as such amajor city.


38

Seney: Let me put it another way. You could wantthe water without necessarily having theagriculture.

Harold: Well, then that goes back to what I saidabout how you define agriculture. Its not amatter of just providing us with enoughdrinking water to survive. That’s essential,that’s a big part of it. But there’s also thelifestyle, the agricultural support to ourincome, the industry, and there’s just somuch involved there. I don’t think it’s fairto say we're going to sacrifice our agriculturefor the sake of municipal tract-type housinggrowth. I don’t see that happening. Fernleywill become larger and larger, but thedemographic evolution of a small town intoa larger town is still a lot different from thekind of growth or the kind of evolution thatyou have in Reno.

Seney: Okay, I just wanted you to speculate a littleabout the future for a minute.

Harold: (chuckles) Right, yeah. I mean certainly,some of the fields are going to be gone,some of the agriculture is going to be gone,but there’s going to be a lot of agriculturehere for a lot of years to come. That’s notsomething you just suddenly decide andovernight walk away. I mean unless thefederal government wants to buy it out like


39

Dixie Valley or somewhere, and pay a fairvalue for it, people can’t just walk awayfrom the land that they do have. There arelives at stake here.

More on the Settlement II Negotiations

Seney: Well, let’s go back and talk about theSettlement II negotiations. I must tell youthat I thought it was kind of peculiar too, acouple of things, one that the upper Carson[River] interests weren’t at first involved inthe negotiations. Did that seem to you like agroup that ought to have been involved inthe negotiations?

Harold: Yes, Lahontan Valley Alliance wasinstrumental in asking that they be included,that they be brought in. Yes, we’ve said thatfrom the beginning that they need to beinvolved.

Seney: And then the time limit that was imposed,(Harold: Uh-huh.) did that strike you asodd?

Harold: Of course it did. They told us that if wedidn’t come up with something, that theywould go ahead and impose legislation. And so this was our last chance to try toreach some kind of an agreement, but thatthey were going to make a decision with or


40

without us.

Seney: Did you think these negotiations were forreal, or did you think that maybe Senator[Harry] Reid was saying, “Well, we’ll gothrough this business of a purportednegotiation . . .”

Harold: Well, it was better than lip service. Therewas a chance that they could, but(exasperated sigh) everybody feels that theother side wouldn’t compromise enough,and I guess I feel that way too. I felt that wewere honestly committed to trying to reach acompromise that would work for everybody,and it didn’t seem that all of the other partieswere willing to do that. There were somewho were still trying to do their politickingand their power plays and their (exasperatedsigh) “business as usual” based on theireconomic and political power.

Seney: My understanding is that the Alliance madea presentation and had proposals to makethat the Fallon Tribe did, though they werelimited in what they wanted (Harold: Uh-huh.) I think primarily a district of their own. Which, as I understand it, has been achieved,that that’s a side agreement that will begoing through. That the Pyramid Lake Tribedid not really appear to be serious in termsof the position it presented. It wanted the


41

rivers decoupled. (Harold: chuckles) Andlet me go through and then we'll come back. (Harold: Sure, okay.) And then SierraPacific Power didn’t really have a position,except it was there–as it probably shouldhave been; I mean, it’s a major player on theriver, there’s no question about that–butmaybe to look after the preliminarysettlement agreement that had beennegotiated and make sure that wasn’t donein–that the federal government had someproposals about what could be done in termsof OCAP and the contract [with TCID] andso forth, primarily aimed at the District asmuch as anything else. And that the upperCarson people really didn’t have anyproposals to make, that they were theremostly as observers and to add theirknowledge and their point of view, but theydid not have a proposal. Do I have thatabout right? What am I missing here?

Harold: No, that’s about right. As you said, there aretwo major components of the wateracquisition program. One is, let’s justoversimplify it again, the 125,000 acre-feetfor Stillwater and the wetlands, and then theother 100,000 or whatever it would turn outto be, for Pyramid Lake. The upper Carsoninterests were brought in because you can’tservice the wetlands, the wetlands can’t bewatered, in effect, just by the Newlands


42

Project. A component of that water sourceneeds to come from the whole Carson River,or whatever areas that it can come from. (Seney: Right.) So the upper Carson wasbeing looked at as a contribution toward thatsource of water or other contributions,whatever it might take, to support their partof the wetlands. So it wasn’t really expectedthat they would come in with a proposal. Itwas more expected that the other partiesshould try to find a way to figure out, withCarson’s participation, what is a faircontribution of them toward the waterneeded for the wetlands?

Seney: And that would not be an easy contribution(Harold: Oh, no.) because the Carson’s ahundred percent appropriated, isn’t it? Maybe more?

Harold: Oh, yes, I’m sure it is, right.

Seney: Yeah, right.

Harold: Well, so is the Truckee but that’s the issue. (Seney: Right.) The appropriations arethere, this whole thing is about changing,trading, buying, doing whatever to changethose appropriations so that you find enoughof the legal rights to support the wetlandsand the wildlife that you're trying to support.


43

Seney: Did you take the Pyramid Lake Tribe’sproposal seriously?

Harold: Well, not the decoupling. I mean they havementioned that, especially their attorney,Bob Pelcyger, has repeatedly talked aboutdecoupling, but they know that its notrealistic, at least not right now. Decouplingwould take–again, that's basically a buy out. If you want to condemn the river, if youwant to condemn the canal, shut it off, thenyou have to pay the fair market value ofwhat those water rights down here are worth,and that’s what nobody wants to do, sothey’re trying to find a way to take the waterrights without paying for them. Sodecoupling was never realistic, nobody everwanted to pay for decoupling–even thefederal government. Maybe I should sayespecially the federal government said no todecoupling. So the idea was to find a way tomake it work without actually closing thecanal.

How the Negotiations Proceeded

Seney: You mentioned when I talked to you on thetelephone that there were what, sixty peoplein the room?

Harold: Uh-huh, in the negotiations.


44

Seney: You weren’t actually at the table, you wereone of the back-up people?

Harold: Right. Each team had up to three people atthe front table, and then the rest, they hadtheir support team behind.

