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ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW

WILLIAM BETTENBERG

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STATUS OF INTERVIEW:OPEN FOR RESEARCH

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Interview Conducted and Edited by:Donald B. Seney, Emeritus

California State University-SacramentoFor the Bureau of Reclamation’sNewlands Project Oral Histories

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Interview conducted–1994Interview desktop published–2009

Oral History ProgramBureau of ReclamationDenver, Colorado

SUGGESTED CITATION:

Bettenberg, William, ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW. Transcript of tape-recorded Bureau of Reclamation OralHistory Interview conducted by Donald B. Seney. Edited byDonald B. Seney and desktop published by Brit Allan Storey,senior historian, Bureau of Reclamation. Repository for therecord copy of the interview transcript is the NationalArchives and Records Administration in College Park,Maryland.

Record copies of this transcript are printed on 20 lb., 100%cotton, archival quality paper. All other copies are printed onnormal duplicating paper.

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Newlands Project Series–Oral history of William Bettenberg

Table of Contents

Table of Contents ............................................................... i

Statement of Donation ....................................................... v

Introduction ..................................................................... vii

Oral History Interview ....................................................... 1Early Life and Education ....................................... 1Going to Work for the Bureau of Mines ................ 3Returning to the University of Washington ........... 4Joining the Staff of the Assistant Secretary for

Program Policy ........................................... 6Moving up in the Department of the Interior ......... 8Deputy Director of Budget for the Department of

the Interior and Other Responsibilities ...... 9Brief Assignment in the Energy Department ....... 11Returning to the Department of the Interior as

Budget Director and Other Responsibilities.................................................................. 13

Serving as Acting Director of the MineralsManagement Service ................................ 14

Joining the Senior Executive Service .................. 17Becoming a Special Assistant to Secretary of the

Interior Manuel Lujan .............................. 18Becoming Involved in the Newlands Project

Controversies ........................................... 20Getting Started on the Newlands Project: Learning a

New Area ................................................. 24Who Should Pay for Irrigation Projects ............... 29

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Bureau of Reclamation History Program

Recapturing Some of the Costs on the NewlandsProject ...................................................... 32

Money for the Pyramid Lake Tribe ..................... 33Getting the Agreement of OMB and DOI to Public

Law 101-618: the Interstate Compact andthe Preliminary Settlement Agreement .... 34

Sierra Pacific Power Company’s Interests ........... 38The Department of the Interior Agrees to Public

Law 101-618 ............................................ 40Getting Public Law 101-618 Through the Congress

.................................................................. 42Getting President George H. W. Bush to Sign

Public Law 101-618: the Problem of Moneyfor the Tribes ............................................ 51

Deciding to Spend Federal Money on a Project.................................................................. 57

Learning the Ins and Outs of the Newlands ProjectControversies ........................................... 59

Difficulty of Reaching Agreement with theTruckee-Carson Irrigation District ........... 64

Becoming Deputy Assistant Secretary for IndianAffairs ...................................................... 74

Coordinating and Implementing Public Law 101-618 ............................................................ 77

Dealing with Other Federal Agencies and Entities.................................................................. 85

Bureau of Reclamation and TCID ....................... 91Minerals Management Service ............................ 94Fallon OCAP Office ............................................ 95Bureau of Land Management and the Honey Lake

Project ...................................................... 96

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U.S. Geological Survey ....................................... 98Dealing with the Navy Department ................... 102More on Implementation of Public Law 101-618

................................................................ 105Budget Process in Implementation .................... 107Oversight Hearings on Public Law 101-618 ...... 114Recoupment Issue .............................................. 115More on the 1993-1994 Oversight Hearings ..... 119Origins of the Settlement II Negotiations .......... 120Stalling by TCID: the Demand for a Programmatic

EIS .......................................................... 123Settlement II Negotiations ................................. 128Federal Government’s Position in the Settlement II

Negotiations ........................................... 129The Possibility of a Municipal Water Supply

System .................................................... 131Changes in State Law and the Issue of Conservation

................................................................ 132Bettenberg’s Reaction to the Negotiations ........ 133Importance of Sierra Pacific Power Company to the

Negotiations ........................................... 135The Conservation Caucus .................................. 137How the Negotiations Went ............................... 140The Participants and the Various Interests ........ 141Collapse of the Negotiations .............................. 145Establishment of the Truckee-Carson Coordinating

Office ..................................................... 146TROA Negotiations ........................................... 152The Advantage of Having a Wide Range of

Postings Within the Department of theInterior ................................................... 154

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(INTENTIONALLY BLANK)

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Statement of Donation

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Introduction

In 1988, Reclamation began to create a historyprogram. While headquartered in Denver, the historyprogram was developed 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 round look at one Reclamationproject. The regional director suggested the NewlandsProject, and the research program occurred between 1994and signing of the Truckee River Operating Agreement in2008. Professor Donald B. Seney of the GovernmentDepartment at California State University - Sacramento (nowemeritus and living in South Lake Tahoe, California)undertook this work. The Newlands Project, while a small-to medium-sized Reclamation project, represents amicrocosm of issues found throughout Reclamation: watertransportation over great distances; three Native Americangroups with sometimes conflicting interests; private entitieswith competitive and sometimes misunderstood water rights;many local governments with growing water needs; Fish andWildlife Service programs competing for water for

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endangered species in Pyramid Lake and for viability of theStillwater National Wildlife Refuge to the east of Fallon,Nevada; and Reclamation’s original water user, the Truckee-Carson Irrigation District, having to deal with moderncompetition for some of the water supply that originallyflowed to farms and ranches in its 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 Office (84-53000)Office of Program and Policy ServicesBureau of ReclamationP. O. Box 25007Denver, Colorado 80225-0007(303) 445-2918FAX: (720) 544-0639E-mail: [email protected]

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Oral History InterviewWilliam Bettenberg

Early Life and Education

Seney: This is December 5, 1995. My name isDonald Seney. I'm with William D.Bettenberg, the deputy director of the Officeof Policy and Analysis for the Department ofthe Interior, and we're talking in Reno,Nevada. This is our first session, and this isour first tape.

Good afternoon, Bill.

Bettenberg: Good afternoon.

Seney: Why don't you just begin by giving us yourbirth date and where you were born, and abrief, not too brief, biography of how you gotto these responsibilities.

Bettenberg: First off, these days I'm the Assistant Directorof the Office of Policy Analysis. As part ofour streamlining, in most of the offices of thesecretary, we did away with deputy directorsand changed responsibilities around a little bit.

Let's see. I was born in Inglewood,California, in 1940.

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Seney: What's your birth date?

Bettenberg: March 18th of 1940. And grew up mostly inthe state of Washington, went from grade onethrough twelve to school in Richland,Washington.

Seney: Was your father working for Boeing?

Bettenberg: No, for the Hanford Project.

Seney: Oh, of course. What am I thinking. Right.

Bettenberg: My father passed away in June of this year,but my mother still lives in Richland, and hedid up until that time.

Went to college at the University ofWashington, majored in political science. Idid a bachelor's and a master's degree therebetween 1958 and 1964, and then I went backfor another school year as a National Instituteof Public Affairs Fellow in the Public AffairsSchool, studying natural resource policy.

Seney: What year was that?

Bettenberg: That was 1969-70 school year.

I went to work for–

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1. Brackets indicate information inserted by the editors.


Seney: Let me ask you. What drew you to thatprogram?

Bettenberg: The National Institute of Public AffairsProgram?

Seney: Right. Obviously this is something youapplied for.

Going to Work for the Bureau of Mines

Bettenberg: Yes. I had gone to work for the InteriorDepartment in the Bureau of Mines in 1964,directly out of college. I had applied to thegovernment, almost as an afterthought, if youwill. Matter of fact, I was offered a jobthrough that process by the Bureau ofReclamation on the Columbia Basin Project,but I had applied under what's now referred toas the Presidential Management InternProgram. It was some sort of a managementintern program at the time, which wasconsidered to be highly competitive. [I]1

passed the written exam and passed throughthe oral process and had a number of offersthat immediately came flooding in fromdifferent government agencies. The Bureau ofMines was the only one that actually said thatthey would put me to work directly on aproject. Everybody else wanted to put me intoa rotational administration training program

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for two years. Having been in college for sixyears at that point, almost continuously, rightthrough the summers and so forth, I was readyfor something other than a training program,and the Bureau of Mines offered to put me towork designing computer systems, which waskind of interesting, because I told them that I'dseen a computer once through a window of abank in downtown Seattle.

Seney: This was a very new field at that time.

Bettenberg: It was a very new field, and they said that Iprobably knew about as much as most peopleentering the field at that point, outside ofelectrical engineering, electronics, or that sortof thing, and that I'd learn it.

So I went to work, initially adapting a Bureauof Reclamation payroll system for use by theBureau of Mines and the Bureau of OutdoorRecreation, and then leading a team to designan accounting system for the Bureau of Minesand ultimately several other agencies. Shiftedfrom there back to D.C. I had started out inD.C. for something like eight months, movedto Denver, then went back in the budgetbusiness, and then moved on to the policyshop in the Bureau of Mines.

Returning to the University of Washington

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As I was doing these things, I recognized thathaving designed one major administrativesystem in what I personally would describe,and I guess a lot of other people woulddescribe, as really well, that it would be reallyboring to do another one. I wanted to do otherkinds of things, and as I got into mineralpolicy issues, budget policy, and that sort ofthing, I concluded that I really liked what theInterior Department did. I was beginning tosee that for the first time, and that I had ageneralist political science background, I waswell trained for budget, matter of fact,academically, and for congressional dealingsand that sort of thing, but not really in naturalresource policy.

A brochure came around the office providingnotification that the National Institute ofPublic Affairs was accepting nominations forthe next school year. I asked the Bureau if itwould be willing to sponsor me and ultimatelythey said yes. I put down three schools thatoffered a natural resource policy curriculum,and for whatever reason, they sent me back tothe University of Washington for anotherschool year. So that was why I ended updoing that.

Seney: And you had a master's degree in that year.

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Bettenberg: I didn't get a second master's degree. I got amaster's degree in political science back in'64. It was a non-degree certificate program. Matter of fact, one of the really nice thingsabout it was that it was pretty free form. Icould take about anything that I wanted, andso I took a full credit load as a graduatestudent, taking natural resource economicsand natural resource policy courses and publicpolicy courses and that sort of thing, and thenI audited a second full load, took things likemodern European fiction and Scandinaviandrama and things like that. So it was a verygood year.

Joining the Staff of the Assistant Secretary forProgram Policy

About two years, year and a half, aftercompleting that program, I was asked to jointhe staff of the Assistant Secretary forProgram Policy.

Seney: This would be about 1972.

Bettenberg: This is would be right at the beginning of1972, January, right at the beginning ofJanuary of '72. The department had abolishedits old program budgeting system office,PBBS. You might have run across it.

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Seney: Right.

Bettenberg: And had gone through a budget phase indeveloping the budget without it, and it haddawned on people that there was no policyinput to the budget at all. So I was basicallyhired to correct that and to add a policyquotient, if you will, to the budgetdevelopment process.

Seney: Sounds like a pretty important job.

Bettenberg: Well, it was a staff assistant type of job. Idon't remember what my title was; it wasprobably program analyst or staff assistant orsomething like that.

Seney: Well, whatever the title is, it sounds like apretty important assignment.

Bettenberg: Well, it was an important assignment, yeah. Matter of fact, during the fall of that year, Iwrote a series of papers. Matter of fact,Austin Burke [phonetic] contributed a coupleto the series, titled Policies for the Mid-Seventies. It was basically kind of a road mapof some areas that I thought the departmentshould pursue. It covered a number ofthemes, some bureaus. It proposed somemajor reorganizations, the creation of theMine Enforcement Safety Administration out

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of the Bureau of Mines, tackling the energyproblem, creating an Office of Energy DataAnalysis, an energy conservation program.

Rog [Rogers C.B.] Morton [Secretary of theInterior] picked up a very large part of that. That was the initial federal step that is now theDepartment of Energy's conservationprogram, for instance. We started it, got thefirst few million dollars for it, and then movedit on the Federal Energy Office when it wascreated, and then the Federal EnergyAdministration. The Office of Energy DataAnalysis became the energy data arm of theEnergy Department.

At the beginning of '74, I moved over as thedeputy director of the department's budgetoffice. Actually, I was detailed over thereduring the fall of '93.

Seney: This is for the whole Department of theInterior.

Bettenberg: This is for the whole Department of theInterior.

Seney: Sounds to me like you're moving prettyquickly up the ladder.

Moving up in the Department of the Interior

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Bettenberg: Yeah, I moved very fast from a promotionalstandpoint in the department. To the best ofmy knowledge, I was the youngest supergradein the department at that point. I would havebeen thirty-three, I guess, when I was a GS-16. Probably a lot of serendipity in that. Also, I think, one of the factors working atthat time was that there was a large number offederal retirements through that period. A lotof people who had come to work in thegovernment in the early to mid- and even lateforties were reaching retirement age, and therewas a lot of opportunity during that period foryounger people.

Deputy Director of Budget for the Department ofthe Interior and Other Responsibilities

As the deputy director of budget, I wasresponsible for, amongst other things, budgetformulation for the department, and so duringthe two previous years, and then through thenext series of years, I was working kind of onissues across the whole spectrum ofdepartment-wide responsibilities. Dennis Dint[phonetic] was the Acting Assistant Secretaryfor what was then Energy and Minerals,during the natural gas crisis of 1977, was thecoordinator for the department for thosemissions that were spun off to the EnergyDepartment and Federal Energy Office and

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Administration, kind of through the mid-seventies. I was [Secretary of the Interior]Cecil Andrus' [phonetic] point person for thecreation of the Energy Department, did a lotof testifying on the natural gas crisis, becausethe Conservation Division of the GeologicalSurvey that was responsible for all theoversight of federal oil and gas wells cameunder my jurisdiction at that point, as well asbeing the go-between between Andrus andDon Hodel, who didn't appear to be onspeaking terms, but Hodel was still theadministrator of Bonneville at that point.

One footnote, I was shanghaied to do thepublic hearing on Auburn Dam during thatperiod. That was the period of the water hitlist.

Seney: During the [Jimmy] Carter administration.

Bettenberg: During the Carter administration. Andrus wasthe only political appointee at that time, andthey were setting up all these hearings, and hecould only go to one or two of them, and sopeople who were in acting capacities, whowere usually senior career persons, drewstraws to see where they went. My straw wasAuburn Dam in Sacramento.

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Seney: And obviously you were assigned to reflectthe administration's policy here, whateveryour own views may have been.

Bettenberg: Well, actually, it was just a hearing. It wasjust to take testimony, get views, and so forth.

Seney: Rather than your giving testimony.

Bettenberg: Right. Had to do a lot of that on natural gas,but not on this particular issue.

Brief Assignment in the Energy Department

In '78, I did what I've since referred to as acameo appearance as the budget director ofthe Energy Department. That didn't work outwell, and I was back over in the InteriorDepartment in a couple of months.

Seney: I'm duty bound to ask why that didn't work outwell.

Bettenberg: Oh, a whole bunch of things. It was duringthe Schlesinger-O'Leary period, and kind ofthe name of the game at that point was shootmessengers.

Seney: So this is the end of the [Gerald] Fordadministration, beginning of the Carter.

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Bettenberg: No, this is mid-Carter. They had created theEnergy Department in late '77, and hired afellow that I respected a lot as theircomptroller in maybe about March of '78, bythe name of Jerry Miles, and he was one of thehandful of budget directors around town that Ithought that I could learn a lot from. Heasked me to come over. He had come fromthe Ag[riculture] Department, where he hadbeen the budget director. He asked me tocome over and be the budget director underhim. Actually, the very first weekend I wasthere, I concluded that the culture thatSchlesinger had created was going to be very,very destructive of everybody in the process.

Seney: This is James Schlesinger.

Bettenberg: Yeah.

Seney: Who's been [Department of] DefenseSecretary and CIA [Central IntelligenceAgency] director and so forth.

