The Finding

What the assembled record shows

Oregon’s general adjudication of Klamath Basin water rights is the process that determines who holds what right, and in what priority. It is a state proceeding, and Congress has required the United States to take part in exactly this kind of proceeding under the McCarran Amendment, 43 U.S.C. § 666. The record below traces what the United States did instead.

Fifty Years, Documented

Every entry is supported by a stamped exhibit page — click any citation to open the volume

• September 1975

  The United States files in federal court three months before Oregon can begin

  Oregon commenced its general adjudication on 23 December 1975. Three months earlier, while the State was preparing to commence, the United States filed United States v. Adair in federal court instead. The Ninth Circuit later recorded that the state proceeding was stayed while the federal suit was pending. Oregon could not issue its notice to file claims until September 1990 — a delay of fifteen years.

  Ex. 1 at 22 →
• 1994

  The United States sues Oregon to keep the adjudication from proceeding — and loses

  When Oregon moved to collect claims, the United States contended the adjudication was not a proceeding in which federal and tribal rights could be determined. The Ninth Circuit rejected that position, holding that the Klamath Basin adjudication is precisely the sort of proceeding Congress meant to require the United States to join under the McCarran Amendment. United States v. Oregon, 44 F.3d 758 (9th Cir. 1994). Federal claims were finally filed in 1997 — twenty-one years after the adjudication commenced.

  Ex. 3 at 8–12 →
• January 1997

  Claims for the Yurok Tribe are never filed — while the same rights are asserted elsewhere

  Four months before the court-ordered claiming period closed, the Regional Solicitors advised that the Yurok and Hoopa Valley Tribes held unadjudicated water rights vested at the latest in 1891, and that no specific statutory directive was needed for Reclamation to manage irrigation deliveries to protect senior tribal water rights. Nothing was filed for those rights in Oregon’s adjudication.

  Interior’s own Solicitor later conceded that the downstream tribes could have asserted storage rights in the adjudication but did not. The consequence falls on everyone: the Tribe’s rights remain unquantified to this day, and the District’s adjudicated rights are subordinated to a quantity no court has ever determined.

  Ex. 6 at 5 → Ex. 18 at 6 → Ex. 31 at 7 →
• 1990s–2000

  Federal litigation funding builds the science that will restrict the Project

  The Department of Justice and the Bureau of Indian Affairs paid Dr. Thomas Hardy more than $850,000 under expert-witness contracts captioned “Klamath River Basin Adjudication” and “Yurok Water Rights Adjudication System” to develop the flow studies that would justify curtailing the Klamath Project. The governing interagency agreement states its purpose as supporting United States claims for water on behalf of the Hoopa Valley, Klamath and Yurok Tribes.

  Ex. 9 at 9, 10, 12, 18 →
• September 2000
  — April 2001

  A contract captioned “Klamath Project Curtailment of Water,” then the shutoff

  In September 2000 the Department of Justice opened a further Hardy contract captioned “Matter — Klamath Project Curtailment of Water.” Six months later, on 6 April 2001, the United States issued a curtailment notice shutting off the Klamath Project completely — in a water year that began with Upper Klamath Lake six inches above its 1987–2009 average.

  The Hardy studies thereafter became the “best available science” in the biological opinions, and have restricted the Project ever since.

  Ex. 9 at 13 →
• 2002–2008

  The science does not hold up under independent review

  The National Research Council found no convincing scientific justification for departing from 1990–2000 operating practice. Its later evaluation identified significant shortcomings in the Hardy Phase II study — monthly rather than daily data, no tributary analyses, and flaws in experimental design — concluding that it and the companion Natural Flow Study were not likely to contribute effectively to sound decision making. An independent review commissioned by the Bureau of Reclamation itself concluded that the underlying Phase I report could not be used to identify ESA jeopardy, recovery, or sustained tribal harvest flows.

  Ex. 36 at 3–4 →
• 2013

  Oregon determines the rights — and the determination is set aside within weeks

  Oregon completed the first phase of its adjudication in 2013. It confirmed that the water stored in Upper Klamath Lake is stored for irrigation of the Klamath Project, and it denied the only tribal claims to instream flows in the mainstem Klamath River, holding that off-reservation claims fall outside the federal reserved water right doctrine as a matter of law.

  Weeks later, the 2013 biological opinion stated in writing that the adjudication’s effects were uncertain and would likely remain uncertain for several years, and that the proposed action was therefore not modified based on the Findings of Fact and Order of Determination. Interior’s Solicitor subsequently described the practice directly: the United States has taken the position that ESA compliance serves as a proxy for its minimum duty to the tribes. No statute created that regime, and no court with jurisdiction over water rights ever approved it.