Seney: Give me a sense of what the negotiatingsessions were like–I mean pick the first one,pick any one–so that in the future whenpeople read this they can get, as best we can,a flavor of what these were like.

Harold: Well, (chuckles) there was a lot ofdiscussion. There was a lot of back andforth. All of the parties voted ahead of timenot to make it open to the public and thepress. And so it was creative.

Seney: That was helpful, do you think? That was agood idea?

Harold: Yes, it was. I firmly believe in that. I knowthat its tough, nobody wants to be excludedand everybody wants to participate, butthat’s why we have representativegovernment instead of true democracies, youjust can’t have thousands of people making adecision, you’ve got to narrow it down andlet a few work out some of the details. So itwas creative in those ways.

A lot more time was spent on


45

presentations of information than I felt wasnecessary. The federal government wouldbring in people, the BoR or the U-S-G-S[United States Geological Survey] to explainsomething, and it would go on for hours. Some of it was helpful, some of it wasoverkill, and some of it took time away fromthe true basic sit-down horse trading backand forth negotiation. That, I think wouldhave been a little more helpful.

Seney: Were the negotiations well-run, do youthink?

Harold: In general, yes. They weren’t perfect. Imean, like anybody else, I’d have done itdifferently, you’d have done it differently(chuckles) but they were well-run, yes.

Seney: Were you optimistic that there was going tobe a settlement?

Harold: Optimistic? I don’t know, I was hopeful. Iwas hopeful throughout that we’d work outsomething that everybody, not [just] us, butall parties could live with. I was hopefulthat it would. I wasn’t optimistic orpessimistic, I was just waiting to see if wecould truly accomplish that.

What Kept the Settlement II Negotiations fromSucceeding


46

Seney: What were the primary hang-ups, from yourpoint of view, that kept a settlement frombeing reached?

Harold: (sigh) The failure to reach agreement aboutthe figures, because of misunderstandingsabout what the figures were.

Seney: Which figures?

Harold: The figures on like the 43,000 acres ofirrigation, and this many acre-feet of waterto the lake, and this many acre-feet ofdiversion in the canal. There were so manydifferent models run with so many figures,they’d be several pages long and they’d havea couple of hundred line items, and theywere just so detailed and so technical, andthey were constantly changing. And theystarted from different bases, if you will,from different starting points. So they’d beyour figures and our figures and his figuresand her figures. There were differentmodels depending on who ran them andwhen they ran them and what factors theyplugged in. We just never could narrow itdown and reach accord on the numbers. Theconcepts were there, the ideas were there totry to reach the agreement, but the numbersnever worked out.

Seney: I mean, to say that we’re going to have


47

43,000 acres of viable agriculture and we’restill going to have this 25,000 acres ofwetlands.

Harold: Yeah, and then the issue is, okay how muchwater does that mean would be delivered? What are the shortages? How does that rateover ninety years of weather history? Howmany years will that leave the farmerswithout enough water to keep their cropsgoing? Those kind of things.

Seney: Are you much of a modeler?

Harold: No, no, that’s not my area at all. I willadmit, I didn’t understand all of it, I got lostat times, I think most of us did. (chuckles) But no, that’s not my area.

Seney: And there’s no other way to address theseproblems without doing this kind ofmodeling exercise, is there?

Harold: I don’t know. (big sigh) I’m not sure. Itdidn’t work using the models, so to my wayof thinking, there must have been analternative. What that is, or whether wecould have done it without the modeling, Idon’t know. Its difficult for me not being acomputer modeler and working and playingwith those figures the way some of thosepeople did. I don’t know if we could have


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done it a different way.

Seney: And there were no numbers that everyonewould accept? I have heard it said in thepast that people generally go along withSierra Pacific's numbers, even though theyhave a point of view in all this.

Harold: Yeah, they [Sierra Pacific] have a particularinterest. They had their models and so thefederal government and the Pyramid LakeTribe would rely on their models simplybecause they had been doing it longer, theywere the so-called experts in it. But theproblem was, we didn’t know how theyarrived at those figures, we didn’t knowwhat they were based on, there was noverification of them. And when we showedthem specific errors, like the amount ofacreage or whatever, then they’d refuse, ornot be able to plug in our figures that we feltwere valid and accurate. So it just didn’tseem to work.

The Role of Farmers as the Negotiations Proceeded

Seney: Other people have told me, who were at thenegotiations, that over the course of thenegotiations, the farmers became moredecisive in the Lahontan ValleyEnvironmental Alliance's presentation. Thatis, that over time it became more of, almost


49

TCID negotiating, again I've heard it said.

Harold: I didn’t see that.

Seney: You didn’t see that?

Harold: No. The farmers were always there, theywere a part of it, just as we were there asFernley, we were always a part of it. Therewere certain times when it came down totrying to figure out this bottom-line figure“what is it that you could survivewith?”–certainly on that we had to defer tothe farmers and ranchers in some parts(Seney: Right.) and say, “Okay, what is thebottom line you can live with?” But oncewe had those, then we’d have to be pluggingin our M&I and what was the bottom linesome other portion or interest could livewith. So I mean certainly they were alwaysa vital aspect, but it wasn’t a TCID or anirrigators’ negotiation, it was still theLahontan Valley Alliance–always was andstill is.

When Did It Seem the Negotiations Would Fail?

Seney: At what point did you pretty much considerthat it wasn’t going to work?

Harold: The last day when we walked out. I was, asI say, hopeful right up to the end, that people


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would say, "Yes, let’s do this." But it didn’t.

Seney: What was it that went on the last day? Imean there was no breakthrough on thesenumbers in other words?

Harold: No, and we ran out of time. They said,“This is it.” If we had had more time andmore financial ability to continue thenegotiations, but they were expensive, wewere paying for the mediator, we werepaying for everybody’s time who had allthese people who flew in all of these federalpeople from out-of-state and whatever. Itwas a costly process, and finally, they justsaid, “This is it, we’re not coming backanymore.” I feel we would have continued. We still are in some ways. We’re all stillnegotiating–just in a different forum. Butthe Alliance would have continued and triedto reach a solution, but in my opinion theother parties said, “No, this is it, we’re at anend.”