Bettenberg: Yeah. The first two weeks I was there, I sat ina morning budget briefing that started sevenor eight o'clock, and sometimes went as longas until noon. He decided, for his first budget,he was going to take personal charge of thisand hear out all the programs, and it wasreally slash and burn. There was no sense that

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he was pulling people together as a newdepartment. He was basically destroyinganything that was there.

But at any rate, by the end of August, they hadcalled in Miles and told him that theysuspected it was more their fault than his fault,that things hadn't quite jelled, and they wouldlike him to move on, and on his way out takehis budget director with him. So the nextweek he was back in the Ag Department, Iwas back in Interior. Fortunately, we both hada number of opportunities available to us inour previous departments.

Returning to the Department of the Interior asBudget Director and Other Responsibilities

January '97, I moved up as budget director in Interior. Theprevious director retired.

Seney: January of–you said '97.

Bettenberg: Of '79. In the fall of '81, I moved up to deputyassistant secretary covering policy, budget andenvironmental affairs, during the period whenthey still had career deputy assistantsecretaries.

Seney: This would have been under the [Ronald]Reagan administration.

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Bettenberg: This would have been under the Reaganadministration, Jim Watt [was Secretary of theInterior]. In that capacity, I was dealing notonly with budget issues, going through someof what they're going through right now, youknow, the downsizing in the first Reaganbudget, for instance, but also working onpolicy responsibilities related to the Office ofPolicy Analysis where I am now, andenvironmental kinds of issues with theEnvironmental Project Review shop.

Serving as Acting Director of the MineralsManagement Service

One of the highlights during that period wasthat I was the department's coordinator for theLennos [phonetic] Commission on coal fairmarket value. Also, had a fair amount to dowith setting up the Office of MineralsManagement, and did a stint as the actingdirector of that while they were searching fora political appointee in 1982, I guess it was.

Bill Clark became secretary [of Interior] in thefall of the year, and, in December, asked me tomove down and become director of theMinerals Management Service. At the time,there was quite a scandal going with regardto–I guess at the time the scandal hadn't reallystarted in earnest, and Clark obviously knew

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more than I did at that point, but there was thepossibility that one or two high Interiorofficials might even be indicted.

Seney: These would have been political people?

Bettenberg: Political appointees. One of them as thedeputy director and acting director of theMinerals Management Service, and the otherwas the deputy assistant secretary, and, Iguess, acting assistant secretary, in what wasthen Energy and Minerals.

But I had been dealing with Clark on budgetissues and on offshore oil and gas leasingissues. He apparently felt that he needed acareer person to go in and clean up the act atthe Minerals Management Service, and was anamazing nonpartisan individual, anyhow. SoI'm not sure that I know where he would havelooked if he had decided that what he neededwas a Republican appointee for this. I suspectthat he didn't have any idea where he mighthave looked for it, but he was very close toReagan, cleared me in a day at the WhiteHouse, and put me into the job. I was thereuntil 1990.

Seney: As head of the Minerals Management Service.

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Bettenberg: Well, I was head of the Minerals ManagementService for about five years. In the fall of '88,with the Reagan years coming to an end, andHodel planning to depart [he] wanted to put apolitical appointee in as the director, andasked me to step down. I was offered a varietyof assignments, and said that I'd really like tostay with the Minerals Management Serviceand run the offshore program. There was avacancy there. So I stayed there another yearand a half. The political appointee that hadbeen put in, Bob Coleman [phonetic], wasexpected to be confirmed again by the newadministration.

Seney: The [George] Bush administration.

Bettenberg: The Bush administration. They surprisedeverybody by naming a fellow by the name ofBarry Williamson. One of his claims to famewas that he was the son-in-law of the biggestdonor to the campaign.

Seney: I guess a lot of people thought that might havebeen his qualification.

Bettenberg: And he had some ties to the oil industry. Hewas uncomfortable having the former directorand so forth around.

Seney: Meaning you.

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Bettenberg: Meaning me. And so we went into anextended process of trying to land a suitableassignment for me.

Joining the Senior Executive Service

Seney: Now, let me ask you at this point, forgive meif I've got the terminology wrong here. Areyou a member of the Senior Executive Service(SES) at this time?

Bettenberg: I am, yes.

Seney: How long have you been a member of that?

Bettenberg: I'm a charter member.

Seney: When did it begin?

Bettenberg: It began in, I think, '79.

Seney: So this means that you were sent around fromassignment to assignment, and it doesn't loweryour salary or your grade, or whatever that is.

Bettenberg: Right. I've probably been far more mobilethan most within the Interior Department,certainly, in the Senior Executive Service.

Seney: Well, it sounds kind of interesting.

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Bettenberg: I've enjoyed it.

Seney: I mean, you know, it's kind of a privilegedposition.

Bettenberg: It's been a fun career.

Seney: Yeah, I would think.

Becoming a Special Assistant to Secretary of theInterior Manuel Lujan

Bettenberg: What we decided in early 1990, was that Iwould work as a special assistant to ManuelLujan.

Seney: The Secretary of the Interior.

Bettenberg: The Secretary of the Interior, reporting in themain to Lou Gallegos, who was the AssistantSecretary for Policy Management and Budget,I guess it was still called then, and that Iwould be given just a series of specialassignments during the year, and sometime inthe future we would look for something thatwas a more permanent arrangement.

Seney: This didn't bother you or trouble you? Thiswas the way the game works?

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Bettenberg: Well, this is the way the game works. When Itook the minerals management job as director,I told myself and told my wife that this is notthe job that you retire in. You will be movedfrom here either for cause or for reasons thathave nothing to do with you whatsoever, andit could be any of those or all of those.

Seney: But you liked that job a lot.

Bettenberg: I liked the job a lot, yeah, and I liked runningthe offshore program. Actually, departingfrom that program in the MineralsManagement Service turned out to be a lotharder than I had expected it was. Movingfrom director to the associate director for theoffshore program was quite easy. I hadanticipated, with the new administrationcoming, I would be shifting to somethinganyhow, but I had a fantastically good staff. Ihad been basically present at the creation, haddone everything from set the policies, staff itthe way I wanted to, I designed the originalorganization of it, even specified what the sealwould be for the organization. So leaving theoffshore program was difficult.

Seney: So you had a little sense of parentage here,obviously.

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Bettenberg: Yeah, a lot. But fortunately, I had goodprojects to work on. I was given an oversightrole for the department on the Presidiotransfer from the Army to the Park Service. Iwas asked to write some policy papers ongeneral Indian policy, picking up on somethings I had written back in 1972, matter offact.

Seney: Excuse me Bill, is that uncomfortable, thatlight?

Bettenberg: No, that's fine.

Becoming Involved in the Newlands ProjectControversies

Kind of in the ashes that followed theFebruary hearing on Truckee-Carson.

Seney: February 1990 hearings?

Bettenberg: February 1990 hearings, was asked to take thelead assignment for the department on theTruckee-Carson-Pyramid Lake legislation,and that's how I got into this.

Seney: All right, good. Let me ask you in detail,because when I spoke to you on the phone,and you, of course, as we both know, urgedme to read the testimony from those hearings,

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which I have read, especially AssistantSecretary [John] Sayre's testimony, which wasvery unfortunate, to put it mildly.

Bettenberg: I have never read that.

Seney: Is that right?

Bettenberg: Matter of fact, one of these days I've got to goback and read that.

Seney: Well, I'm sure you must know this, because,as you know, I've interviewed Betsy Rieke,who was the Assistant Secretary for Waterand Science, who didn't quite exactly succeedSayre, but had his position after he did, and Iknow she prepared thoroughly for–

Bettenberg: Oh, she directly succeeded him.

Seney: Oh, did she directly? Okay. I know sheprepared thoroughly for her hearings, and youmust have assisted in that preparation–

Bettenberg: Yes. Yes.

Seney: –knowing full well that Sayre had bombed,and that your new boss had better not bomb.

Bettenberg: Yes.

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Seney: It's interesting, you have told me that youdidn't really know all the details, andobviously, as you say, you haven't read thetestimony, so I'm kind of curious when I takeit Secretary Lujan maybe calls you in, or thenumber-two person calls you in and says,"Bill we want you to handle this," whathappened during that conversation, do yourecall how that assignment was given?

Bettenberg: I don't recall it being an extensiveconversation. It was with Lou Gallegos, andhe said, "One of the things we want you tohandle is the Truckee-Carson. That's not beenhandled well, and there was a congressionalhearing at the beginning of the month." Thiswas at the end of February. "There was acongressional hearing that didn't go well at all,and you need to pick up the pieces and figureout what to do with this, and we have nopreconceived notions at this point."

Seney: That was essentially your assignment?

Bettenberg: That was essentially the assignment.

Seney: Let me turn this over.

END OF SIDE 1, TAPE 1. DECEMBER 5, 1995.BEGIN SIDE 2, TAPE 1. DECEMBER 5, 1995.

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Bettenberg: I think that it's fair to say that the departmentdidn't have the slightest idea what to do at thatpoint. I doubt that they put any great stake inme resolving this, but they had to dosomething different, was the feeling.

Seney: If I may, and you were kind of the man to begiven special tasks, since you are now, in thisspecial task business..

Bettenberg: Right. I'm in the special task business, right. For instance, a couple of months later, I washanded the task of negotiating the first self-governance compacts between the departmentand Indian tribes, under self-governancelegislation.

Seney: Get Bettenberg in here, right?

Bettenberg: Somebody needed to do it. At that point I wasbeginning to establish some track record onthe Truckee-Carson, and I think that thatincreased their confidence in me with regardto that.

Seney: Tell me how you got started on the task. Iguess it's, what, the number-two man is thedeputy secretary in the Interior, Gallegos?

Bettenberg: He was Assistant Secretary for PolicyManagement and Budget.

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2. Legislative aide to Senator Harry Reid.3. Chief Counsel, Subcommitte on Water and Power of the U.S. SenateCommittee on Energy and Natural Resources.


Seney: Okay. Good. How do you get started onsomething like this?

Getting Started on the Newlands Project: Learninga New Area

Bettenberg: Well, let's see. I read Senator [Harry M.]Reid's bill.

Seney: Just the bill?

Bettenberg: Just the bill.

Seney: You must be pretty good at reading legislationby this point, I would think.

Bettenberg: I've done a lot of that. I've written a lot oflegislation. I visited with a few of the keyplayers in interior, just to talk about what arethe issues, and how do you go about this, andso forth, talked to [Fred] Disheroon over at[Department of] Justice, after I discovered thathe was the attorney dealing with this, talked toWayne Mehl;2 went up and chatted with TomJensen3 to find out what was going on, andwent over to OMB [Office of Managementand Budget] and talked to them to get their

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perspective on what's going on here, what's allthis about, so forth. I had dealt veryextensively over the years with OMB, and soI've always had a pretty ready entre over there. I talked to Jim [James P.] Bierne–

Seney: Jim Bierne being–

Bettenberg: Jim Bierne was the principal minority counsel.

Seney: On the Senate side.

Bettenberg: On the Senate side. Made a trip out here.

Seney: Let me ask you. I take it when the assistantsecretary tells you, "I have a congressionalhearing that went the wrong way here and I'vegot a lot of problems," that would lead you, Iwould think, immediately to go to thecongressional staff people to get your bearingson what went wrong there. Would that be anatural sort of investigative progress for you?

Bettenberg: Yes.

Seney: Knowing that there were congressionalproblems?

Bettenberg: But I really didn't dwell on what happened atthe hearing.

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Seney: You were interested in the substance of theissues.

Bettenberg: I was interested in the substance of the issueand where do we go from here.

Seney: Do you remember your reaction as you beginto take in the information about this and whatyour thoughts might have been as you beganto accumulate knowledge about this?

Bettenberg: Yeah. By early April, I thought that I hadfigured out what the department's problemwas with this. It was really a combination oftwo things, I think. One was kind of thehistoric deference and defensiveness of theBureau of Reclamation in favor of irrigators,and the second part of it was a major concernthat, what, twenty years before, they had builtStampede Dam and Reservoir, and still hadnever gotten a penny for it. It had been builtas a multipurpose project that had then beenshanghaied, in their eyes, and dedicated toendangered species exclusively.

Seney: “Their” again being the Bureau ofReclamation.

Bettenberg: Being the Bureau of Reclamation. Iremember going in on a Saturday and meetingwith, I guess we had the assistant secretary

27


and a deputy, and maybe one other person inPMB, Gallegos and some of his crew, andtalking them through the legislation and how Ithought the department could get on boardwith it, and what needed to happen to do that. They seemed quite taken with the approach.

The following week I went down and visitedwith John Sayre, and told him that I thoughtprobably the key on this one wascompensation for the dam. I said–I'm justparaphrasing here; my memory is notremotely the type where I can quoteconversations–I basically said, "John, as bestas I can figure it out, from the preparedstatement for the hearing and everything elsethat's gone on here, there are several hangupshere on this legislation. The first is that weare not getting any money for this reservoir."

"Yeah," he said, "spend all this money, you'vegot this reservoir, and we're getting nothingfor it."

I said, "Well, yeah, how long have we gottennothing for it?"

"Since it was built."

I said, "Yeah, that was 1970–'69, '68,someplace back in there." I said, "It's been

28


over two decades we haven't gotten anymoney for it. If we don't have this legislation,how much do you think we're going to get forit?"

He said, "Well, nothing's going to change, Iguess."

I said, "Well, that's the way I figure it, too. Nothing's going to change. We've alreadywritten this thing off. We're never going toget any money for this. What if I told you thatI think that the key to it is charging SierraPacific [Power Company] for storage underthe preliminary settlement agreement, andgetting a good healthy amount of money forthat?"

He said, "That'd be terrific." He said, "I couldbuy that."

One of the key issues with OMB was that theydidn't feel that there was enough state cost-sharing, so I suggested that one additionalelement be added. The state was alreadywilling to put up 13 million bucks. That, inaddition to that, that they'd take responsibilityin perpetuity for Carson Lake and pasture,because, otherwise, one of these days that wasgoing to be a refuge, too, and we would be onthe hook for the operation and maintenance

29


costs in perpetuity, and so forth. OMB boughtoff on that.

Who Should Pay for Irrigation Projects

Seney: Let me ask you here. When you talk tosomeone like Secretary Sayre and the peopleover at OMB and they're looking at the dam,in the case of Sayre, and the Carson pastureargument that you're able to make to OMB,are they reflecting a kind of fiduciaryresponsibility that these federal officials feeltoward federal projects and federalresponsibilities? Is there an equity sense herein terms of what the state should pay and whatthe feds should pay, and we shouldn't be thegolden–"we" being the feds–be the golden cuphere?

Bettenberg: Yes.

Seney: Am I getting this right?

Bettenberg: Very much so. That is especially strong inOMB, and has been probably the big theme innational water resource policy since the latethirties. The question of how much shouldyou subsidize irrigation. The NewlandsProject, a lot of it was written off. The partthat was paid, was paid with no interest. Youhave people who come at it from an economic

30


standpoint, which I probably tend to do. I'mnot an economist, but I've had a lot ofeconomics training.

Seney: When you say coming at it from an economicsstandpoint, you mean the economic impact ofthe project?

Bettenberg: No, it's the question–you're looking at theeconomic impact of it, but who pays and whobenefits? That's the main theme in alleconomic writing, I think, on water projectsover the last forty, fifty years, and not only forthe Bureau of Reclamation, but for the [U.S.Army] Corps of Engineers, and a tendencytowards more and more local matches, interestrates more reflective of the market rates.

From an economist's standpoint, they wouldsay that when you subsidize things youmisallocate resources, and you put more intothings than you should, and you take moneyfrom some people and give it to others, ineffect.