  Ex. 13 at 5 → Ex. 11 at 21 → Ex. 18 at 1, 6 →
• 10 February &
  14 May 2025

  Interior reverses its own legal position

  Interior concluded that stored Project water is bound by the adjudication, and that the Project contracts leave Reclamation no ESA discretion. The United States withdrew its litigating position in the Ninth Circuit and moved to dismiss and vacate.

  Ex. 29 → Ex. 32 at 21 →
• 17 June 2026

  A divided Ninth Circuit panel decides the appeal notwithstanding the withdrawal

  The panel reaffirmed that ESA requirements override the water rights of the irrigators, while stating in the same opinion that neither it nor the district court had adjudicated any water rights. Judge R. Nelson dissented.

  Ex. 32 at 26, 39 →
• 3 August 2026

  Rehearing en banc sought — the decision is not final

  K.I.D. and the Klamath Water Users Association each petitioned the Ninth Circuit for rehearing en banc. The 17 June decision is therefore not final.

  Ex. 33 → Ex. 34 →
• 13 April &
  15 June 2026

  A further round of litigation opens on the same three-year cycle

  Earthjustice, for the Yurok Tribe, served a further sixty-day notice of intent to sue and then filed a Second Supplemental Complaint seeking to vacate the 2026 operations plan and reverse the current Administration’s corrected legal position, while expressly declining to consent to any adjudication or quantification of the Tribe’s rights.

  The same plaintiffs have filed on a roughly three-year cycle since 2016 and rely on that history: in the 12 June 2026 joint case management statement they cite their own 2016 action before the same court as the template for how this round should be briefed. The Department of Justice describes the pattern in its own published materials, noting that litigation over Klamath operations is almost an annual event, with the plaintiffs changing in relation to the Reclamation decision at issue.

  The involvement is older than this case. On 14 March 1995 the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund wrote to Reclamation’s Klamath Project Manager asking that its submission on Iron Gate Dam minimum flow requirements be entered into the administrative record for the 1995 Klamath Project water decision. That organisation renamed itself the Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund in 1997 and now practises as Earthjustice. It has been shaping the federal administrative record for Klamath Project operations for more than thirty years.

  Ex. 31 at 7–8 → Ex. 30 at 7 →

No Forum Remains Open

The regulatory-fairness failure

Reclamation’s 2024–2029 operations plan and the underlying biological opinions remain in effect. K.I.D. is the applicant to the ESA Section 7(a)(2) consultation and has since 2021 been denied the ability to submit biological assessments, proposed actions, or reasonable and prudent alternatives. The federal services authored the operating plan and then evaluated their own plan. Every route to review of that result has since closed:

Cumulative Harm

What five decades have cost this basin

Farms have been foreclosed. Producers in this basin face a documented mental health crisis. And through it all, no listed species has been recovered or delisted.

What the District Has Asked For

Requested action, SBA Office of the National Ombudsman

Klamath Irrigation District is a special government district organised under Oregon law, serving roughly 1,200 family farms across a service population well under 50,000. Both the District and the producers it serves fall within the Office’s jurisdiction — as a small government entity and as small businesses. The District respectfully requested that the Office:

• Refer this matter to the Department of the Interior, the Bureau of Reclamation, the National Marine Fisheries Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for high-level fairness review, with specific attention to the exclusion of K.I.D. as the applicant from the ESA Section 7(a)(2) consultation process since 2021.

• Refer the interagency litigation-funding records at Exhibit 9 — including the September 2000 Department of Justice agreement captioned “Matter — Klamath Project Curtailment of Water” — to the Department of the Interior Office of Inspector General, as contemplated by SBREFA where circumstances warrant.

• Include the Klamath Basin in the Office’s annual report to Congress and refer the matter to the Region X Small Business Regulatory Fairness Board.

• Support reforms preventing the misuse of federal litigation funding and expert contracting, including transparency requirements for interagency litigation-support agreements of the kind documented here, so that federal expert-witness contracting directed at a regulated community is disclosed to that community.

• Coordinate with USDA under the existing Memorandum of Understanding so that the agricultural and regulatory-fairness records are developed together.

The Record

Approximately 1,075 pages · every exhibit page stamped “Exhibit N, Page x of y”

The full documentary record is published here as filed. Nothing is summarised away; the exhibits are the primary documents themselves. If you read one thing, read the Key Documents compilation — it is twenty-eight documents arranged in sequence, each captioned with its source and marked to the operative passage.