What Happened to the Conservation Money the Interior Department Sent to California?

While one federal agency was last week dishing out money in a bid to mitigate the impact of the drought out west, another was looking like it made the situation worse there, in part of the region, over the past few years.

 

The Office of Special Counsel said Friday that it will tell The Department of the Interior to look into how its Bureau of Reclamation spent millions of dollars on a conservation project in Northern California and Southern Oregon. The payments, which started in 2008, allegedly resulted in giveaways to irrigators, the depletion of groundwater, and excessive compensation packages for those overseeing what has been characterized as a mess.

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility–a non-profit watchdog that in February filed a complaint about the matter with OSC–said it involves “at least $48 million dollars in contracts.”

At the heart of the accusations is an agreement between BOR and an inter-governmental development agency over the Klamath Project: a major regional water works impacting land that stretches for 5,700 square miles. The venture was between the bureau and a municipal utility consortium called the Klamath Water and Power Agency (KWAPA).