From the environmental side, they latch ontothese same economic arguments and add amoralistic tone to it as well. "Why are youtaxing steel workers in Pittsburgh to subsidizeagriculture in the Columbia Basin, when thegovernment is already paying out billions of

31


dollars in price supports and so forth and soon? And by the way, these projects causetremendous environmental damage." Theresome of the economists and theenvironmentalists kind of marry up and saythat if you had your prices right and yourallocations right and your costs right, and thatkind of thing, then you'd have fewer of theseand fewer environmental damages.

Seney: You get some of that here on this project withthe Nature Conservancy's way of thinking,don't you?

Bettenberg: Oh, yes, and much more so EDF.

Seney: The Environmental Defense Fund.

Bettenberg: Environmental Defense Fund. You will getthat with a more moralistic tone from theSierra Club here.

Seney: I do want to ask you one more thing. Goingback to Mr. Sayre and the OMB, the moneywould hang up the sound policy, I guess, iswhat you suggested to him by saying, "Theyhaven't paid for it in twenty years. If we don'tget this legislation which encompasses soundpolicy, we still won't get paid."

32


Recapturing Some of the Costs on the NewlandsProject

Bettenberg: Yeah. We're going nowhere with this. Matterof fact, you'll notice in section 205D, that wejust simply write off the debt on the project. There's no way that this project is ever goingto pay out, but there is a means of collectingmoney, and there are benefits to be had bySierra Pacific here, and we can tap into thatfor part of the storage costs.

I sold the department and OMB on putting therevenue above O&M costs into a special fundfor the long term to help defray costs of theenvironmental restoration work on thewetlands and on Pyramid Lake.

Seney: Now, these were not elements that were in thebill before you became involved, I take it?

Bettenberg: No. No.

Seney: And this was your insight into getting thedepartment to back the legislation, is, "This iswhat would have to be done."

Bettenberg: Right. How do you put together a packagethat we can sell.

33


Seney: Had you gotten from Tom Jensen, who wasSenator [Bill] Bradley's staff person, WayneMehl, who was Senator Reid's staff person,that these two gentlemen, these two senators,really wanted this legislation?

Bettenberg: Oh, absolutely.

Seney: So you understood that there was pressurehere–

Bettenberg: Yes.

Seney: –and the department better get on board withthis or be–how did you feel? I shouldn't putwords in your mouth.

Money for the Pyramid Lake Tribe

Bettenberg: Probably the issue that I was mostuncomfortable with throughout the processwas the amount of money in it for PyramidLake Tribe. If you go back and read thedepartment's letters on positions that areincluded in the Senate report, there's arecurrent theme in there, that $40 million foran economic development fund is too much. That was a continuing problem right up tosignature by the president, matter of fact, evenpost passage.

34

4. Public Law 101-618, sponsored by Nevada Senator HarryReid, passed Congress in 1990 and was signed by President GeorgeBush. It contained two main sections: Title I–Fallon Paiute ShoshoneTribal Settlement Act, and Title II–Truckee-Carson-Pyramid LakeWater Rights Settlement Act. Senator Reid has been interviewed bythe Newlands Project Series oral history program.


Getting the Agreement of OMB and DOI to PublicLaw 101-618: the Interstate Compact and the

Preliminary Settlement Agreement4

I basically got the department and OMB onboard with a set of concepts in April and veryearly May, and then came out here on a week-long trip with Fred Disheroon, one of ourattorneys, a guy from the Bureau ofReclamation, and negotiated us into theinterstate compact, bridged the remainingdifference that had blocked that, and thennegotiated us into the preliminary settlementagreement. That basically became our set ofpositions.

On the interstate compact, Section 204 of theact, basically we created a mechanism where,if the federal government had to go toCalifornia to get water for EndangeredSpecies [Act] requirements, that there was amechanism to do it, that it couldn't bethwarted, although it wasn't easy. That hadbeen hanging it up for years, almost twodecades.

35


Seney: California's view was that the federalgovernment should charge uses against thestate in which they occurred.

Bettenberg: Yes.

Seney: And you needed to overcome that.

Bettenberg: We needed to overcome that, and we weren'twilling to lock up California's allocationsunder this legislation, with no access if itbecame necessary. So that's what we tookcare of primarily in that negotiation.

Seney: Am I right in thinking that you've got aproblem here with Pyramid Lake andCalifornia? Pyramid Lake Tribe doesn't thinkthere's going to be enough water over timeunless there's some access to California water.

Bettenberg: Well, in the United States, from an ESA,Endangered Species Act, standpoint.

Seney: Felt the same way.

Bettenberg: Felt the same way. We may have felt morestrongly than the tribe did on that particularissue. Although it was just a very importantissue. We couldn't do the legislation withoutthat access, basically.

36


Seney: Right, and you needed to square up theseinterstate questions before the legislation wasgoing to go anywhere.

Bettenberg: Right. It had failed between [Senator Paul]Laxalt and Reagan in the, what, 1970s.

Seney: '86.

Bettenberg: Then in '86 from a legislative standpointagain, it was kind of Laxalt's last hurrah.

Seney: And as a very powerful senator, and was notable to accomplish it.

Bettenberg: He was trying to get the president to sign thebill that the two had negotiated when theywere governors, and Reagan had to take theposition that it would be vetoed.

I remember at the end of the meeting–we didthe meeting in, I think maybe it was a PublicUtility District building up on South LakeTahoe, on the Nevada side, I think. At the endof the session, David Kennedy looked up andsaid, "I think this is a historic occasion."

Seney: He was the Director of Water Resources forCalifornia.

37


Bettenberg: He was the Director of Water Resources forCalifornia.

Then I came back down here to Reno and metwith Sierra Pacific and the Pyramid LakeTribe, and we went through the preliminarysettlement agreement, which mentioned theUnited States frequently, but the U.S. had notbeen a party to it. So we negotiated ourselvesinto that. There were things that we had to layon as some requirements and resolve those. That gave the foundation, then, for thelegislation to go forward.

Seney: On the preliminary settlement agreement andthe department now coming into thepreliminary settlement agreement, myunderstanding is–and please correct me if Ihave this wrong–that you didn't really domuch to the preliminary settlement agreement.

Bettenberg: No, there wasn't much to be done.

Seney: It was kind of, I don't want to say ego, but itwas kind of a matter of, and I don't want tosay prestige, I'm fighting for the right word,but you had to say, "Gee, we've got to have apiece of this, and can we change this a littlebit and that a little bit, and, okay, now weapprove."

38


Bettenberg: It was almost more a matter of the boilerplatebeing wrong from a U.S. perspective, and wehad to get that squared away. If we hadn'tneeded a change of word, I'd have beencomfortable not changing a word, but weneeded to change some words, but thereweren't a lot of words that we needed tochange. I had satisfied myself and thedepartment that the basic concept in thepreliminary settlement agreement wasbeneficial to us, and that we would buy intothat.

Matter of fact, one of the first things I haddone back in March of '90 was calledGeological Survey and told them I needed ahydrologist pronto, full time, to go through themodeling and see just exactly whether thisagreement was doing what it looked like itwas doing. They detailed Ernie Cobb[phonetic] to me for about three months or so. He did a nice job on it.

Seney: Satisfied your concerns.

Sierra Pacific Power Company’s Interests

Bettenberg: Satisfied my concerns there. I had aneconomist with the Office of Policy Analysisdo an examination of Sierra Pacific and theirportfolio and what their interests were.

39


Seney: When you say their portfolio, you mean–

Bettenberg: Who is this company? What's their interest inthis?

One of the things I discovered was thatobviously a large part of their interestprobably dealt with real estate. They owned acompany called, I think it was called Lands ofSierra. As a regulated public utility, theycould only make a certain amount of moneyfrom water, but as a broader company with allsorts of interests, they had to be prettyinterested in the long-term development ofthis region, and that showed in theirnegotiating positions, I thought.

Seney: But you were satisfied they were just doingwhat business corporations do to enhance theirstanding?

Bettenberg: Yes, I didn't see anything that told me thatthere was anything nefarious, that they weregoing to increase the value of a piece ofproperty, like you hear about somebody whoknows that a road is going to come throughand buys it three days before they announcethey're going to put a road through here, or ayear before. I've heard those kinds of storiesin the state of Washington, for instance. I

40


didn't come across anything that looked likesmoking guns from that standpoint.

Seney: But you felt obliged to check it out first.

Bettenberg: Oh, yeah.

Seney: What made you do that?

The Department of the Interior Agrees to PublicLaw 101-618

Bettenberg: Well, we were talking about entering intoagreements with these people, and I wanted toknow what we were doing from a publicpolicy perspective. Basically, by June wewere on board with the basic concepts in thelegislation, and working closely from then onwith Mel, with Jensen, with Bill–

Seney: Condit?

Bettenberg: Condit, over on the house side, with JimBierne.

Seney: Now, when you mention Bill Condit, he, ofcourse, was an assistant to Congresswoman[Barbara] Vucanovich, a Republican, Mr.Bierne's the minority counsel on the Senateside, and this is part of your general way of

41


operating, I take it, to involve both sides of theaisle?

Bettenberg: Yeah. I've never been partisan in mydealings. Part of the time that I was directorof the Minerals Management Service, we hada Republican Senate. I was involved in high-level negotiations on California issues withRepublicans and Democrats, including[Congressman] Leon Panetta, matter of fact. [Senator] Barbara Boxer was part of thatCalifornia coastal negotiations in about–musthave been '86, probably, '85, '86.

Seney: This would be offshore oil drilling?

Bettenberg: Offshore oil drilling off California.

It was actually useful to involve all parties. When Tom Jensen wanted to move a littlefurther than I was comfortable with onsomething, I could go talk to Jim Bierne.

Seney: And have Jim help you put the brakes on TomJensen a little bit?

Bettenberg: Right.

Seney: That would have to be done, I would think,fairly tactfully and subtly on your part. You'resort of looking–the tape won't see the gesture

42


you just made, but you just sort of shruggedyour shoulders and look–I would like, yes, ofcourse, right?

Getting Public Law 101-618 Through the Congress

Bettenberg: Well, yeah, you have to deal with the peoplethat are there and the cards you are dealt with. It was a Republican administration. Thislegislation would not pass with anycongressional opposition in the Senate,because any senator could put a hold on it.

Seney: That's just the way it is with any piece oflegislation.

Bettenberg: That's the way it is. Well, it's not true withany piece of legislation, but it was with thispiece of legislation. This was not a bignational–

Seney: Oh, I see what you're saying.

Bettenberg: –an issue of overriding national concern,where it might go down to the wire and youhave a fifty-one to forty-nine vote, or the vicepresident comes in as a tie-breaker, or thosekinds of things. This one effectively passedon the consent calendar in, what, probably thelast thirty-six hours of Congress, through theSenate and the House.

43


Seney: Well, it was not even opposed in the Senate. It was on, as you say, the consent calendar,and no one objected, so I guess in the Senate,under the rules, it's automatically passed.

Bettenberg: In effect.

Seney: Do you have an insight into why it passed inthat way? Because it was, as long as we'retalking about this, it was moved out of anomnibus bill in the Natural ResourcesCommittee, and tacked onto the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Settlement Act in the Indian AffairsCommittee at the last minute.

Bettenberg: Matter of fact, that's the only thing that madethe Paiute settlement go, the Fallon Settlementgo. The Fallon Settlement was, I believe,specifically introduced to be a vehicle for theTruckee-Carson Act. I've never talked toWayne Mehl about that, but I guess I woulddetect his fine hand in that, and Senator Reid'sfine hand in that. Reid was on that committee.

Seney: Right, the Indian Affairs Committee.

Bettenberg: The Indian Affairs Committee.

Just a little bit of background on that. Inprobably sometime in 1993, I had aconversation with Dan Beard.

44


Seney: Who was then Reclamation Commissioner.

Bettenberg: Who was then Commissioner of Bureau ofReclamation. Dan told me what a debacle thehearing had been, and he said that–

Seney: Now we're going back to the hearing to theSayre hearing.

Bettenberg: We're going back to Sayre's hearing. Hiscomment on that was, they had beenapproached by Harry Reid on this legislation,and that Miller had committed that if theycould get it through the Senate, he'd get itthrough the House. But Dan said they didn'tthink this had a chance of passing.

Seney: You're referring now to the fact that DanBeard was George Miller's chief of staff.

Bettenberg: He was George Miller's chief of staff at thattime.

Seney: So Mr. Miller was thinking he was making apromise he'd never have to keep.

Bettenberg: Right. They were in favor of the legislation asa general matter, and more than willing topush it through the House if the opportunitycame, but they doubted they'd have theopportunity. It was part of the omnibus

45


reclamation legislation for that year. At onepoint it was Title VII, which is why, when yousee the report, it's referring to Section 701 and702 and that sort of thing, out of thatcommittee. But it was being held hostage forlegislation dealing with the Central ValleyProject.

END SIDE 2, TAPE 1. DECEMBER 5, 1995.BEGIN SIDE 1, TAPE 2. DECEMBER 5, 1995.

Seney: This is December 5, 1995. My name isDonald Seney. I'm with Mr. William D.Bettenberg. This is our first session, and thisis our second tape.

Bill, a little bit of that would have been cutoff, the fact that this legislation was part of anomnibus act.

Bettenberg: Okay. The Truckee-Carson legislation waspart of an omnibus act, it was Title VII, andthat's the reason why the Senate report out ofthat committee refers to Section 701, 702, andso forth, and you read the bill and it's Section201 and 202 and 203. But at any rate, it wasbeing held hostage. The whole bill was beingheld hostage to the Central Valley. AsCongress was winding down towardsadjournment sine die.

46


Seney: That means the end of the Congress.

Bettenberg: The end of the Congress. [Senator Daniel K.]Inouye introduced a bill on the FallonSettlement. I don't recall whether Reid was asponsor, but I think he was a co-sponsor ofthat.

Seney: He was.

Bettenberg: This, in effect, became the vehicle tolegitimize doing Truckee-Carson through theIndian Select Committee, the SelectCommittee on Indian Affairs in the Senate. That committee proceeded to report out thelegislation, and I had done some work on theFallon Settlement and I guess I probably didthe final negotiations for the department onthat one as well.

Seney: But that was relatively less important, muchless important, than the Truckee-Carson part.

Bettenberg: Politically it was, and counting the interstatecompact provisions in it, probablysubstantively as well. But it was actually avery important settlement, and settled moreissues with Indians than the Truckee-Carsonpart.

47


The legislation from Bradley's committee, theNatural Resources Committee, was justsimply taken over in total. The report–let's getmore light around here.

Seney: Yeah, it's getting a little dim.

Bettenberg: It was reported out of that committee, andsome holds were immediately put on it byboth, I assume by both Bradley and, was itSimpson that was on that committee, or[Malcolm] Wallop?

Seney: Wallop.

Bettenberg: Wallop. Because it was still part of thehostage-taking, if you will, and the battlebetween the House and the Senate on thewater bill. It was not clear if they were goingto have a breakthrough on the omnibus waterbill, and on the Friday in October beforeCongress adjourned, there were still somediscussions going on, but apparently thepossibility of getting an act was dying.

Harry Reid apparently went to the twomembers, personally, that had the holds, andhad them taken off, and sat over on the floor,what I was told, for a couple of hours, waitingfor his opportunity, caught an opportunity, gotup, moved it out on the consent calendar. I

48


got a call from Wayne Mehl, perhaps an hourafter that had happened, to tell me that theSenate had passed the bill, it was now up tothe House, and they were going to work on theHouse, and that they would need myassistance on some issues.

Seney: At this point you're completely on board withthe bill and you're helping to push it through?

Bettenberg: At this point, we're trying to be helpful, butthere's still an issue over funding.

Seney: That is that there's still too much money forthese–

Bettenberg: For the Pyramid Lake economic developmentfund.

Seney: What about for the Fallon fund? Was that allright?

Bettenberg: From the department's standpoint, we werevery comfortable with that.

Seney: That was 40 million for the development fundfor the Pyramid Lake, and 25 million for thefishery fund.

Bettenberg: Fishery fund.

49


Seney: In the Fallon side it was a straight–

Bettenberg: Forty-three.

Seney: Forty-three for development fund and that wasit.