Why Didn’t the Negotiations Fail?

Seney: A few minutes ago I said the negotiationsfailed and you rebuked me for that word. (both chuckle) Why do you quarrel withthat word?

Harold: Well, because they didn’t fail in my opinion


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in two ways: One is they accomplished alot. We did compare figures. They workeda lot of good for the Alliance because we didget people together, we did come together asa community, and so a lot was accomplishedthere. And that work is still going on. Weare still negotiating with these differentparties to try and come up with somesolutions. Its just a more piecemealapproach now. Its looking at OCAP,looking at wetlands, instead of trying to dothe comprehensive settlement we weretrying to accomplish, now it’s been piece-mealed off again. Which, in my humbleopinion, isn’t the best way. I would ratherspend the time and keep doing thecomprehensive ones and get acomprehensive settlement, and I’m sorry itsnot working that way. But they brought theplayers together. Like any group ofmeetings, you make personal contact witheach other. It’s a lot easier to negotiate withsomebody you’ve laughed with and haveeaten lunch with and joked with after ameeting, than it is with a perfect stranger. So a lot of good was done that way. Anawful lot of information was shared amongthese different parties. We know a whole lotmore than we did a year ago–so do they, sodoes each of the parties.

END OF SIDE 2, TAPE 1.


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BEGINNING OF SIDE 1, TAPE 2.

Seney: Today is October 9, 1995, my name isDonald Seney and I'm with Rebecca AnnHarold, the town attorney of the town ofFernley, in her private law office in Fernley. Some of this got cut off, so you were sayingthat you now know each other better and youhave more information?

Harold: Yes. We were talking about why thenegotiations didn’t fail. They’re still goingon and we all know a lot more and we knoweach other a lot better than we did a year ortwo years ago, so they accomplished a lot.

Current Discussions on Matters Raised at the Negotiations

Seney: Tell me a little about what's going on now. What’s going on in terms of the wetlands?

Harold: Well, Lahontan Valley Alliance hascontinued its work through its variousworking groups or committees, but workinggroups is what we call them. Studies arestill being done, figures are still being triedto work out. You have “separatenegotiations,” if you will, going on as toOCAP and other things, but they all tie-inwith each other and are related. You havethe various EISs [environmental impact


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statements] coming out on the wetlands, onthe water acquisition programs. Those areall being reviewed, studied, evaluated todetermine whether we can accomplish somegood for the wetlands.

Seney: Are you part of the working team that'snegotiating on the wetlands?

Harold: Not directly. There is an L-V-E-A workinggroup on that and . . .

Seney: Have you been going to the meetings?

Harold: No, no, not for some months now.

Seney: Are you a member of any of those specificworking groups, because I know its beenbroken down into (Harold: Uh-huh.) thingson OCAP, the new contract, (Harold: Right.)wetlands . . .

Harold: Bob Kelso and I have tried to cover some ofthose. Its difficult to run over to Fallonconstantly. Frankly, we got burned out overthe last year of doing that.

Seney: Well, its very costly, (Harold: It is.) I mean,even though you were paid for it and, as youpointed out . . .

Harold: For part of it, a lot of my time was donated


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too and of course, all of Bob’s time.

Seney: But its emotionally exhausting, isn’t it? Don’t you find it that way?

Harold: Sure, oh yeah, it is. Sometimes its uplifting,sometimes its challenging. But yeah, overthe long haul, it is. But I haven’t been asactive in going to the actual meetings. A lotof what we do is review things, and thenBob and I send our comments over to themto be incorporated or whatever. But no, Ihaven’t been too active lately in the actualmeetings.

Keeping the Fernley Community Aware of Issues Related to Water Problems

Seney: Now, do you work mostly with Bob Kelsoon this? Is he the designated guy on thetown board?

Harold: He’s the most involved from the town board. Bob also attended the negotiations, as I did,and so he is the one who’s been most activeand involved in it.

Seney: What do you do here in Fernley besidesdealing with Bob to keep the communityaware of what you're doing and what youthink are important issues that thecommunity ought to know about?


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Harold: Well, I try to report on those things to thetown board at the town board meetings. Those are open [meetings].

Seney: You must be at every meeting, I wouldthink?

Harold: Mostly, yeah. I occasionally miss one, butyes, virtually all of them. The meetings areopen to the public so we try to keep thepublic informed. I try to keep the publicinformed as well as the town board. Wehave the press there, the Fernley LeaderCourier usually has somebody there at TownBoard meetings. I must say they’ve done anawful good job of putting a lot of it in thepaper, so we’ve had some good presscoverage there.

Seney: Do you have a local water users’ group here,as opposed to, say, the Newlands WaterProtective Association [NWPA]? Or wouldthey also belong to that?

Harold: No, they belong to N-W-P-A.

Seney: Right. (Harold: Right.) It would cover theirinterests up here too?

Harold: Uh-huh. Once in a while we havemeetings–they're not formal I guess. TheTruckee Division is a separate division from


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the Carson Division of the project, so oncein a while there are meetings of just theTruckee Division water users. Certainlyanybody from the Carson is welcome tocome over, but if its meetings of interest orgeared specifically to some issue in Fernleyand Hazen and Swingle Bench, then it tendsto be just the Truckee Division water users. But there’s not a formal group ororganization, its just that those people whohappen to belong to that division.

The Need for Municipal Water Supplies in the Newlands Project

Seney: I know one of the things that was hoped forby the water users on the project, out of thenegotiations, was a municipal water supplyfor Fernley and Hazen and Swingle Bench,and then obviously, a different one for thecity of Fallon. That didn’t come to pass. Did it come even close?

Harold: It came close, I don't know how close. Thefederal government talked about supportingit, the Pyramid Lake Tribe talked with us,and we still do, we still have meetings, wetalk about the possibility of a joint supply. Part of the issue with Hazen, SwingleBench, do they tie into Fernley? Do they tieinto Fallon in Churchill county? That’snever been clear. But we are still talking


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and trying to come up with that. The federalgovernment said they were going to help andwe talked about the studies that would beneeded. There’s a great deal of informationwe need about the hydrology and things, andthose never came through, the federalgovernment never came through with thehelp to do the technical assistance to do that.

