Nov. 15, 2017
The Icicle Work Group is being chastised for inaccuracies in its public remarks.
In a November 15 email to all Work Group members, Karl Forsgaard, president of Alpine Lakes Protection Society, targeted public statements by the Bureau of Reclamation and Daryl Harden, Work Group member and irrigation district board member. Based on these, Forsgaard said, “It looks like IWG has an accuracy problem.”
In its Environmental Assessment for a larger valve on the Snow Lake dam, the Bureau of Reclamation described it as “routine operations and maintenance.” Daryl Harden, in a November 9 op-ed in the Wenatchee World, also claimed that a Forest Service easement gave the irrigation district the right to do “maintenance” on dams in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness, thus ensuring that Work Group proposals in the wilderness were legal. That seemed to imply that the Icicle proposals only involve maintenance.
Forsgaard took aim at what he called this “misleading messaging.”
“The main environmental concerns are not about maintenance,” Forsgaard declared, “they are about proposed expansion.”
He cited the Work Group proposals:
-- to drill a tunnel that would drain Upper Klonaqua Lake into Lower Klonaqua Lake.
-- to build new dams at Snow Lakes to expand Snow Lakes bigger than they have ever been.
-- to build a new dam at Eightmile Lake where there are only pieces of an old dam that has not held water in decades.
-- to install a new valve that would allow a 60% increase in withdrawal rates from Snow Lake.
“In each case,” Forsgaard said, “IWG is aggressively proposing significant changes in the Wilderness, a lot more than ‘routine maintenance,’ which is why so many pro-Wilderness groups are responding with concern.”
Various Work Group members have responded that the Bureau of Reclamation, and not the Work Group, drafted its own Environmental Assessment, and Daryl Harden made it clear in his op-ed that he spoke for himself and not the Work Group.
This prompted Forsgaard to reply: “But at a higher level, accuracy problems such as those in the Snow Lake valve Draft EA are not just a BuRec [Bureau of Reclamation] accuracy problem, they are also an IWG accuracy problem. BuRec is an IWG member and its seriously defective EA was talking about a project that supports the goals of IWG.”