Bettenberg: Right. I could come back to both of thosepoints if you want me to.

Seney: Sure. Please do when you think it'sappropriate.

Bettenberg: The passage was done without either Jensenor Bierne realizing it had happened. I havethe best of confirmation of that because I wasthe one who told both of them that it hadpassed. And they were both stunned. I calledJensen to talk to him about it and to see whatkinds of issues we were likely to have on theHouse side, and whether there was any chanceof getting it through the House so far as heknew, and he didn't realize that it had alreadypassed.

So then I called Bierne. My recollection isthat it was a surprise to him. I suspect thatthere may have still been some conversationsgoing on with regard to an omnibus bill.

50


The only issue that arose in the House, that Iwas aware of, was with the Merchant Marineand Fisheries Committee on sequentialreferral. They were concerned that thislegislation was kind of a Super EndangeredSpecies Act, and they had not been on board. Miller's committee had been on board, butapparently no one had really scouted out theMerchant Marine and Fisheries Committeeand dealt with them on this. So I don't knowwhat deals were struck in getting them to backoff and say that they wouldn't object.

Seney: Let me tell you what I've been told, that Gerry[E.] Studds, of Massachusetts, who was thechairman of the relevant subcommittee here,had been approached by TCID [Truckee-Carson Irrigation District] people to the effectthat these was very bad for endangeredspecies, and that Harry Reid had to go to himand say, "This is good for the endangeredspecies. Take the hold off of it." Were youunaware that that had gone on?

Bettenberg: I was unaware of that.

Seney: Were you aware at all of the fact that TCIDwas now trying to scuttle the legislation?

Bettenberg: Oh, I knew that they were trying to scuttle it,and they basically were all year. There was

51


never a point at which I thought that they werelikely to become supportive of the legislation.

Getting President George H. W. Bush to SignPublic Law 101-618: the Problem of Money for the

Tribes

Seney: Once it was past the House, and now, ofcourse, the hurdle is President Bush'ssignature, were you involved at all in trying toget the administration to go along now?

Bettenberg: Yeah. The first thing I did was check with thefront office, if you will. I don't recall who thefront office was at that point, but it wasprobably [Tom] Weimer, chief of staff.

Seney: Chief of staff to the Secretary of the Interior?

Bettenberg: To the secretary, about the price tag on it. Ihad gone to him earlier. At one point, we hadconcluded that we would be willing to go 20million bucks, in constant dollars, orthereabouts.

Seney: For Pyramid Lake.

Bettenberg: For the Pyramid Lake economic developmentfund. We, frankly, thought that the issuesbeing settled with the preliminary settlementagreement probably didn't call for more than 5

52


million, and you'll see that in our writtencommunications. But behind the scenes, I hadgone up to the front office and said, "The tribehas really built a hole for itself. They havesold themselves on $75 million, and that is anoutrageous number."

Seney: This was for the development fund alone.

Bettenberg: This was for the development fund alone, waswhat they went for in the legislation, and theoriginal bill, I think, had $75 million in it. SRwhat, 1554?

Seney: Right.

Bettenberg: I had pared that down in part by a compromisethat said, "Let's put together this $25 millionfishery fund," and I sold that to both thedepartment and OMB, as $25 million whichthe tribe could claim credit for as part of a bigsettlement, but they couldn't touch theprincipal or part of the interest, and it offset amillion dollars a year that we were alreadyspending, and we ceased to be responsible foroperating their fisheries.

Seney: That's all spelled out in the legislation.

53


Bettenberg: Yes, that's all in Section 207, and I guess Iwould say that that's largely my writing inthere.

Seney: So they want a total of 75 million. You say,"Well, let's take 25 million off of that, set it upas this fisheries endowment fund. That get'sus out from underneath the million bucks ayear."

Bettenberg: Right. And the 25 million always stays intreasury, so it doesn't score.

Seney: When you say it doesn't score, that's a budgetterm.

Bettenberg: It's a budget term, yes. From an OMBperspective, or a congressional budget officeperspective, you're going to appropriate $25million, and you're going to deposit it into thetreasury. So what goes out comes right backin. The only thing that scores from a budgetperspective for them is we stop appropriatinga million dollars a year, and they start earninginterest of perhaps a million and a half a year. That interest would be paid to somebody onthe debt in any case. So it takes somebudgetary magic, if you will.

Seney: If you've got something in there that says thatif this endowment is more money than they

54


could spend, that goes back to Fish and65Wildlife.

Bettenberg: Yes. Actually, that was Jim Bierne'srequirement. He was concerned that the tribeat some point would build that money up andthen the pressure would build for a per capitadistribution. He wanted to make sure thatcould never happen.

Seney: Because there is language, am I right,permitting a per capita distribution in theFallon Settlement funds?

Bettenberg: Only from some of the profits.

Seney: Okay. The likelihood of that happening is notgreat.

Bettenberg: Oh, yeah, they will earn profits.

Seney: So there will be at some point a per capitadistribution.

Bettenberg: At some point there will be per capitadistributions. I'd be surprised if there haven'talready been some.

I was one of the people who had a hand inwriting that part as well, that basically saidyou can't touch the principal, except for a loan

55


for water projects, and you have to pay itback. I'm the one who pushed that policy.

Seney: What was your thinking on that?

Bettenberg: There have been a lot of cash settlements withIndian tribes where the money hasdisappeared within a few years, and there isnothing left to show for it. The way the fundis set up, the tribe is responsible for managingit, which is something useful for the tribe todo; it brings them together in a commoninterest. They can plow the profits intovarious kinds of enterprises that create jobs ordo other sorts of things, but they can't justsimply sign a bunch of checks and have all themoney disappear. So this goes on inperpetuity. It seems to me that that's animportant principle in Indian settlements ofthis type.

At any rate, because of the environmentalaspects of this legislation, what had grown upin Section 206 dealing with Lahontan Valleywetlands, the interstate compact, and that sortof thing, the department said, "We can go inthe ballpark of about $20 million in presentvalue spread over five years," which comesout around $30 million. I was deputized topass the word that we couldn't vouch forOMB, but that if it came out $6 million a year,

56


we would not recommend a veto. Throughoutthis period, we were never able to get abottom line from OMB. Of what the totalpresent value could be, or what the yearlycould be, which was something that madenegotiating this very difficult. I personallythought that $20 million was high, and therewas a lot of sentiment, I think, at the stafflevel, and probably at the political level thatthat was high.

What Wayne Mehl told me after the fact wasthat the tribe had said, "Well, we'll buy thisnotion of the $25 million for the fishery fund,but then we've got to have our $50 million,but we could back off and make that $10million a year for five years." What Mehl toldme after the fact was that that was kind ofwhere things stood at that point. The tribesaid they wouldn't back down; we said wecouldn't go any higher. Harry Reid said,"Well, at least part of the administration issaying that they would go with $6 million ayear for five years, the tribe says they'd go at10 million. I'll bet you the administrationwon't veto it at eight, and that the tribe won'tturn it down at eight." So he just made thatjudgment, and that's the way they moved itthrough.

57


Seney: As a member of the AppropriationsCommittee, he'd have a pretty good handle onwhat the committee would go for and whatCongress would take and so forth.

Bettenberg: Yes, of what could be done.

Seney: And he was right.

Bettenberg: He was right. He managed the entireenterprise just absolutely beautifully.

Seney: You know, this doesn't seem to me, given, ofcourse, the scale of the federal budget, andwhile that's always one factor, you're clearlyfocusing on this problem, and when whatyou've got in front of you, that doesn't seemlike a lot of money, say the differencebetween twenty million and forty million, toachieve these other goals. I guess that's whatthe administration must have come to in theend. Have you ever said, "Oh, the heck withit, that's okay with me," or do you still think,"Damn it, it ought to have been twenty"?

Deciding to Spend Federal Money on a Project

Bettenberg: I don't think I've worried about it since. It iswhat it is. Having spent all the years that I didin the budget business, I would have todescribe myself as–if I wasn't naturally a

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fiscal conservative, doing that makes you afiscal conservative. You see money wastedmany times and you think that that moneycould have been put to better use or left intaxpayers' pockets. It's important that youbuild up–sometimes they're referred to asdikes–build up policies that circumscribe. What is it that we will fund and what won't wefund as the federal government? Where do wedraw the line?

Benefit cost criteria are one of the ways ofdoing that. If you can look at a project andsay, "This requires taxpayers to put more inthan the benefits to the nation that you get outof it," then that's one way of doing it. OnIndian settlements; let me backtrack. One ofthe reasons why the government does Indianwater settlements and other Indian settlementsis that these things can take forever, they canbe very nasty, and it could be decades beforeany benefits are realized. On the other hand,in nearly all cases, the rights being attemptedto be restored to a tribe effectively have beentaken over by somebody else who'sbenefitting. If you pursue this through thecourts, you may ultimately win, causing greatbitterness in the process. But then you askyourself, "What would you win?"

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In some of the Arizona cases, for instance, itmay be that the federal government wouldnever have to pay a dime, that it would beprivate parties that would lose water that theyhave been claiming as theirs. The governmentgoes into these, and one of the things it does isit assesses. If we were sued for breach oftrust, what's the worst that could happen? That's one way of trying to size that up, butthe political process at some point takes overand makes some judgments, and that's what'shappened here.

Seney: I think that these funds are probably acombination of bait to entice an agreement,and maybe conscience money.

Bettenberg: I think both of those apply. But at any rate,that's some of that background there.

Learning the Ins and Outs of the Newlands ProjectControversies

Seney: I want to take you back again to as you getinto this, and your own learning about this,because I take it you've never been out herebefore. You came out and you must have,when you came out to negotiate these things–

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Bettenberg: I was in Reno when I was in college duringspring break with my folks once. That's thelast time I've been here.

Seney: So I'm interested in how someone who hassuch a decisive position as you do in all of thisbusiness, how you gain your knowledge andform your judgments about what's going on,and you said one of the people you contactedwas Fred Disheroon of the JusticeDepartment. As you know, I've interviewedMr. Disheroon. I like him very much. I'mvery impressed with him. I think he's verybright, a very capable man, but he certainlyhas a point of view on the parties and theissues and so forth, and I can't help but believethat he must have given you that point of viewas he briefed you on these matters.

Bettenberg: Oh, he's very open about it.

Seney: I know he is.

Bettenberg: And virtually everybody in this has a point ofview. I came into this as the new person onthe block, if you will.

Seney: Pretty much a clean slate.

Bettenberg: Clean slate. I had had some very minordealings with the cui-ui hatchery, probably in

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the 1970s, and that's about all I knew aboutPyramid Lake. I'd never seen Pyramid Lake. I don't think I'd ever seen Tahoe. I'm sure Ihadn't seen Tahoe. Didn't know the parties. Ireally came into this with a clean slate.

Seney: Do you recollect your first contact with peopleout on a project, the Truckee-Carson IrrigationDistrict people?

Bettenberg: It's a little hazy, but basically I made a trip outhere in early March, and they were running atour. Blaine Rose [phonetic], who worked forHarry Reid here in Nevada, was kind of thetour guide for it, and we went up and lookedat Stampede. Don't think we made it as far asTahoe. Yes, we did, too, come to think of it. We made it as far as Tahoe Dam. We were ina bus. Then we went all the way down to theproject and the wetlands and we met with theirrigators and so forth. John Sayre was alongon that trip.

It was crystal clear where everybody wascoming from, and that they were atloggerheads with one another.

Seney: And you'd probably handled enough of thesekinds of things, although maybe in theminerals area or in the offshore area, that youcould come to grasp pretty quickly with all of

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these things? Did this seem like a–"Jesus,what a terrible mess this is," or "This is kindof on average"?

Bettenberg: I just needed to work through it. It wascomplicated. It's very complicated. Somepeople have said, who know better than I do interms of the whole West, that in a compactmicrocosm, if you will, Truckee-Carson hasvirtually every issue that you deal with onWestern water, Western environmentalproblems, and it's all in this one system, thesetwo valleys that are hooked together, youknow, with rivers that are only 120 miles longand don't even go into the ocean. The onlything it doesn't have is salmon.

Seney: That apparently really complicates things, too.

Bettenberg: That can complicate things, too, yes.

Seney: Do you recall your first contacts with Mr.Pelcygar, Bob Pelcygar, the tribal attorney forPyramid Lake, who's a very interesting andcapable individual, and has been a player inthis for some time?

Bettenberg: He's been representing the Pyramid LakeTribe since, I think, 1972. So he has thelongest history of any of the major players,except possibly for a couple of irrigators or

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something like that, I would suppose. I can'tsay that I do. I don't remember whether hewas on that trip or not, and I don't rememberwhere I first ran into him.

Seney: Certainly throughout the legislation,obviously, he played a role.

Bettenberg: Yes, and we were in a variety of meetingstogether. I think we tended to see the issues alot alike in many cases. I was writing paperson Indian policy at that point, for instance,and trust policy and that sort of thing, wasformulating ideas for creation of an Office ofAmerican Indian Trust in the department thatgot established, and we got it funded andestablished it. And in part, it was from someof the things that I had learned in the MineralsManagement Service. In part, it was fromsome of the things I was learning on thisproject, some of the things I was learning onthe self-governance projects and so forth. Ithink it's fair to say that we had differencesand we had agreements, but on a lot of thebasic concepts in the legislation, there wasgeneral agreement.

Seney: You know, what I'm trying to do here, andwhat I'm trying to get at is, as you know, I'veinterviewed a number of the irrigators andpeople out on the project. As I've said to you

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over the telephone, that they don't regard youparticularly negatively, as they do, forexample, Mr. Disheroon, and he knows that,and everyone does. I don't mean to impugnMr. Disheroon at all, I mean, I think he's avery able advocate for the Justice Departmentand the Justice Department's views, and thosehappen to be contrary to the district's, and Iwant to say this here on tape as I say this, butthere's a general perception out there in theproject that the Interior Department has a kindof negative view now of the project, includingFish and Wildlife and Bureau of IndianAffairs, and Bureau of Reclamation as well,who used to be their friends, and that you asthe key official, permanent official in theInterior Department, have perhaps kind of anegative view as well.

Difficulty of Reaching Agreement with theTruckee-Carson Irrigation District

What I'm trying to get at here, maybe I'm notdoing it very well, is how you form yourjudgments on these things, and what, in fact,are your judgments on the issues out here onthis project, and do you have a kind ofnegative view of the project itself?

Bettenberg: Yeah. Well, a negative view would beprobably not the right word.

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Seney: It isn't the right word.

Let me turn this over.

END OF SIDE 1, TAPE 2. DECEMBER 5, 1995.BEGIN OF SIDE 2, TAPE 2. DECEMBER 5, 1995.

Bettenberg: I've met with lots of people from the Truckee-Carson Irrigation District over the last, what,five years now, six years, a lot of very nicepeople and a lot of very sincere people. Thedistrict, during the first year that I wasworking on it, when I was working on thelegislation, was pretty much represented by[TCID Manager] Lyman McConnell and afew of the members of the board.

Seney: Certainly Ted deBraga.

Bettenberg: Ted deBraga, for instance. That, I think, wasmy prime image of the project at that time. Ihad a meeting in–I'm pretty sure that it was in1990, and I think that literally it was inbetween the meeting on the interstate compactand the meeting with Truckee-CarsonIrrigation District, where they wanted to talkabout the possibility of settlement andincluding recoupment.

Their idea of a just settlement was basicallythat we buy up, I think it was something like

66


$40 or $50 million dollars worth of waterrights in the upper Carson, and increase theflow down the Carson so that you could backup some of the diversions from the Truckee,and that the federal government bear the entireexpense. I don't recall what else was involvedin their proposal right at the moment, butbasically there was not a single thing that theywere giving in it.