Seney: Is the town talking about it independently atall saying, “Well, we better push ahead withthis anyway, even if the federalgovernment’s not . . .”

Harold: Well, we already have a municipal watersystem, we’re always trying to improve it. Imean yes, with or without the federalgovernment, we’re always looking to protectand to take care of our water supply, ourwater quality. We have a well-headprotection program in place. As I say, we’retalking with Pyramid Lake about possiblejoint systems for Fernley and Wadsworth. New development comes in, we’re alwayslooking at new sources, new storage tanks,new transmission, whatever it takes. Sothat’s just an ongoing process with us.

Seney: If tomorrow the water were to stop flowingthrough the Truckee Canal and the seepagefrom the canal and the irrigation were tocease here, where would you get your water


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from?

Harold: We wouldn’t, we'd be out.

Seney: There isn't any nearby sources you can tapinto?

Harold: No. The nearest is the Truckee River. Imean if its not the canal, you’d have to findsome other transmission line to get it overhere. We pump underground water–there’swhere our town, our municipal wells [are],half of the people in town, say, are onprivate wells, half of the people are on themunicipal system. So the municipal wellswould keep pumping for some time. I don’tknow, that’s part of what we don’t have thestudies, we don’t have the information on. Idon’t know when they’d run out. I honestlydon’t know the answer to that. (Seney:Yeah.) Kirk Cramer, [phonetic spelling] ourUtilities Manager, would have a better grasp(chuckles) of that, or George Balder, ourconsulting engineer. But at some pointthey’re going to run out of water. I don’tknow what that point is. Where you’d see itfirst though, would be all those people onindividual private wells. Certainly they’ddry up much more rapidly if there were noirrigation here.

Seney: So there really isn’t an alternative approach


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from the Truckee River?

Harold: No, there isn’t. The Truckee River is theonly source other than whatever water isunderground and might be there for a fewyears.

The Impact of the November, 1994 Elections on the Settlement II Negotiations

Seney: Let me go back to ask you something aboutthe Settlement II negotiations–and it sort ofgets into this subject as well–I’m told–and Ithought, by the way, at the time–that theelection last November might have made adifference in terms of the negotiatingoutlook by the people on the project. Wasthat true, do you think?

Harold: No, it was considered, it was debated a lotbut the bottom line was we don’t trustpolitics; you can’t predict, you just don’tknow. I mean just because some of theplayers in Washington changed doesn’tmean national policy is going to change overnight. We were cautiously optimistic itmight help a little bit that people werefinally taking–not just us, but people all overthe country–people were taking a better lookat the Endangered Species Act [ESA], whatits supposed to accomplish and how muchdamage it can perform in trying to


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accomplish these good goals for the public. So we were hopeful that it might help a bit,but I don’t think anybody relied on it orcounted on it to make all the difference inthe world, and it didn’t.

Seney: Given Public Law 101-618, would a changein the Endangered Species Act without achange in 101-618 make any difference?

Harold: Probably not. Insofar as its purpose is to beimplementing the Endangered Species Act, Imean they’d go hand-in-hand.

Seney: Right, right. I guess my understanding isthat 101-618 is really independent of theEndangered Species Act. So even iftomorrow the Congress repealed theEndangered Species Act, 101-618 is stillsitting there mandating the recovery of thecui-ui and the cutthroat trout.

Harold: Its still a law, but perhaps it would be lookedat again. And 101-618 says a lot of thingshave to be accomplished. Paragraph “A”has to be done before Paragraph “B” kicksin, and so it’s the implementation of thosethings that would change, based on whathappened with E-S-A.

Seney: Right. I’ve been told that Congresswoman[Barbara] Vucanovich, who of course is a


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Republican, a member of the new majorityin the House of Representatives, has told thepeople on the project, “Don’t depend on101-618 being changed, because its notgoing to be changed." Are you aware ofthat?

Harold: I don’t know, I’m not aware of it.

Seney: The reason being that they are too manyinterests who are satisfied with 101-618:California and Nevada among them arehappy about the way the water wasdistributed and allocated between the twostates.

Harold: Barbara knows a lot more about politics thanI do. (chuckles)

Are Long Term Trends Running Against the Newlands Project?

Seney: And Sierra Pacific Power is happy, who is avery powerful player in all of this. So Imean even though there’s a change in thepolitical climate, it may not necessarilytranslate to the advantage of the people onthe project. And I’m trying to get tosomething else here, and it was somethingthat I tried to get at before, and that is, doyou think the long-term things are runningagainst the project? That the trend is against


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the project?

Harold: Huh, the trend . . . I guess I don’t know howto answer that.

Seney: Maybe if I asked a little better, it mightmake more sense. For a long time, ofcourse, things were running against thePyramid Lake Tribe and the Fallon Tribe, tosome extent. The project took tremendousamounts of water, I mean they just divertedas much as they could get out through theTruckee Canal.

Harold: No, I don’t think that’s accurate; I don’tbelieve that.

Seney: Well, people say there was winter powergeneration when it wasn’t needed forirrigation, that was taken during the winter.

Harold: Well, people say. I’m not aware of that; Idon’t believe that.

Seney: Well, before 1967 of course, the watercontinued to be diverted after irrigationseason in order to generate winter power. You’re unfamiliar with that?

Harold: I’ve heard different claims about that. I’mfamiliar with the issue; I’m familiar withsome of the arguments for that and against


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it. I don’t know enough to know whetherthat’s true. I don’t believe that its all truethe way the popular perception in theTruckee Meadows would have you believeit.

Seney: I guess some people who would now pointto the fact that things have just changed, thatyou have very different constellation offorces that in the long run are simply goingto shrink the project, agriculture, back downto what it was before the Newlands, about20,000-22,000 acres, give or take, that wasthere naturally before the project was put inplace. Do you agree with that? Do you seeit that way? Is that your nightmare that that'sgoing to happen?