Over time, I've come to conclude that it's notlikely that we could reach amicablesettlements with them. I think that either theydon't see their own future very clearly, or,[because of] internal politics, they are unableto act on what they see, and that makes themincapable of making the kinds ofcompromises that would be necessary to reachsettlements. We are beginning developmentof a new set of Operating Criteria andProcedures (OCAP) that would be going intoplace perhaps three years out into the future,and we would expect to be reducing theamount of water that goes to the project. Theyare still fighting the 1988 Operating Criteriaand Procedures. In 1988, they were stillfighting the criteria imposed by the courts.

Seney: In 1973.

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Bettenberg: In 1973. In 1973, they were still fighting thecriteria put in place by the department in1967. A telltale sign is the controversy overawarding the unappropriated waters of theTruckee River to the Pyramid Lake Tribe. There are a number of claimants to that water,including TCID; there's Sparks, there's Reno,Washoe County, Sierra Pacific. Compromiseshave been reached with all those parties, andthey have all agreed that if the operatingagreement goes into the place, Truckee RiverOperating Agreement goes into place, thatthey release all their claims on that.

Seney: These are essentially flood waters, am I right?

Bettenberg: Well, it's called flood waters. It's justwhatever is left after everybody takes [theirshare].

Seney: What's already appropriated. Whatever's leftwill go to the Pyramid Lake Tribe.

Bettenberg: And it goes there now.

Seney: Then part of this is to have the Nevada StateEngineer to give those unappropriated watersto Pyramid Lake and declare the river fullyappropriated.

Bettenberg: Right.

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Seney: So that this won't come up again.

Bettenberg: Won't come up again.

Seney: Hasn't the district revived an old petition fromthe 1930s that–

Bettenberg: Yes, and that's what they're fighting. They arecontinuing to advocate that and make thatdifficult to resolve this. The legislation dealswith it in a fairly clever way to satisfy states'rights, since Congress doesn't want to come inand tell the state, "You have to give this waterright to the tribe." It says that for thepreliminary settlement agreement and theinterstate compact to go into effect, the stateand the tribe have to resolve this to theirmutual satisfaction, which means that the stateis going to have to give the tribe the water,otherwise we won't have these other things.

Seney: Because they want the interstate allocation.

Bettenberg: They want the interstate allocation.

Seney: And they want the TROA [Truckee RiverOperating Agreement] in place.

Bettenberg: And they want the TROA in place, and theywant the drought backup supply for Reno,

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Sparks, and so forth, and so that is where thestate's going.

Seney: And this is only one example, by the way, ofthis sort of interlocking incentives in PublicLaw 101-618, isn't it? I mean, it's filled withthese, really.

Bettenberg: Yes. Yes, we built it that way. It's what youdo when you can't resolve all issues up front. There is very little in the act that is self-executing. Watashemu Dam is deauthorized. That's self-executing. Stillwater NationalWildlife Refuge has expanded in the act, andit might be worth coming back to that at somepoint.

Seney: Sure, when we talk about this latestnegotiations.

Bettenberg: That's self-executing in the act. We weren'twilling to sign on to the Truckee RiverOperating Agreement without doing aNational Environmental Policy Act [NEPA]analysis. Despite the fact that the legislationlooked good, it was based on a black boxmodel, our best quick assessment of “did thislook like it was in the right direction, did itlook approximately right”, we wanted toreally understand what the implications were

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before we signed on to this thing. So NEPA isthe way to do that.

But we have been at this issue on theremaining waters, now, for two and a halfyears. We signed an agreement; [Secretary ofthe Interior Bruce] Babbitt signed it, providingfor an accelerated determination by the state,and the Truckee-Carson Irrigation Districtknows that the state can't afford to give themthat water, that the Pyramid Lake Tribe can'tafford to have that water go away, that itwould put us right back into the throes of theEndangered Species Act, and jeopardy, andwe would therefore have to rachet down theNewlands Project water by an equivalentamount, of whatever they took. We have goneon record saying that there are nocircumstances in which we would allow thefacilities of the Newlands Project to be used totransport the water.

Seney: And that's pretty final, isn't it. They can'tconvey it except through a Department of theInterior-owned facilities.

Bettenberg: Well, they could run trucks over there. But itwould take a lot of trucks and it would cost alot of money.

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Seney: Why are they doing this? What is your gutfeeling on this, or judgment?

Bettenberg: I don't think that they understand what's intheir interest over the long term, and wherethings are going to go. Matter of fact, in thenegotiations that went on last winter, inFebruary, we reached a point where they said,"We have some questions of the latestproposal on the table, of the parties." Some ofthem were for the federal government, somewere for the Pyramid Lake Tribe, some werefor the state. I think there were some for thestate, but at any rate, they asked theirquestions, they got the right answers, and theysaid, "Given those answers, we think we canbuy that deal." And I did not for a momentbelieve that they could buy that deal, becausethere wasn't the political leadership in place,and they hadn't led the community to the pointthat it could be an acceptable deal.

Seney: So you didn't join in the jubilation thatapparently occurred.

Bettenberg: But we all clapped.

Seney: But in your heart, you knew.

Bettenberg: By that night and the next morning they werewalking away from it as fast as they could,

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and we never saw it again. I knew that thatwas the case, because they hadn't prepared theground. What they had prepared the groundfor was a lot of rhetoric, most of which isincorrect, that "They're taking our rights," alot of sagebrush rebellion type of rhetoric, thatsort of thing. Given those circumstances, youcan't settle those kinds of things. You have tohave your group with you, and you have tohave brought them there. Leaders have tohave developed, that have seen that, and beenable to carry that message back, and it hasn'thappened.

So I guess I would say I'm not negativetowards TCID. I'm sympathetic in somerespects–[they’re] hard-working people. They're not, I think, able to coalesce aroundfiguring out what their long-term interest isand negotiating for their long-term interest. It's just unfortunate, but those are thecircumstances.

One interesting facet of that is that at variouspoints they could have negotiated for dealsthat will never be on the table again. I wasrereading some of the congressional reportrecently, and I was struck by the discussion ofa settlement of OCAP, and you recall at thetime the legislation was introduced, thedepartment had promulgated its OCAP, Earl

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Jeldy [phonetic] had signed that in 1988. TCID had sued on one side that "This takestoo much water away from us." The tribe hadsued on the other side, "This doesn't give usenough water." Jeldy had fine-tuned hisdecision and had reduced diversions only tothe amount necessary to avoid a jeopardyopinion. Now, if he'd have let another 1,000or 2,000 acre-feet come over on average, theFish and Wildlife Service would have said,"This is jeopardy, you can't do it." So he hadbeen as friendly as he could be.

Seney: Jeopardy to Pyramid Lake and the endangeredspecies.

Bettenberg: Jeopardy is a technical term under theEnvironmental Species Act. So he had madeas friendly a decision to Truckee-CarsonIrrigation District as he possibly could. Therewas the possibility of TCID saying, "Legislatethis and we'll live with it," at that point. Ipresume that we would have bought it, don'tknow about the tribe, but if there was $40million out there over five years, maybe theywould have bought it, who knows. It couldhave become part of the deal, perhaps.

They would have none of that, and that willnever be on the table again. That's what Iwould describe as an example of trying to

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understand what your interest is and where thefuture is headed.

I remember being told, and this is purelysecond-hand, may be even third-hand, that onepolitical figure in Fallon said, "The future ofFallon is anything but water." But that's notthe view that's getting expressed.

Seney: Why don't we stop.


Seney: Today is December 5th, 1995. My name isDonald Seney, and I'm with Bill Bettenberg. This is our second session and this is our firsttape.

Becoming Deputy Assistant Secretary for IndianAffairs

Why don't we talk about now that thelegislation is passed. It's time for thecoordination of implementing the legislation. Tell me how that task came to you.

Bettenberg: Well, it basically was automatic. I had beenthe point person for the legislation, and thesecretary, assistant secretaries, and so forth,were quite pleased at how it had ended up and

75


how I'd handled it. I had kept them on boardall the way through the process, and so theyhad an interest in me continuing it. I wasgoing to be moving over as the DeputyAssistant Secretary for Indian Affairs, but Iknew that that wasn't a permanent kind ofassignment. It's like the MineralsManagement Service, not something that Iwould retire from, and I figured probablyabout two years was going to be about theright amount of time.

Seney: How did this assignment come up? You'dbeen on sort of special assignments of onekind or another, now this position comesavailable and the secretary wants you for that?

Bettenberg: Yeah. As we were getting towards thelegislation in the end of the session, I thoughtthat it was time for me to be moving intosome different assignment. I had put togethera list for Lou Gallegos, who was going to beleaving the department, and I basically said,"Here is a list of some of the things that Iwould be interested in as a permanentassignment," and someplace on my list, itwasn't at the bottom, but it wasn't at the top,was this deputy assistant secretary post inIndian Affairs, which was vacant. I had agood rapport with Dr. Eddie Brown, who wasthe assistant secretary, and thought they

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needed a lot of help and that I could help onsome of their issues. So I gave him the listand he said, well, he would discuss it amongstthe leadership in the department.

They came back and they said, "We'd reallylike you to move down as the DeputyAssistant Secretary for Indian Affairs," andcalled me in for a session with Lujan and wetalked it over. I said that I had a couple ofrequirements, I said, "Because that's a postthat's usually occupied by a political appointeeand somebody who's Indian, and I'm neitherof those." I said, "The first is, that if I workfor Eddie Brown, I'm going to have to workfor Eddie Brown. I can't be the secretary'sperson working for Eddie Brown or the chiefof staff's person working for Eddie Brown. I've got to work for Eddie Brown."

Seney: Who was the assistant secretary.

Bettenberg: Who was the assistant secretary. "The secondis that since this isn't going to be a career, I'dlike to keep a couple of the projects that I'mworking on as sidelines so I've got somerelationship going with other parts of thedepartment on other issues, and when I'mthrough, I'll need a little bit of help onwhatever the next assignment is." Theythought that that would be just dandy. They

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understood that, so that was what we workedout.

Seney: They obviously probably wanted you tocontinue to do the Truckee-Carson legislation.

Bettenberg: I think they did.

Seney: What did you start out to do? What were thesteps that you take when you have anassignment, now, where the legislation ispassed and signed?

Coordinating and Implementing Public Law 101-618

Bettenberg: Well, I started out going through the bill andcataloging everything that needed to be done. Then I started working with therepresentatives out here with the bureaus toidentify who were the people that needed todo these things and who's going to do all thesethings. My hope was that it wouldn't be anintensive assignment, and in the AssistantSecretary for Indian Affairs role, it couldn'thave been.

Seney: That was too big a job?

Bettenberg: Yeah, I didn't have the time for it to have beenall that intensive. So I was probably out here,

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I think I remember figuring out once that itwas about five times a year, so just a littlemore than once a quarter but not every othermonth.

Seney: Would these specifics include–obviouslythere's the wetlands restoration, 25,000 acreson average, so that's on the list.

Bettenberg: Get the water acquisition program funded andgoing, get the EIS [Environmental ImpactStatement] under way for the long-termprogram there, get the Truckee RiverOperating Agreement negotiations started, getthe EIS for that started as a multi-bureau EISbetween Fish and Wildlife and Reclamation,get the Fallon settlement things going to wrapthose up.

Seney: Cui-ui recovery.

Bettenberg: Get the cui-ui recovery plan effort cranked up.

Seney: Did you need to do anything in terms of theallocations between California and Nevada oris that something they would have worriedabout themselves?

Bettenberg: Well, the allocations are really set in thelegislation. That was largely negotiated in the1960s.

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Seney: Right. So would it be the federal water masterwho would manage those allocations?

Bettenberg: Well, see, none of that goes into place untilthe Truckee River Operating Agreement isdone. It's part of the set of incentives to keepeverybody working on this and at the table,and having a positive interest in getting itsigned.

Seney: My understanding is that from the time thatboth legislatures passed that interstatecompact back in, I think, what, '68 forCalifornia, '70 for Nevada, that they'veactually adhered to that.

Bettenberg: Yeah.

Seney: And gone by the allocation that's in there. Isthat something that the federal water masterthen does, or do you know what themechanism is for overseeing that?

Bettenberg: My recollection is that basically, if you thinkthe other side's violated, you take them tocourt and enforce it.

Seney: So when you say begin the wetlandsrestoration, what is involved in that?

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Bettenberg: Well, one part was getting an EIS effort underway, getting that assigned out.

Seney: That goes to Fish and Wildlife Service.

Bettenberg: Goes to Fish and Wildlife Service.

Seney: Out in the Fallon area?

Bettenberg: Well, originally the person that theydesignated to be their leader was their deputyregional director up in Portland. Fish andWildlife Service is a little complicated to dealwith in Nevada because the traditionalorganization for Fish and Wildlife is to havean organization for refuges, an organizationfor ecological services, and an organizationfor fish. They have that in the headquarters,they have it at the regional office, and all thehatcheries and fishing people report to theassistant director for fish in Portland. All ofthe refuges report to the assistant director forrefuges in Portland. All of the ecologicalservices people, like those in Reno, report tothe ecological services people in Reno. So theonly place where it comes to a head is with theregional director and the deputy regionaldirector. So I nabbed the deputy regionaldirector as their representative on this.

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Seney: Clearly there are tugs and pulls within, say,Fish and Wildlife Service over these kind ofthings. You had the fish hatchery people up atPyramid, and the refuge people out inStillwater, they have different interests andobviously see these things differently. Whatkind of authority do you have to make themagree on things, and how does that work forsomeone like yourself?

Bettenberg: I have never asked for any specific authority. The authority that I carry is basically kind ofmy reasonableness in working with the peopleout here and the knowledge that I can take theissue back to Washington at any time andelevate it.

Seney: Have you ever had to do that?


Seney: Give me some examples of when you've hadto.

Bettenberg: Well, let's see.

Seney: Because I would think not only would youneed a reputation for reasonableness, butyou'd need a reputation for kind of toughnessat the same time, and that is that you wouldreally do this if it were necessary.

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Bettenberg: Yes. Yes, and they all understand that. Let'ssee. Recently we've had an issue on–I thinkwe had two issues with John Leshe, andprobably the best of those is making someinterim adjustments to the OCAP. The 1988OCAP were predicated on the irrigationproject growing to 64,800 acres, and theywere predicated upon certain water duties thatare no longer applicable.

Seney: The bench versus bottom lands.

Bettenberg: The bench-bottom [categories]. So there issome good reason based on that, they're reallyoperating about 59,000 acres or around there,some good reason to adjust the targets down,because they don't need as much water as wasassumed back in '88. We decided in comingout of the winter negotiations that we shouldhave a two-pronged effort: one, to make kindof what you could call technical adjustments,kind of within the scope of the '88 decision,but just adjusted downward for less acreage,but given less acreage then you won't havequite as good efficiency as was assumed, soyou've got to reduce the efficiency and soforth to make those tradeoffs. Bringing thebureaus together on that was difficult.

Seney: Now, these target storage levels are importantbecause that has an impact on how much

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Truckee River water is diverted over intoLahontan.

Bettenberg: Yes. Well, you can measure the difference intens of thousands of acre-feet for differentstorage targets.

Seney: Who had the different viewpoint, Reclamationand Fish and Wildlife?

Bettenberg: Yeah. Well, the group out here, Reclamation,Fish and Wildlife, Indian Affairs, seemed tohave a lot of trouble coming to grips with it inthe first place. We were doing computer runafter computer run, different assumptions andso forth. I finally said, "Well, this run is mine. I'm willing to take however many views youall have to the solicitor [Leshe] who is, ineffect, set up as the policy person now fordealing with this."

Seney: Mr. Leshe.

Bettenberg: Mr. Leshe, since Betsy's [Rieke] left. I said,"As many of you want can join me on thisone, but this is my recommendation to Leshe. Now, let's get everybody else's down on paperhere and let's get in and see him." They didsome more runs, and I actually was persuadedto come off of my position and adjust it, butwe ended up coalescing with kind of

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Reclamation way out as an outlier, andeverybody else on one position, and took it toLeshe and he made a decision.

Seney: Did he accept your recommendation?

Bettenberg: Well, that's not for public consumption yet,but yes.