Harold: No, I don’t see it happening that way. Youcan’t go back to the way things were in1900. I mean Fernley’s here, like it or not,we exist and there’s 8,500 people here andyou can’t just blow them out of the waterovernight. Either you pay for it to do that torelocate them all and move them, but I don’tthink you can just waltz in and destroy 8,500people in this day and age. I don’t thinkeven the federal government can get awaywith that. I hope not.

Seney: Does Fernley have a right to the water thatseeps out of the Truckee Canal?


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Harold: (exasperated sigh) The town has certainwater rights. The water rights owners andusers have certain water rights. It’s acombination, but yes, there are water rightshere.

Seney: I don’t mean to be argumentative.

Harold: I know. And the argument’s made thatsomehow this is all free water that we arestealing (Seney: Right, the excess water.) theexcess or somehow. Well, I guess I don’tbelieve that. (Seney: Right.) I think that wehave permits for the underground water weuse, the surface water rights users have theirlegal rights, and some of that water thatseeps goes to support wetlands and theenvironment and natural habitat andwildlife, so I mean there’s a lot of us, yes,living off of the water here.

Seney: But on the whole, you’re fairly optimistic interms of being able to maintain the water forFernley in an amount necessary for thecommunity?

Harold: Yeah, I’d say I’m optimistic. I guess, if Ididn’t believe it was worth continuing thiseffort, I wouldn’t be here, I wouldn’t bedoing it. I believe that people will generallydo what’s right. I guess it comes down tothat. I think most people will do the right


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thing, and I'm hoping we can steer eachother and guide each other into doing theright thing for all of us.

Seney: You know, if I were on the town board andwere town attorney maybe, I would maybewant to think about the future in the sensethat “Well, the more people we get here, themore voters we have here. The more voterswe have here, the less likely it is that we’regoing to lose access to this water.” Do youthink that way?

Harold: No, because voters have nothing [to do withit]. Even if you have 20,000 people here,that’s not much in terms of voting inNevada. They’re always going to beoutvoted by Reno, Las Vegas, the largecities. So I don’t look at it that way. I lookat how many people do we have to support? How do we use our natural resources? But Iguess I don’t think of it in terms of voters. Our power is not going to come frompolitics. We don’t have the money to fight apolitical fight. If we survive, it’ll be becauseother people, the majority and thegovernment, do the right thing–not becausewe’re powerful enough to make them, butbecause somehow they end up doing theright thing: for whatever reasons, whetherthey’re selfish, whether they’re noble, butbecause its fair and it’s right.


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Seney: I guess I asked that question because peopleon the project have told me that they’ve beentold bluntly that “Well, face it, there aremore votes in Reno and Sparks (Harold:Certainly.) than there are in Fallon. (Harold:Uh-huh.) And that in the end, that’s goingto determine where this very preciousresource goes.” But you're hoping thatthey'll do what’s right. (Harold: Uh-huh.) Now, I'm smiling. (laughter)

Harold: I am and it’s a combination. I mean somepeople will do the right thing because it isright and because they’re decent. Somepeople will do the right thing becausethey’re afraid of getting sued or they’reafraid of bad publicity. I mean there’s athousand reasons why people do what theydo. So I’m hoping that the combination, thecumulative effect, will be that we do workthis out and reach some way of livingtogether that where all of our interests aresatisfied as best they can be.

What Are the Federal Government’s Intentions?

Seney: Do you see another set of thesecomprehensive negotiations in the offing?

Harold: No. I’m not aware of any and my opinion isthe federal government is refusing to do itthat way.


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Seney: Well, you're gesturing to a big pile ofreports.

Harold: We have this pile of Environmental ImpactStatements and Environmental Assessmentsand different reports, and it seems to me thatthe federal government doesn’t want tospend the energy again in doing acomprehensive and cumulative negotiation,or settlement, or working out of theseproblems. They compartmentalize them intothese separate approaches. Its not the way Iwould do it, but it seems to be the waythey’re doing it.

Seney: Do you see them doing this deliberately as away of gnawing away at the project?

Harold: Yes, I do.

Seney: So you think its part of their plan to do it inthis fashion?

Harold: Yes, I do.

Seney: Have you been involved at all in the newcontract negotiations between the Bureau ofReclamation and the District?

Harold: And TCID? No, I have not.

Seney: What have you heard about them, anything?


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Harold: Not much, just reports of how things aregoing, I wouldn’t give you an opinion onthem. (laughs) (Seney: Okay.) You betterask the people who are involved in it. I’mgetting it all second- and third-hand.

Seney: Well, I guess the only reason that I would isbecause impressions will percolate up andwill then be traded around the community(Harold: Uh-huh.) as to what is going on andwhy it may be going on. And I’ve heard itsaid that just like all of these reports thatyou've gestured to, that these contractnegotiations are another attempt by thefederal government–in this case through theBureau of Reclamation–to whittle away atthe project.

Harold: Oh, I believe that, all of it is.

Seney: To raise the costs and the fees (Harold:Sure.) and push the marginal farmers out(Harold: Uh-huh.) and secure those waterrights for the wetlands. (Harold: Uh-huh.)

Harold: I agree with that.

Seney: Despite your optimism. (laughs) I'm havinga hard time here, (laughter) despite youroptimism that people are going to do theright thing, you still see people doing thewrong thing here, that the powerful,


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influential federal government, is essentiallygoing after the project in every way it can.

Harold: Uh-huh. Yeah, but not all of them. Some ofthese attempts are honest attempts. Thereare different ways: as I say, its not the way Iwould do it, but it’s the way they've chosento and some people are doing it that waybecause they think it'll work. And they thinkthat if they can compartmentalize and settlethis issue, then they can tackle the next issueand do it in a sequential fashion. Andmaybe it will work–I've been wrong once ortwice. (laughter) So maybe that is a betterapproach maybe it’ll work. I'm willing togive it a shot.

But yes, in general, I believe that(sigh) if the federal government were trulysincere about working this out, that wewould get back into some form ofcomprehensive negotiations, howeverpainful they might be. But I think they aretrying to piecemeal this, and I truly thinkthey’re doing it with all theenvironmental [impact statements]. I thinkthey’re trying to get around the NEPA[National Environmental Protection Act]process and not do this. As I say, myopinion is they’re trying not to condemn andnot to pay fair market value, so they’retrying to regulate and manipulate and do allof these other processes to achieve the same


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results without paying for it. That’s the wayI see it.