Seney: Okay. We're not going to talk–it'll be a longtime before this sees the light of day.

Bettenberg: Yes. Yes. And presumably we will be outwith this quite a bit sooner than that.

Seney: Yeah, and you weren't surprised that he wentalong with you.

Bettenberg: I was not.

Seney: I mean, I assume he sees you as his man. You're his agent, and he's going to supportyou unless you're wildly off the marksomehow, but that's not likely to be the case.

Bettenberg: He's perfectly capable of making up his ownmind and isn't necessarily going to be swungby numbers and that sort of thing. He's a verybright, able, and experienced attorney.

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Seney: I would think, still, given all that, hisdisposition would be to look with favor upon–

Bettenberg: Right. We've done some other thingstogether, so he's built up some confidencefrom that standpoint. Betsy Rieke had passedon good words about me. Cecil Andrus hadpassed on some good words about me, andLeshe was an associate solicitor underAndrus, and knew me and knew something ofmy reputation, although we didn't do muchbusiness then.

Seney: Well, you must be pretty much a knownquantity in the department, I would think.

Bettenberg: To a lot of people, yeah.

Dealing with Other Federal Agencies and Entities

Seney: When you look at the various federal agenciesyou've got to deal with here, Indian Affairs,Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau ofReclamation, to some small extent the Bureauof Land Management, a little bit, not a lot–

Bettenberg: Geological Survey.

Seney: And who else?

Bettenberg: National Biological Survey.

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Seney: Soil Conservation Service a little bit maybe?

Bettenberg: I've dealt with Soil Conservation Service alittle bit. They're in another department.

Seney: They're Agriculture, of course.

Bettenberg: Right. Justice, maybe. The [Army] Corps [ofEngineers] on occasion. Who else? TheEnergy Department. WAPA, Western AreaPower Administration, in the legislativebattles, back in 1990. I think that that's it forthe–oh, EPA [Environmental ProtectionAgency].

Seney: When you look out at all this spread ofagencies, some you deal with more than otherson this, what's your general view of how thenational government, the federal government,is discharging its responsibilities out here?

Bettenberg: On this project?

Seney: Yeah, in this area.

Bettenberg: Well, it's getting better. I guess I think thatthe Fish and Wildlife Service is doing a verygood job in their ecological services unit.

Seney: Chet Buchanan heads this?

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Bettenberg: Chet Buchanan is kind of the number-twoperson in the unit here.

Seney: What do they bring to you? What is it thatthey're doing?

Bettenberg: They look at wildlife in a broader context. Asthe name implies, they're looking at broadecological issues and relationships, comparedto, say, a refuge manager that is managing thatpiece of land and whatever wildlife shows upthere, which is a difficult thing when you'redealing mostly with migratory species, someof which come from the North Slope ofAlaska and some go to Panama, and somecome from the Rockies and some from thePacific Coast. They are used to dealing on apolicy plane more, and in a broader scope,since they're more typically the people thatmake the news and rub elbows on endangeredspecies issues and mitigation issues and thatsort of thing. They're more used to looking atall sides, and where other people are comingfrom, and trying to figure out appropriatecompromises to solve problems.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs is often prettydifficult to deal with. The first two years afterenactment, I didn't actually have to deal withthem all that much because I was the deputy

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assistant secretary. So it was easy to getcooperation–

Seney: I'm sure it must have been.

Bettenberg: –and assistance and so forth. They'reextremely fortunate in having Tom Streckle,who's one of the broader-gauged peopleinvolved in this issue. They've recognizedthat and recently they have him also heavilyengaged in the Klammath issues. But he'sworked for Reclamation, he's worked for Fishand Wildlife Service. He was working as anendangered-species biologist in Washington,D.C., on the 1988 OCAP, so he's got eight, tenyears of experience with this issue, loves thiscountry, so he's very, very helpful on it.

Reclamation has been the most difficult todeal with. They're the group least likely tosay, "We're in this together, and we have towork this out in a mutual and amicable way,and we have to present kind of a commonview." Last spring–you know, I keep trying toget as much coordination out here as I can andas little on my shoulders as I can. Amongstother things, I've got other things I've got to bedoing.

Seney: What percentage of your work is on thisproject?

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Bettenberg: Right now I would guess that it may berunning 40 percent. Last winter it wasprobably running–

Seney: During the negotiations?

Bettenberg: During the negotiations it may have beenrunning 65 percent. The first couple of years,it was probably not 20 percent. It variesdepending on what the issues are and if we getover a few of the issues that are front burnerright now, get the water-quality agreementbehind us. I'm hoping that it'll drop backdown to something under 25 percent.

Seney: I interrupted you saying the Bureau is leastlikely to act as part of the federal team.

Bettenberg: Right.

Seney: Let me say, it strikes me as interestingbecause, of course, I don't know who they'd besiding with, because the people out on theproject certainly view them as part of thefederal team and as antagonistic. I mean,they're kind of betwixt and between, are they?

Bettenberg: Yeah. And it's difficult, I think, sometimesfor them to figure out who they're working forand what they're working for. The new

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bureau concept as a water managementagency has not taken hold.

Seney: They're still dam-builders are they?

Bettenberg: Well, they sure would like to be. The notionof managing the reservoirs they have formultiple purposes doesn't come natural tothem, and elevating a cui-ui or water rights fora refuge still doesn't strike a responsive chord,if you will, with most people that I deal within the Bureau of Reclamation. There are somethat it does, but–

Seney: Are they here in the local Lahontan Basinoffice?

Bettenberg: No.

Seney: Then you think probably mid-Pacific region,maybe?

Bettenberg: Well, there are some that I have met,especially from some other parts of thecountry, that I would put in more theprogressive category. I've not worked withRoger Patterson that much, but I think he's–

Seney: He's the regional director.

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Bettenberg: He's the regional director, and I think he'sgenerally considered to be in the progressivecamp, but like I've said, I've not dealt withhim very much.

Seney: How about Frank Dimick, the assistantregional director?

Bettenberg: There's nobody that I know who woulddescribe him as in that camp.

Seney: In the new bureau camp?

Bettenberg: In the new bureau camp.

Bureau of Reclamation and TCID

Seney: There's been a recent change here in LahontanBasin projects office. The project manager,Ed Solbos, has been replaced by a new projectmanager, Ann Ball. Has that made adifference? Because that change was madebecause maybe Mr. Solbos didn't quite have,some people thought, the right views, this sortof new bureau views?

Bettenberg: Yeah. I guess I think he was probably caughtin the cross current of some considering thathe didn't have enough of a new bureau senseand, at the same time, possibly not handlingrelationships with the irrigators adequately. I

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tended to think of his handling of the FallonTribe water delivery last year as perhaps hisfinest moments here, but, frankly, I think thatgot him in trouble.

Seney: Yes, it did, I think. Why would you think ofthat as his finest moment, maybe?

Bettenberg: The Truckee-Carson Irrigation District iselected by the non-Indian irrigators. Itrepresents the non-Indian irrigators. Ourresponsibilities for water delivery to theFallon Tribe are separate from ourresponsibilities to TCID.

Seney: They're part of the trust responsibility.

Bettenberg: They're part of our trust responsibility. TheTCID board considered the question ofwhether they should have late deliveries orjust use up all the water and when it was gone,it was gone. It was a difficult issue for them,and in the spring they met and consideredthose people arguing for late deliveries versusthose arguing against them, and made adecision.

So far as they were concerned, if they madethat decision, that was good enough for thoseIndians, too, but it wasn't their decision tomake. Ed basically stood up to them, told

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them that he would be required to deliverwater to the tribe, and when they still refusedto deliver, he moved people in and actuallyphysically moved water to meet thedepartment's trust responsibility. The tribehad taken a responsible position. They said,"There will be some water lost because of this. We'll take the loss." So TCID wasn't out anywater.

Seney: This was water the tribe had a right to.

Bettenberg: This was water the tribe had a water right toand they just simply wanted their delivery ona different pattern. TCID basically thinks, oracts as though, they run the community andcan act on behalf of anybody. They can't dothat. That's not their decision to make. Andthat's why I say I thought that that was his[finest hour]. Reclamation has done that fartoo few times, where they've stood up for animportant principle like that.

The more typical situation is up through themid-1970s, they appear to have largely beenlooking the other way when TCID wasdiverting large amounts of water. They werediverting simultaneously as they were spillingit. They were running water all winter so theycould generate more hydropower and get more

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revenue from it, when they didn't need it forirrigation at all.

Seney: Water they had no right to divert.

Bettenberg: They had no right to divert it. They wereapplying as much as seven acre-feet per acrewhen there were no water rights in excess ofthree and a half and four and a half under thedecrees, allowing land that didn't have waterrights to be irrigated. Where was the Bureauof Reclamation and its complianceresponsibility? And that is not a mid-Pacific[Region] problem, it's a national problem.

Seney: And they still haven't gotten to this newbureau outlook.

Minerals Management Service

Bettenberg: Just to give you a contrast, when I went to theMinerals Management Service, my first roundthere I was acting director, but I landed therejust at the time that the offshore program andthe onshore program were all put together, andI had to design the organization for it. Itbecame very obvious that they had nocompliance program worthy of the name, andI wasn't going to be there long enough to putone in place. But in designing theorganization, I designed two boxes for

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enforcement and compliance, one for onshore,one for offshore, and went with the theory thatif we have a box, we put somebody in chargeof it, they'll think they have to do something,and anything they do has got to be better thanwhat they're doing now. It worked out well.

When I went back, I strengthened it, but itdeveloped training programs for inspectors,compliance programs, surprise inspections,and so forth, you know. But before that, thegovernment had kind of a "good old boy"network, and that's kind of the way the Bureauof Reclamation has operated.

Fallon OCAP Office

Seney: Does the Fallon OCAP office play any kind ofa compliance role at all at this point in termsof overseeing that?

Bettenberg: Yes, yes, yes, and it's much, much better. You know, that was put in place in '88. Before that, there wasn't anything like thatdown here. But, yes, they play an importantrole.

Seney: You know, for many years the Bureau officewas in Fallon and then the Bureau ofReclamation office was moved to CarsonCity. I don't know if we could speculate on

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whether it might have been better to have it inFallon or Carson City.

Bettenberg: I didn't know that.

Seney: But at any rate, with the OCAP office there,they're keeping an eye on the OCAP on a day-to-day basis. That does make a difference.

Bettenberg: Yes.

Bureau of Land Management and the Honey LakeProject

Seney: What kind of relationship do you have withthe Bureau of Land Management? What areyou doing with them and what are they doingfor you?

Bettenberg: Let's see. Not a lot. I was pretty heavilyinvolved with them on an only semi-relatedissues involving the Truckee MeadowsProject, which was an out-of-basin waterimportation project that was proposed here.

Seney: Is that the Honey Lake project?

Bettenberg: Honey Lakes Project. I kept getting pushed–

END OF SIDE 1, TAPE 3. DECEMBER 5, 1995.BEGIN OF SIDE 2, TAPE 3. DECEMBER 5, 1995.

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Seney: The Honey Lake Project. You were beingdrawn into that.

Bettenberg: Yeah, I was drawn into that because many ofthe same parties were involved, and I wasinvolved in Truckee-Carson water and soforth. So Lujan originally asked me to bringthe tribe and the developers and the countytogether, and see if there was anything thatcould be worked out on it.

Seney: And nothing has happened with that project. Too many problems?

Bettenberg: Too many problems.

Seney: Was that BLM [Bureau of Land Management]land up there that they were going to bedrawing some of that water from?

Bettenberg: What they needed was a pipeline right-of-wayacross the public lands, so that's where BLMcame into it, but it turned out that there weresome substantial problems with the SierraArmy Depot.

Seney: Water-quality problems.

Bettenberg: Water-quality problems, toxins in the watertable, and they were spreading and couldspread a lot faster if you were withdrawing

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water from the other side. And there weresome trust issues with the Pyramid LakeTribe.

Seney: Because some of that might have drifted downinto the Pyramid Lake area if that water hadbeen drawn. Wasn't that one of the feelings?

Bettenberg: Yeah, there was a tie-in between the waterthat would be used and groundwater flowsinto Pyramid Lake and in the Smoke CreekDesert. As you start pumping in one place,you start drawing water away from where itwould naturally have flowed otherwise. So Iworked pretty closely with some of the peoplein BLM on that. Then there are some landissues that involved public lands, which landwe're buying, possible exchanges with it withthe Fallon Tribe, and then we have some landownership problems at Carson Lake. BLMhas been involved in all of those, but none ofit has been major involvement.

U.S. Geological Survey

Seney: The U.S. Geological Survey has acted kind ofas a staff in a way to you, have they not?

Bettenberg: On certain kinds of things, but mostly whatthey've done is, we concluded early on that wereally needed much better models for long-

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term implementation, and so I went to worksecuring the funds to fund them to build themodels that they need–groundwater andsurface interties, rain flow, precipitation, tie-ins to it, water-quality tie-ins to it, operationstie-ins to it, for both Truckee and Carson. Sowe're developing a whole new generation ofmuch better models, probably about a yearaway from having that largely in hand, and,too, from having it well documented andcompletely usable.

Seney: I don't want to jump ahead too much, butsome of this recent activity in modeling withthe USGS comes out of the disputes, as Iunderstand, over modeling that went on in theSettlement II negotiations, that you're tryingcome up with a model that everybody canagree on or will meet some–

Bettenberg: Well, it'll be a fully documented model thateverybody can take a look at.

Seney: Maybe agree to.

Bettenberg: Maybe agree to, as opposed to a model wherenot very many people know even how itworks and can adequately describe andexplain it. This fellow that you mentioned tome earlier, Bill Siconia [phonetic], is out oftheir Tacoma office, and I've just recently

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gone back to Survey and said, "We'rebeginning to get through some ticklish pointsin these negotiations, and I really need a reallygood hydrologist who can spend about sixmonths with us, and at the end of the processbecome our expert witness when we presentthe final package to the courts and so forth." I've not met him, actually. We're hoping toget together tomorrow.

But that's primarily their role. But I call onJohn Noland [phonetic] from time to time tocounsel me on hydrologic issues and whatquestions should I be asking. What do weknow about this? That sort of thing. Hereally knows water resources.

Seney: John Noland being–

Bettenberg: John Noland is the head of the office for GS,the station chief for the state water resourcesoffice in the USGS, and extremely able, veryknowledgeable.

Seney: I take it when you call on the people withinthe Interior Department you don't have muchtrouble getting cooperation. For example,when you ask the USGS to send you someonegood, they send you someone good.

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Bettenberg: Well, I was really pleased on this one, becausewhen I called up, I asked John Noland to scoutme out who I needed. He and I talked aboutwhat I needed, and I described my problemand he understood it, so I asked him to scoutout somebody who might be coming off of aproject and wasn't in the middle of a project,you know, and could be pulled for somethinglike this, and he came up with this particularfellow.

Then I went to their headquarters and called inand said, "I've got this problem, and I'm atypical guy from the Office of the Secretary,I've got a problem and no money." Theycame back and said, "Well, yeah, the guy thatyou're talking about could do the job and wecan make him available, but we don't havehim financially covered either at this point, soyou need money." At which point I wasscratching my head and trying to think, now,where am I going to come up with money forthis? They got back to me the next day andsaid they had concluded that they could figureout how to solve the money problem and thencover it.

Seney: Is that just good rapport, good cooperationamong the various elements in the Interior?

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Bettenberg: Probably. I don't know the leadership of theGS well right now, but I would guess that Ihave a reservoir of good will built up fromprevious years. When I was the budgetdirector and all of that, I was heavily involvedwith their programs and budgetary issues,testified with them for appropriation hearingsand that sort of thing. Then as the director ofMinerals Management Service, we had amemorandum of understanding with the GS,and twice a year we had meetings to go overany kinds of issues that we had. We had somejoint projects.