Seney: In other words, to de-stabilize the situationwith one hand, creating anxiety among thefarmers, making it more difficult for them topursue their livelihood: (Harold: Uh-huh.)raising costs with the other hand to add tothis (Harold: Uh-huh.) uncertainty, nowgreater cost and less likelihood of profitableagriculture. (Harold: Uh-huh.) And then Isuppose the Pyramid Lake Tribe figures inhere with its lawsuit over abandoned andforfeited water rights.

The Use of Lawsuits by the Pyramid Lake Tribe

Harold: Uh-huh, that's an aspect of it.

Seney: They certainly filed against people here inFernley, did they not?

Harold: Oh, yes, yes.

Seney: Are you involved in that at all too?

Harold: Yeah, they filed the 2,000 petitions and wehave a number of people here in Fernley inthat. The town isn't directly involved, theydidn’t serve any of those on the town ofFernley.


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Acting as Town Attorney for Fernley

Seney: But are you representing any of the privateindividuals in your capacity as a privateattorney?

Harold: No. As town attorney, no, I’m notrepresenting people on a private basis.

Seney: By the way, do you limit yourself in terms ofwhat kind of cases you will take as a resultof your position as Town Attorney?

Harold: Sure, yeah. I don’t take anything where Ithink there might be a potential conflict or aconflict of interest or a problem. Andthere’s certain things that I just don’t havethe expertise in. There are a relatively small,(chuckles) it seems like a vast number oflawyers involved, but its not that all 2,000people have 2,000 different lawyers. Mostof them have a few, they bunch up intobeing represented by certain lawyers, and itsbetter for those lawyers who have the time,the staff, the facility, the ability, and theexpertise to do it, so I wouldn’t even try tocompete with something like that, its just notmy area.

Seney: What fraction of your time do you spend onit as town attorney?


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Harold: Most of it. It varies depending on whatwe’re doing. I don’t know, maybe seventy-five percent of my time.

Seney: Are you paid a flat amount for that, (Harold:Yes.) or do you bill them for that?

Harold: No, I'm paid a monthly retainer by them as acontract service.

Seney: Right. Well, is there anything I haven’tasked that you’d like to comment on?

Harold: I don’t think so, you’ve been pretty thoroughabout it and covered a lot of ground here.

Similarities and Differences Between Fallon andFernley

Seney: Well, there’s not much difference, I think,between Fernley and Fallon, in a way. (Harold: Uh-huh.) You know, I think thatthe values and the interests are prettyconsistent with one another. (Harold: Uh-huh.) Although–and I tried to get you tocomment on that, and maybe I'll try again–asan outside observer, I could see differenceshere where you might take a different tactand a different course.

Harold: Uh-huh. There are some differences. Fernley’s a different kind of community


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from Fallon. We are closer to Reno, weprobably do more shopping in Reno than wedo in Fallon, so yeah, there’s ties both ways. It’s just–maybe I'm a little defensive aboutit–we’ve had even parties in the negotiationstrying to put wedges between us and Fallon,and I don’t like that kind of game-playing. We are in the middle and we should be ableto be friends with, and work with both sides. We shouldn’t have to pick sides. I will tellyou frankly, that’s one of the problemswe’ve have with Pyramid Lake, they don’tseem to feel we should be able to be friendswith both. They say, “You should be alliedwith us, you should not be part of theLahontan Valley Alliance.” It’s like “youhave to like us only, you can’t like bothsides.” And we don’t play that way, weneed to be free to be friends with, andcoworkers with whoever.

Seney: Have they made offers to you to entice youto see things their way?

Harold: (hesitantly) Offers? No.

Seney: I guess I’m talking about, “Well gee, wehave a community of interest here, we couldwork out something for municipal watersupply system that would suit yourinterests.”


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Harold: Yes, they’ve tried to talk to us about thatkind of thing and basically their approachis . . . (pauses to answer beeper). Anyway,yes, Pyramid Lake’s basic approach is theywould like to help us come up with a jointM&I supply, they want to help us havemunicipal water but the cost of that issacrificing all agriculture in Fernley–ineffect, decoupling. And that’s just notacceptable.

Seney: You’re not ready to do that at this point, ifever?

Harold: No. We’re not willing to give up agricultureovernight. Its going to be changed, its goingto be probably decreasing in importance,economically and every which way, butthat’s not something that happens overnight. And to say, “We'll help you get an M&Isystem,” but that’s all it is, is drinking water,“you give up all agriculture in Fernleyovernight” is simply not acceptable.

Seney: Although I expect a couple more twenty-eight percent years in a row and that mightsound a little different mighten it?

Harold: Not to me it wouldn’t. (both chuckle)

Seney: I’m thinking of the farmers. After a while Isuppose you lose the economic basis, your


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equipment begins to deteriorate and itbecomes expensive, I mean it’s a reality.

Reasons for Water Shortages

Harold: Yeah, but is the twenty-eight percentbecause of nature or because of the way thefederal government participates in thedelivery of water?

We need storage. One of the bigissues for the town of Fernley is, we needupstream storage for the Truckee Division. And all these negotiations that are going onwith TROA–this Truckee River OperatingAgreement–that’s part of what we feel needsto be worked out. There just needs to be5

some storage here, we shouldn’t have to facetwenty-eight percent years.

The Recoupment Issue

Seney: But the 101-618 says until recoupment isworked out, that there’s no permission forupstream storage.

5 For information on the Truckee River Operating Agreement

see U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service,

California Department of Water Resources, Report on Scoping

Comments Truckee River Operating Agreement, November, 1991; see

also u.S. Bureau of Reclamation, Draft: Truckee River Operating

Agreement, October, 2003.


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Harold: Well, until its worked out. So what’sworked out? (chuckles) That’s another onewe feel that the tribe has been less thanwilling to compromise and to work outsomething on. They have an inflated claimof millions of acre feet of water they want,and we just feel that's unrealistic. I don’tknow where that’s going.