Then in 1990 when I needed somebody, Icould just pick up the phone and call the chiefhydrologist, Phil Cohen [phonetic], who I'dprobably known for a dozen years at thatpoint, and had a great respect for. He went towork in finding me somebody quickly andhelped out. I think there's probably some ofthat residual still there. And they also knowthat it's an important issue to the secretary.

Seney: Yeah, that doesn't hurt either.

Bettenberg: That helps a lot.

Dealing with the Navy Department

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Seney: What about when you get outside theDepartment of the Interior, say, with the NavyDepartment, the Defense Department, I guessit would be the Navy, really, dealing with theFallon Naval Air Station, how are they to dealwith?

Bettenberg: Turned out not to be too bad when we finallygot them pinned down. Betsy Rieke and Iwent over and visited their headquarters inD.C.

Seney: Went over to the Navy Department?

Bettenberg: Right. And that helped a lot in terms ofgetting cooperation.

Seney: Whose idea was that, yours or hers?

Bettenberg: Mine. I had dealt with that office extensivelywhen I was at the Minerals ManagementService. As you can imagine, the minute youtalk about putting platforms offshore–

Seney: You're talking Navy's–

Bettenberg: You're talking Navy, and the Navy doesn'twant you to put those things just anyplace. They have submarines coming out of SanDiego, out of San Francisco Bay, out ofNewport News, and so forth. They have test

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areas where they calibrate sonar and torpedoesand any number of those kinds of things. So Iworked extensively with the Navy on offshoreissues, and it's the same office that deals withenvironmental issues. So I knew who to go toover there.

Seney: And in a rank-conscious organization likethat, it's probably politic to take the assistantsecretary along.

Bettenberg: Oh, yes. Yes. I learned all about that. One ofour issues when I was at the MineralsManagement Service was leasing offshoreCamp Pendleton. The Navy and the Marinesconcluded that I really needed to go downthere and see for myself how they conductedoperations and why it was necessary and soforth, so I went out to an LST carrier withthem and came in on night maneuvers withthem. When it came to figuring out where Iwould stay, they needed to know what SESlevel I was, because the Navy, and themilitary, I guess, has worked out this systemthat if you're an SES Level One, you'reequivalent to some kind of an officer, and aLevel Two some other kind of an officer, andI rated about a three-star general, I think itwas, or something like that. So they put meup.

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Seney: In pretty nice digs.

Bettenberg: They put me up in a place with a lot moreroom than my house. Yeah, they're fairlyrank-conscious, and taking an assistantsecretary along was the right thing to do. Butthe Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Navybasically put a hold on releasing money forimplementing their water plan until we hadagreement.

Seney: What more can you ask, really?

Bettenberg: We negotiated the agreement and it's a decentagreement.

Seney: Once the local people got the idea that thehigher-ups were interested in this, that musthave made it a little easier for you then.

Bettenberg: I assume so.

More on Implementation of Public Law 101-618

Seney: Let's go back to setting up all thisimplementation. You must have a book orhowever you keep records of these things anda list of things to do.

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Bettenberg: From time to time I do that sort of thing, but Idon't have anything like that running rightnow.

Seney: Because again, there are a number of fronts onwhich this all has to be conducted.

Bettenberg: I'm not trying to lead the orchestra, so tospeak. It's probably not a real flatteringphrase, but we had a BLM director who wassometimes a little bit earthy, and he said he'dgiven up on the idea of micromanaging hisorganization. Basically, all he wanted to dowas keep them between the fences andmoving the same direction. To the extent Ican, I try to do that.

There are some issues that I'm directlyresponsible for. I'm the lead negotiator for thewater quality negotiations in Furtrillo[phonetic] for the department, so I'm veryheavily involved in those. Because of the lackof consensus out here, I've been forced to getinto OCAP issues from time to time.

Seney: That is, the kind of lack of consensus youwere describing before.

Bettenberg: Amongst the bureaus and so forth, andsometimes the lack of attention to trustresponsibilities. When something's going

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wrong out here, all of a sudden the FallonTribe or the Pyramid Lake Tribe are on mydoorstep or on the phone, "Do you know whatthey're doing now?" sorts of things. "We'vegot a problem." If they don't get satisfactionfrom me, they're in to see the secretary orLeshe or the assistant secretary, and so forth.

Seney: They have pretty good entre, do they?

Bettenberg: I'd say reasonable entre, yeah. Most of thetime they have a pretty strong case to make. Sometimes not, but a good part of the timethey do, too much of the time, you know,which tells me that we never should haveended up with it in D.C. in the first place, ifwe had been handling it right.

Budget Process in Implementation

But on the water acquisition program for thewetlands, I try to stay in tune with it. I'vecritiqued their EIS, but you know, as long asthe policies seem about right and they seemheaded off the right direction–one of thethings that I do is a fair amount of budgetcoordination. It kind of comes naturalbecause of my background. So I've been theone responsible for kind of shepherding thebudget together, budget through, and keepingit together through the process.

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Seney: Well, you had a close call this year with themoney for the developments, did you not?

Bettenberg: Yes. Yes. The 8 million. Yes. And that onecame as a surprise.

Seney: Why don't you talk about that and your role inthat.

Bettenberg: Well, let's see. We needed 8 million a year,and this would have been the fourthinstallment out of five, so we've been goingjust like clockwork.

Seney: This is the Pyramid Lake installment.

Bettenberg: This is the Pyramid Lake settlement. As ageneral rule–

Seney: Is the Fallon money all in place now?

Bettenberg: No.

Seney: But this happened to be the 8 million for thePyramid Lake Tribe.

Bettenberg: This was the 8 million for the Pyramid LakeTribe. Fallon has four installments behindthem and one this year and one next year andthen that'll be through.

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Seney: But theirs didn't get hung up this year the wayPyramid's did.

Bettenberg: Theirs didn't get hung up.

Seney: Any reason why, or just a fluke?

Bettenberg: No, I've talked to the appropriation clerk whoused to work over at OMB, and I know him,he's a good guy. He, I think, may haveslightly misread the law in terms of interestthat would come due on delayed payments,but he basically looked at it–well, let's see. Number one, he was in a situation where hisjob was to find savings everyplace, if you will. That's what's going on in Congress this year. He went through each of those settlements,each of the different Indian settlements, with afine-tooth comb, because there's a lot ofmoney there.

Seney: This is Indian settlements all over the country.

Bettenberg: All over the country. For instance, the moneyfor Tohono-O’odham Tribe, it used to becalled the Papago Tribe down in southernArizona, was in for $3 million dollars, andthat was cut to $1.5 million. He looked atwhat the requirement of the law was, and thismoney couldn't go to the tribe until after thefifth year and the Truckee River Operating

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Agreement was done. So he said, "Well, wecould save 8 million here, next year we'll haveto come up with 16 million. We just have torecognize that we would have to do that, butthe budget is really tight this year." So that'swhat he recommended.

Vucanovich's staff apparently wasn't payingattention, and by the time it became known,she wasn't able to get it fixed in subcommitteeor full committee, and really got lucky on thefloor and was able to get the money back in onthe floor. But that required a fair amount ofvigilance on her part to seize the opportunity,if you will. That occurred because–I can'tthink of the congressman's name, from theVentura area in California, but he was boundand determined that there was too muchmoney going to the territories and to theterritories' office, and went out on the floor,and he was the authorizing committeechairman. He went out on the floor andproposed that they cut about 12 million bucks,and he wasn't proposing to put it anywhere,just cut 12 million bucks. That freed up 12million bucks, and she immediately jumpedinto the breach with her project for eight, andwas the first one through the door and so shegot it restored. The pressure was really on herto do it. Here's somebody who's one of thecardinals; that's what they refer to the

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subcommittee chairman on appropriations isthe cardinals.

Seney: She's a subcommittee chair?

Bettenberg: She's a subcommittee chair, not thatsubcommittee, but for one of the othersubcommittees. The subcommittee chairstake care of one another, and with all thisnewfound power and being in the majority,she couldn't hold $8 million that theadministration requested. It wasn't as thoughshe had to add it onto the budget, she couldn'teven hold what was there. The Reno Gazettewas running an editorial saying, "Well, this isreally nonsense, but we're fortunate, becausewe now have a cardinal and as thesubcommittee chairman and member ofappropriations and on this very subcommitteeas a member. We're lucky because we haveBarbara Vucanovich, who can fix this for us." Well, it would have been really difficult to notfix it under those circumstances.

Seney: Right. Expectations had been raised.

Bettenberg: Expectations had been raised.

Seney: Did you play any part in this?

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Bettenberg: Incidentally, she may be announcing herretirement today.

Seney: Oh, she has.

Bettenberg: Oh, she has?

Seney: Apparently, according to the news last night,she's leaving the Congress.

Bettenberg: That's amazing.

Seney: It is, isn't it?

Bettenberg: Yeah. Well, I went up and talked to her staff,about how important it was, some ideas onhow you might finance something like this. Italked to the appropriation clerk to find outwhy it had happened. I worked with Reid'speople to get them encouraged to put it backin, why it was important and so forth. Iworked closely with the Pyramid Lake Tribeon providing them information on the need forit. Graham Chisholm called me and we talkedabout it. I provided him information on it.

Seney: I understand. So you kind of encouragedpeople to move along on it.

Bettenberg: I encouraged, but I would not consider what Idid as being what turned it around.

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Seney: Right. I understand what you're saying. Apparently, a lot of people played a role in itand were interested in making sure that thismoney stayed there.

Bettenberg: Yeah. One thing that's important to note hereis–and we're talking about my role in this sortof thing, and in terms of getting thelegislation, I would consider that I played animportant role for the administration. But itmust have taken seven, eight, key players,maybe ten or twelve, even, and there may be anumber of them that I don't even know about,to get this done, and without any one of them,it probably wouldn't have gone. It's importantthat that be clear in the record, if you will. This is one of those, to the extent anybody canclaim credit for getting this done, it's HarryReid. But if you hadn't had a Joe Ely, if youhadn't had a Bob Pelcygar, if you hadn't had aWayne Mehl and a Tom Jensen, you probablycouldn't have gotten it done either.

Seney: Yeah. A lot of chefs at a banquet.

Bettenberg: Yes.

Seney: I guess Senator Reid would have been the hostin this case.

Bettenberg: I guess so, yes.

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Oversight Hearings on Public Law 101-618

Seney: You get busy overseeing this implementation,and there are oversight hearings are held. What was the origin of those? There werehearings held by Senator Bradley'ssubcommittee on water and power, inDecember of '93, about three years after thelegislation was passed in Reno.

Bettenberg: Right.

Seney: Then in April of '94, hearings were held inWashington, D.C., where you appeared alongwith assistant secretary–essentially the federalpeople appeared at that hearing. What was theorigin of those hearings? Why did those comeabout?

Bettenberg: I think the real origin of those was Reid'sunhappiness with the Truckee-CarsonIrrigation District and the issues related tothem, his feeling that they were intransigent,weren't helping to solve any of the problems,were continuing to create problems. He tookthem on in a big way in that first hearing.

Seney: Yes, he did.

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Bettenberg: Bradley has continuously had a genuineinterest in this as well, and so was more thanwilling to play host to these kinds of hearings.

Recoupment Issue

Seney: Let me say that one of the things that was tobe solved, mandated to be solved eitherthrough negotiation or litigation, was therecoupment issue. This water, 1,058,000 acre-feet is the number that's been agreed upon,that has taken between 1973 and 1987,diverted by the Truckee-Carson IrrigationDistrict. Did you make any headway withthem at all with them on that issue in that firstphase?

Bettenberg: I conducted negotiations over a span of twoyears. Probably more accurate, it was littleover a year and a half. I think my firstmeeting was with them in either February orMarch of '92, and wrapping up in October 1 of'93, and we never got close. There was onemeeting in March of '93 when they hadappointed some new people from the board,and we did some brainstorming, and itsounded like there were some positive ideasand maybe some slight glimmer that theremight be a possibility of a settlement, and thenover the course of the next months, theybasically backtracked and walked away from

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all that, never produced any of the analysesand paper that they were supposed to produce,and when we met the final time, they said,"We don't have anything new to offer."

Seney: Did they ever acknowledge that they owed thePyramid Lake water?

Bettenberg: No.

Seney: They never have?

Bettenberg: They never have.

Seney: To them, this claim has no legitimacy.

Bettenberg: That's right.

Seney: You know, in interviewing Norm Harry, thecurrent tribal chairman of the Pyramid LakeTribe, his view was, and I know you've heardthis expressed, but I want to say it here, thattheir view was that the recoupment should goback before 1973, because water was illegallydiverted well before that and in copiousamounts.

Bettenberg: Well, large amounts were, but it wasn't until1973 that a federal judge said that it's illegaland you have to do the following, but he didnot go back historically.

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Seney: When Norm Harry said this, when Iinterviewed him, I could understand what hewas saying, his point of view.

Bettenberg: Yes. They were missing eighty feet of lake,and that's a lot of lake.

Seney: That is a lot of lake. The amount it droppedover the years of these diversions.

Bettenberg: Right.

Seney: I guess, what I'm trying to get at here is onboth sides there are very strong feelings aboutthis.

Bettenberg: Yes.

Seney: But the fact is that the law is on the side ofPyramid Lake in this matter.

Bettenberg: Yes.

Seney: Unarguably, unambiguously.

Bettenberg: Yeah. That's been recognized by Republicanand Democratic administrations. RogersMorton [phonetic], when he was secretary,said, "You have to comply with theserequirements, and if you don't, we will reduce

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your future supply to offset anything that youtake illegally."

Seney: They were on record. That was as early aswhat, 1975?

Bettenberg: '73.

Seney: '73 was the ruling.

Bettenberg: '73 and '74. We every year republished theOCAP requirement for them. When thecourt–have you read the court decisions onthis?

Seney: I have not read the full text.

Bettenberg: You ought to.

Seney: Pyramid Lake v. Morton?

Bettenberg: Well, Pyramid Lake v. Morton, but especiallyTCID–I suppose it's v. Morton. Who is it? TCID against whom, I can't recall. Well, it'sthe 1983, '84 decisions. The judge says,"You've made no pretense of complying. You've flaunted it." Matter of fact, I probablyshould have brought that opinion fortomorrow's meeting. I didn't think to do that.

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Seney: Well, if you recall, it was Pyramid Lake v.Morton, and the Solicitor General elected notto appeal that decision.

Bettenberg: Right.

Seney: Judge [Gerhard] Gesell's decision.

Bettenberg: Right.

Seney: Then, the Secretary of the Interior–


Seney: It's December 5th, 1995. My name is DonaldSeney. I'm with William D. Bettenberg of theDepartment of the Interior. We're in Reno,Nevada, and this is our second session and oursecond tape.

Let me go on to ask you if there's anythingyou want to add about those oversighthearings that were important.

More on the 1993-1994 Oversight Hearings

Bettenberg: I thought that it was important that thetestimony presented was as comprehensive asit was, covered the issues in the way it did,laid out clear positions the way it did. It

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seems to me that that will forever be a marker,if you will, against which we test our currentactions.

Seney: This is, you mean, the interests out here in theDecember hearings, laying out what theirpositions were?

Bettenberg: No, I was thinking of Betsy Rieke's testimonyin April of last year.

Seney: As I read that testimony, I got the feeling thatmaybe you might have drafted that.

Bettenberg: I wrote the first draft, yes. The way I work ondrafts like that is, they go out for everybody tocomment on, the bureaus all got severalcracks at it, the attorneys got cracks at it,Betsy changed it as she felt she needed to.

Seney: Right. But it would be my feeling that wouldbe yours to draft to begin with as a policystatement, being familiar with the positionsand so forth.

Bettenberg: Right.

Origins of the Settlement II Negotiations

Seney: Not long after those hearings were concluded,my understanding is both the Nature

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Conservancy and the Environmental DefenseFund and the TCID approached Senator Reidabout new negotiations. Is that yourunderstanding of how this came about?

Bettenberg: I guess I'm not sure who all approached whomin that, but I know that Reid felt that heneeded to reach out one more time, if youwill, to TCID, give them one more chance tonegotiate. I think he concluded that he'dprobably come across as overly harsh in theDecember hearing and this was a way oftrying to go an extra mile and be seen as goingan extra mile, if you will.