Seney: There’s talk going on now.

Harold: There’s talk going on about the recoupmentand again; that’s not one of my areas.

Seney: Recoupment’s a tough issue, isn’t it?

Harold: Yes, it is.

Seney: I mean it's not just water, it’s a veryemotional issue (Harold: Uh-huh.) as far asI'm able to tell. (Harold: Uh-huh.) Not onlydoes the tribe feel righteous about it (Harold:Uh-huh.) but the district does as well(Harold: Certainly.) that this recoupmentissues from the OCAP in '73.

Harold: Or were not allowed to take part in.

Seney: Yeah, again, it depends on who you talk to.

Harold: Yes, it does. (chuckles)


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Seney: That’s the joy of studying something likethis! (chuckles)

Harold: Yeah.

There Is a Lot of Emotions Over Water Issues

Seney: Well, you know, one of the things I’velearned is that people have very strongfeelings about all of these things.

Harold: Sure they do.

Seney: I mean it isn’t just the facts, it’s theemotions (Harold: Uh-huh.) and how theyrelate to the facts.

Harold: Yeah, it is.

Seney: And I can see it in you, (Harold: Sure) notonly in your tone but what the tape won'tpick up (Harold: Uh-huh.) and that is thelook on your face as you talk about thesematters.

Harold: Oh yeah, you can’t be totally dispassionate. I mean I’m not a hired gun from outside, Ilive here. This is my community and it is,you live with it. (long pause)

Seney: What are you thinking? You’re nearly intears, well, you are. Tell me what you . . .


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(tape turned off and on) You were sayingit's an emotional issue.

Harold: Well, it is. It’s part of your life. This is notjust a case that I’m working on. It’s not atheoretical or an intellectual exercise: its ourlives, (with emotion) its how your neighborssurvive and how your community survives.

Seney: Well, I can tell you're very much a memberof the community–I don’t know if the tapecan pick this up–but as we're talking, you area member of the volunteer fire department?

Harold: Uh-huh, oh yes.

Seney: And there’s a fire, it’s fire season.

Harold: Yeah.

Seney: And this will be a brush fire?

Harold: Of course its been fire season for severalyears now. (Seney: That’s right.) We don'tseem to be getting out of season. (chuckles)

Seney: So you take part in all kinds of activities inthe community?

Harold: Yes, I do.

Seney: Well, I can understand your strong feelings


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about this. As I say, I’ve interviewed a lotof people out on the project and it’s verycommon. And again, that’s something wewant to capture here, (Harold: Uh-huh.) isthe depth of feeling that people have,(Harold: Uh-huh.) what it means to thempersonally. (Harold: Sure.) That again, thatwon’t show up in the memos (Harold:Right.) and in the charts and in the modelruns.

Harold: Yeah, it’s hard to see that.

Seney: Yeah, exactly.

Harold: Yeah, it’s hard to see that. You look at L-V-E-A’s papers or things we prepared in thenegotiations and it is, when it’s down inblack and white . . .

END OF SIDE 1, TAPE 2.BEGINNING OF SIDE 2, TAPE 2.

Harold: . . . it’s hard to see those things. But it is,it’s the way we live and the way we work. (chuckles) There was one time during thenegotiations somebody suggested movingthem into Reno, having more sessions inReno. And even Betsy Reike, who was theassistant secretary [of the Department of theInterior for Water and Science] at the time,even she pointed out, “Wait a minute, these


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people from Fallon have to get up in themorning and milk cows or do whatever theyhave to do on their land, and then you wantthem to drive for an hour-and-a-half intoReno?! Whereas, these federal bureaucratsare being paid to come in, put up in fancyhotels, they can drive out here.” That’s thekind of difference that you see. Its commonworking people, to that extent on this oneside–the majority of the people down hereare just that, working people, and they’redealing with a lot of people being flown in atgreat expense from other states and otherplaces. And that’s part of what's been sotroublesome about these [negotiations]:there’s an issue of local decision-makingand self-determination versus all of thisfederal government dictation of what willbe–that’s been at the heart of this.

Decisions Need to be Made Locally

Seney: Well, I know that was another one of theobjectives that you had in the negotiationswas (Harold: Yes, yes it was.) to bring asmuch decision-making home here, locally,as possible.

Harold: Sure, right. We’ve talked about there aredifferent figures. “You claim there’s thismuch water; we claim there's that muchwater being diverted.” But once those


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figures are reached, yes, then it should be upto the local people to use that waterproperly. All of the business of the way thefederal government does what they think ismonitoring of the program–it’s a problem. (both chuckle)

Dealing with Federal Officials

Seney: Yeah. You mentioned Assistant SecretaryReike: Did you find her a positivepersonality in all of this?

Harold: Oh, yes. She was. She’s one of the peoplethat I would say would do things because it’sthe right thing, not because she had to, and Iadmired here for that. I do admire her forthat.

Seney: Because there are people on the federal side,the members of the bureaucracy (Harold:Uh-huh.) in both the Justice Department andthe Interior Department, about whom, shallwe say, the local people don’t have suchwarm feelings.

Harold: (laughs) Ah, you could say that, sure. Thatwould be a fair statement, yes.

Seney: Did you see her as an antidote in a way tothem?


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Harold: To some extent, yes. She wasn’t able tomake all the decisions, but yes, she was avery positive and very helpful force.

Seney: Well, is there anything else you want to add,because I think that’s about all I want to askabout?

Preserving the Record

Harold: I can’t think of anything, seems like wecovered it.

Seney: As I ask that, what we're trying to do ispreserve the record of all (Harold: Uh-huh.)of the various points of view on the projectfor the future. (Harold: Uh-huh.) So as youthink about, say, someone a hundred yearsfrom now reading these things and trying tounderstand what went on . . .

Harold: And I do, I was a history major in college,this kind of thing is very important to me. Itook my camera in, I was one of the fewpeople who took pictures during thenegotiations, but I wanted to get that kind ofthing, have it preserved, because it isimportant. What we did was, what we’restill doing, still is important: not just for theTruckee and Carson river systems but it isimportant in terms of how the federalgovernment deals with these kind of things


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everywhere.

Seney: What were you hoping to capture, and whatdid you think you captured with thosephotographs?

Harold: Just the setting, some of the players, andhow it was set up. I mean it was a uniquesituation to have sixty people at tables set upand as best we could form them into a circle,and sixty people sitting there and trying tobe able to communicate with each other andwork with each other. I felt at the time itwas historical. (chuckles)

Seney: Well, I wish there were more completerecords kept of it (Harold: Uh-huh.) andmaybe there were, I'm not sure that maybesome people kept diaries that some day willbe available?

Harold: Yeah, I don't know if anybody did. A lot ofus took various notes on different topics andall that. I don’t know if anybody kept ajournal of the proceedings. Have you talkedto Gail Bingham?

Seney: I haven’t talked to her yet.

Harold: Yeah, I mean she was the facilitator so shemight have some of those kind of things.


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Seney: Right, and if they make them available(Harold: Uh-huh.) at some point to anarchive (Harold: Right.) whether if everyonegave them to the same one (Harold: Yeah,sure.) that would be very nice, the things thathistorians dream of.

The Impact of Environmentalists on the Negotiations

Let me ask you in this context ofwhat your overall take of theenvironmentalists’ contributions or role inall of this?

Harold: Meaning like the Nature Conservancy andall those type of . . .

Seney: Right, Environmental Defense Fund,Wetlands Coalition.

Harold: They were like us, they’re an importantpiece of the picture. They’re an importantinterest. And at least they had a clear goal. Imean you knew what they wanted (laughs)and they were very honest about, “This iswhat we want to do, this is what we want topreserve,” and yet they were workable. They were willing to compromise, they werewilling to work with us on the numbers andfigures. They, like anything else, there wereindividual differences in the personalities, sosome people were easier to work with, some


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were more willing to compromise. Somewere more devoted to their own modelingand figures, so you had some of thosedifferences. But in general, they were partof the puzzle.

Sierra Pacific Power

Seney: And Sierra Pacific Power again, didn’t reallyplay much of a role. Sue Oldham was theprimary negotiator for them. (Harold: Uh-huh.) I understand that she . . .

Harold: She was there and Gordon DePauli.

Seney: . . . sometimes sort of helped to facilitatethings a little?

Harold: She did. Sue is good at taking the risk ofsaying something that maybe is not going towork, but trying it. She’s good at saying,“Okay, here’s an idea, let me throw it out,maybe its not going to work, but let’s at leasttalk about it.” She was creative and she waspositive in that way. Its like, “Okay, don’tclose your minds, don’t write this off, let’stalk about it.” And she would do that withher own ideas and she was willing to do itwith other people’s ideas. So yes, she washelpful in that way.

Disappointment that an Agreement was not Reached


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Seney: Well, you must be personally disappointedthat this didn't work out?

Harold: Yes, yes I was. I mean as I say, I don’t thinkthey failed. The negotiations are still goingon, but I’m disappointed we didn’t reach thecomprehensive kind of agreement that wecould have or that I wish we could have.

Seney: Yeah. (Harold: Uh-huh.) You know,there’s a little schizophrenia, I think, aboutthis–for want of a better term–among peopleon the project, who are very suspicious ofSenator Reid’s motivations here, (Harold:Uh-huh.) and the reason for the time limitthat we discussed. (Harold: Uh-huh.) Andthinking that this was maybe not a sincereeffort on the part of the primaryconvener–again, that’s Senator Reid. Andyet were very optimistic and hopeful thatthings would work out. (Harold: Uh-huh.) That seems, again to an outsider, an oddattitude.

Harold: Well, I think the hope was maybe this hasgone beyond Harry Reid. If it is a group ofsixty people, if it is negotiations among allof the affected parties, maybe we can reachan agreement and Senator Reid will have tolive with it whether he personally likes it,whether it’s the agreement he would havemade or not, once sixty people have made it


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or nine parties have made it, he’s probablygoing to be bound to honor all or most of it. And I think that was the hope, so I don’tthink there was much dichotomy there. Idon’t think there was a lot of trust of HarryReid but there was a hope that thenegotiations would work, not because ofHarry Reid but despite Harry Reid.

Seney: Yeah. Alright, well, I think for the forthtime . . .

Harold: (both chuckle) Yeah, I guess. We keepsaying, “Okay I think we’ve covered it all.” (chuckles)

Seney: But is there anything else you'd like to add?

Harold: Not that I can think of, no.

Seney: Alright well, on behalf of the Bureau ofReclamation, I want to thank you.

Harold: Except that I appreciate this. I’m gladsomebody is taking the time and the troubleto put together a history. Its been somemonths, of course, since we’ve finished upthe formal negotiations, and I hope it is setdown before we all forget, or before it allgets merged. Certainly it’s much clearer tohear our recollections now than it would beyears from now.


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Seney: It’s been very difficult to get people to talkspecifically about things, even though theydon’t have any barrier to that (Harold: Uh-huh.) because at this point, people are leftwith impressions. (Harold: Uh-huh.) Thoseare important to get here on the tape(Harold: Right.) and I hope your notes andthe notes of others will survive (Harold: Uh-huh.) and that at some point the actualpapers will become generally available.

Harold: Uh-huh. Yeah, maybe it would have beenhelpful if this had happened six months agoor right after. I’m not good at the numbers,and so it’s hard for me to remember exactlywhat the figures came down to and what thespecific differences were. I might have beenbetter able to say that a few months ago.

Seney: Well, you sacrifice one for the other. Yousacrifice the details for maybe the meaningor understanding.

Harold: But maybe get a better perspective that’strue too.

Seney: Exactly. So its hard to know which is right.

Harold: Yeah. (chuckles)

Seney: Alright. Well, once again, on behalf of theBureau, thank you very much.


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Harold: Okay, well thank you.

END OF SIDE 2, TAPE 2OCTOBER 9, 1995END OF INTERVIEW


ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW - Bureau of Reclamation...Let me start by asking you a little bit about your...

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Transcript of ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW - Bureau of Reclamation...Let me start by asking you a little bit about your...