Seney: Were you at those December hearings? Didyou attend them?

Bettenberg: No. No. I read the transcript from it. Well, Iguess, actually what I read was the statements,I think. I don't remember whether I read thetranscript or not.

Seney: Did you think he was harsh?

Bettenberg: I guess I thought maybe he was a little morepersonal than he needed to be.

Seney: Obviously this is a decision, as I understand,that Senator Reid really made, that we'll goahead with these negotiations.

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Bettenberg: Yeah.

Seney: Did he ask you for your input on any of this,or did Larry Werner give you a call and seewhat you thought about it?

Bettenberg: No, but there were conversations with BetsyRieke.

Seney: Between the senator and Betsy Rieke?

Bettenberg: Yeah. I shouldn't say no. I guess there wereprobably conversations between Werner andme, that they were thinking of doing this, andmy logistical problem became one of, we hadlaid out, including in the testimony, an agendaof actions, and the question was, if we'regoing to have negotiations, what do you doabout all these actions. It had the effect ofdelaying us probably close to a year and ahalf.

Seney: You put all those on hold.

Bettenberg: We ended up putting them all on hold. At onepoint, we were going to put only some of themon hold, but eventually Betsy decided to putthem all on hold, thought that they wouldpoison the negotiations too much, knowingthat we were losing a lot of time as a result ofit.

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Seney: If it had been your call, would you have putthem on hold?

Bettenberg: I guess I think you probably would have hadto put the OCAP and the O&M agreement onhold, because that was what the negotiationswere about. Leastwise, it have been awkwardto be proceeding simultaneously.

Stalling by TCID: the Demand for a ProgrammaticEIS

On the other hand, I guess I think that it was amistake not to proceed with recoupment. Oneof the things that I worry about is, it'simportant that we not send mixed messages, ifyou will, or that we confuse the people thatare supposed to be receiving the message. Itwould be easy for the TCID folks to think thatthis works pretty well. Now, what can we doto get the next year and a half? I suspect rightnow that what they're trying is theprogrammatic EIS issue, which is a well-orchestrated campaign. LVEA's [LahontanValley Environmental Alliance] writingletters, the Protective Association is coming toD.C. and holding meetings, and the county issuing, all on the same issue and with the samerhetoric.

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Seney: This is currently going on over at NEPA, andwhether or not the EIS is coming to pieces–

Bettenberg: Needs to have a programmatic versus adifferent course of action.

Seney: Well, there are several EISs. There's one onthe TROA [Truckee River OperatingAgreement].

Bettenberg: One on the wetlands.

Seney: Which has been completed?

Bettenberg: No, just the draft.

Seney: Just the draft has been completed. There's oneon cui-ui recovery.

Bettenberg: No, well, there's going to be one more.

Seney: Which one am I missing here? I'm missingone.

Bettenberg: There's only three.

Seney: But I've missed one. The wetlands, which isin a draft form, the TROA, and I'm missingone.

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Bettenberg: Then the third one is–I refer to it as the LowerBasin EIS, but it's going to cover cui-uirecovery, new OCAP, and water managementon the refuge.

Seney: What's being argued now by LVEA, theLahontan Valley Environmental Alliance, theNewlands Water Protective Association inChurchill County, is that all of these ought tobe one.

Bettenberg: No, what they're arguing is that it's all a singleprogram, and you ought to do oneprogrammatic EIS that kind of sets the overallstage, if you will, and then you should tier offof that and do individual EISs for TROA, forwetlands, for other things, you know, which istwo to three years for the programmatic, andthen two to three years for the site specifics,and you're into the next century.

What we have actually going here is not aprogram, but a series of action, some of whichare related, some of which aren't very closelyrelated. TROA has only slight effects on theNewlands Project, and really the preliminarysettlement agreement only has modest effectson cui-ui. It's positive effects and it's a goodthing to do, but it's not a third of the answer, ifyou will.

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Seney: This is between the tribe and Sierra PacificPower.

Bettenberg: Right. If we also cover storage for a water-quality agreement, under the operatingagreement, then maybe it becomes moreimportant as part of the cui-ui equation. Butwhen you normally do a programmatic iswhen you're doing rule-making on a nationallevel. The department did a coalprogrammatic to cover its coal leasingprogram nationwide, the regs that cover theentire nation. Then you do a programmaticEIS. Then you go in, you're going to have aseries of sales in a single basin area, like thePowder River Basin. So you do a basinwideEIS, and you do your leasing and so forth.

Then when actual mine plans are developed,you come along and you do an EIS on eachindividual major mine plan. You're going togo up here and dig a hell of a big hole in theearth, and maybe mine five or ten or twentymillion tons of coal a year. So you're going tohave a major environmental impact just withthat one site. So you do a NEPA documentthere. But this isn't of that nature. All of ourEIS experts have looked at it and said, "No,there's nothing to this argument."

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Seney: Is Churchill County filing a lawsuit becauseTCID can't under 101-618? Are theyprecluded from this kind of litigation under101-618?

Bettenberg: No. No, TCID could have brought it. Iassume it's just a matter of kind of sharing,responsibility sharing. Lyman McConnell hasprovided them with an affidavit, for instance. Things are pretty well orchestrated out there. I have always presumed that Carl Dodge is theone that orchestrated them.

Let's see, summer before last–was it summerbefore last–I guess it was the year before that,they created LVEA and the Water ProtectiveAssociation simultaneously, got the city ofFallon geared up to work on this, and thecounty geared up to work on this, probablysome careful choice in calling it LahontanValley Environmental Alliance even, and theWater Rights Protective Association. No onehas ever said that–anybody–everything thatwe're doing has to protect the water rights ofthe irrigators out there. But if you call itWater Rights Protective Association, youknow, it connotes something. If you call it anEnvironmental Alliance, it connotessomething. And these are names kind of outof the wise use movement, if you will. A lotof those committees are environmental

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committees. In April, May, of last year, therewere a series of delegations through D.C.

Seney: After the negotiations?

Bettenberg: After the hearing, before the negotiations wereset up, but the city of Fallon was in and theyhad hired two attorneys, both with priorassociations with Reid, and the ProtectiveAssociation was through, and TCID wasthrough. It sounded suspiciously to me asthough they took up their topics even in thesame order, but it was kind of like within amonth or a month and a half, something likethat. Right now the mantra, if you will, is,"We want a programmatic." I guess I thinkthat they have done really poorly over theyears in selecting their legal advice.

Seney: But you see this, even perhaps the request fornegotiations last year, as a kind of stallingtactic.

Bettenberg: It bought them a year and a half. It worked.

Settlement II Negotiations

Seney: When you heard that there were going to benegotiations, were you elated? Did you say tothe wife over dinner, "Honey, I think we'refinally going to settle this"?

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Bettenberg: No. No.

Seney: Or did you take a more cynical view? (laughter) I'm laughing when I say this, ofcourse.

Bettenberg: Yeah. As Betsy said at one point, sherecognized that I really doubted that thiswould be successful, but that I had put far, fartoo much work into it for anybody to thinkthat I wasn't trying to make it successful.

Seney: Speaking of you, now.

Bettenberg: Yeah.

Seney: And it was a lot of work.

Bettenberg: Oh, yeah. It was a lot of nights, it was a lot ofweekends. I had to put our position togetherfor every meeting, and coordinate it with allthe bureaus, discuss it with her, discuss it withother parties when there were key issues, putproposals on the table in written form that hadbeen brokered, so that we had a federal teamposition.

Federal Government’s Position in the Settlement IINegotiations

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Seney: What did you bring to the table in thosenegotiations? What was the federal position? You know, to be honest with you, you werekind enough, through Jeff Zippin, to makeavailable to me the federal documents, andI've been through them a number of times, butthey're not all that easy to summarize, I mustsay.

Bettenberg: Well, I'm not sure that I would be any moresuccessful in summarizing them. Well, let'ssee. Twenty-five thousand acres of wetlandswasn't negotiable, but some of what wecounted was.

Seney: In other words, you got down in the final thingof counting the S-line Reservoir and theHarmon Reservoir?

Bettenberg: Well, we talked about how we would keepthose, but we definitely had the gun club inthere, if we could strike a bargain with the gunclub, and so forth. We had to have a tighterOCAP, and we had to be getting PyramidLake levels up into the, what, thirty-eight,forty, thirty-eight, fifty range.

Seney: And this had to do with target storage inLahontan.

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The Possibility of a Municipal Water SupplySystem

Bettenberg: No, this was the level of Pyramid Lake. Thatwas for cui-ui restoration. We were willing tochip in some money for efficiency measureson the project. We were willing to talk aboutchipping in money for municipal systems.

Seney: Because as you improve the efficiency,especially through linings of the main canals,that would have an impact on the groundwaterseepage and therefore on the supply to themunicipal system.

Bettenberg: Yeah. Actually, you have that effect, butmore importantly is you're buying up waterrights. But the principal source of percolationinto the groundwater table is the wateractually put on the land. If you bought up alot of land in the area where you get most ofyour recharge, you would be diminishing thewater table.

In actual practice, it's not clear that that'sgoing to be a problem. Virtually all theproperty we've bought so far is not in the areaof recharge. It's in the area of least recharge,and it's down dip, as a geologist would say,from town and from where the wells are, andso forth. The water is flowing in the opposite

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direction. The groundwater is flowing in theopposite direction.

Seney: Recoupment was in there, but that's notnegotiable.

Bettenberg: Recoupment was in there as a part of it, andwe had figures with and without recoupmentin there, and we were willing to treat it as aseparate issue or as a joint issue. We wouldlike to solve the whole package, if you will.

Changes in State Law and the Issue ofConservation

We were interested in talking about statelegislation that would allow you to garner thebenefit of water conserved if you pay for it,whereas Western water law generally doesn'twork that way and it's not very helpful on that. I don't know if you've followed it, but therewas a major agreement a couple of years agowhere the Metropolitan Water District forL.A. [Los Angeles] agreed to put up about$100 million for lining canals down theMohawk Project, and Mohawk will get nicelylined canals, and the water saved will go to theMetropolitan Water District. General Westernlaw is not friendly with that. I was trying tothink what else was in there. Those weresome of the main–

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Seney: There was some things having to do withFallon Naval Air Station that we sort ofdiscussed before.

Bettenberg: Yes.

Seney: There would be some contributions out ofFallon Naval Air Station. I don't really expectyou to repeat the whole thing, because we'vegot the documents, and I hope some daythey'll be in the archive where people who areinterested can listen to, read the transcriptsand go to the documents themselves.

Bettenberg’s Reaction to the Negotiations

But tell me what your reaction to thenegotiations were. First of all, did you feellike the federal team was pretty wellorganized?

Bettenberg: Yes.

Seney: And you were in a pretty good position? Youfelt pretty good about what you came to thetable with?

Bettenberg: Yes. Felt very good about it and we seemedto win high marks from everybody else, fromthe environmental community, from the[Pyramid Lake] tribe, from Sierra Pacific,

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from the Reno-Sparks-Washoe Group. Wewere kind of coherent, we were forthcoming,we were putting potential compromisesolutions on the table. I think that we wereseen as showing a lot of leadership in those. The congressional delegation seemed to beimpressed, Republican and Democratic alike.

Seney: These were the representatives,Congresswoman Vucanovich and SenatorReid.

Bettenberg: Right, the local representatives who wereattending sessions. I think that we wereconsidered as having acquitted ourselves quitewell in that.

Seney: How did the negotiations go? Was there anypoint in which you were kind of optimistic,that you got caught up in the euphoria of thatfirst meeting?

Bettenberg: No.

Seney: Nothing swept you along?

Bettenberg: No. I thought that we had proposals on thetable that they should have agreed to, but likeI said before, I didn't think that they hadprepared either themselves or the communityto do so. Without some sense that the

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community was prepared, I couldn't see howwe could ever reach an agreement. Thepeople at the table agreed they couldn't take ithome and bank it, if you will.

Seney: The other participants were fairly unified; thePyramid Lake Tribe was unified in what itwanted and didn't wanted. Fallon Tribe didn'thave a whole lot on the table, as I understandit.

Bettenberg: No.

Seney: They wanted their own district, whichapparently they're going to get.

Bettenberg: Well, actually, they've backed away from thatmore recently.

Importance of Sierra Pacific Power Company tothe Negotiations

Seney: Oh, have they? All right. Apparently, thepower company, Sierra Pacific Power, reallydidn't want much. They were there to protectthe preliminary settlement agreement, andthey made some moves on the power systemdown in Fallon, but by and large, theyweren't–

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Bettenberg: I had wanted them there because I thought thatif we were going to reach a settlement, that itwas going to need money from a poweragreement, because one of the practicalproblems I had to deal with was, if you have asettlement, how do you finance it.

Seney: And that would have been the power systemdown in Fallon making a contribution to that?

Bettenberg: Right. There is a way of optimizing the powersystem down there that we are not takingadvantage of, just like where in the TruckeeRiver Operating Agreement we're takingadvantage of optimizing reservoir storageupstream and using it synergistically, if youwill, or in a coordinated way, so that we getmuch more benefit out of it. The same thingcould happen with–there are three differentpower generators down there, and if we baseloaded them differently and so forth, youcould generate more power and more money,and especially more money,disproportionately more money. That isprobably a relatively easy deal to make.

Seney: So you were discussing some of that withSierra Pacific Power?

Bettenberg: So having Sierra at the table was importantbecause they operate the generators down

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there and acquire the electricity from them. They are part of the contracts for those, sothey would have to be a party to a settlementof that.

The Conservation Caucus

Seney: Various participants have told me theythought that what came to be called theConservation Caucus, since apparently theenvironmental name had been appropriated bythe people from Fallon, and I understand therewas some talk about what theenvironmentalists, as we would normallythink of them, that is, the Sierra Club, theNature Conservancy, the EnvironmentalDefense Fund, I'm right in thinking the SierraClub was there, too.

Bettenberg: No.

Seney: They were not?

Bettenberg: The Wetlands Coalition.

Seney: The Wetlands Coalition, I see.

Bettenberg: The Sierra Club is a part of the WetlandsCoalition, but they weren't at the table.

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Seney: My understanding from others is that theyplayed a positive role. Was that your feeling,too?

Bettenberg: Yes. Yes.

Seney: Let me say at this point, and then maybe I justwant this to, I don't know, maybe for humor, Idon't know why. Do you recall more than ayear ago, I called you, I think the first time Iever spoke to you, and I asked you–

Bettenberg: You wanted to come to the meetings.

Seney: If I could come to the meetings, and you saidyou'd get back to me, and you did, telling methat you and Betsy Rieke had discussed it anddecided that I should not come to themeetings, and I wasn't offended, by the way,because I had been to one TROA meetingwhere we first met, and it was seven of thelongest hours of my life. [Bettenberglaughing.] So I didn't get to come to thesemeetings, and I think I want to thank you forthat, here. But if I had been at those meetings,what would I have learned?

Bettenberg: Well, you would have learned a lot. Therewas a lot of information put on the table. Youwould have learned the varying theories abouthow much water it takes for the wetlands,

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which wetlands might count and which oneswouldn't and why, what kinds of birds usethese, and why is timing important. I don'tremember the name of it now, but there's onebird that flies up, I think it's from Panama,flies from Panama from here in one flight,loses a good chunk of its body weight in theprocess, then puts down here and has to fattenup to fly to Grace Harbor, one more directflight. Sits down there, fattens up once moreand goes to Alaska, and at the end of thesummer, turns around and comes back anddoes the exact reverse of that. This refuge outhere is extremely important to them at acertain time in the spring and a certain time inthe fall. It's a different time than when ducksare there and geese and swans and so forth,and it's a different time when stilts andavocets, you know, and so forth, shore birdsand so forth are there.

You would have learned something about thepower situation, all sorts of theories on how tohelp the cui-ui, a more in-depth look aboutwater conservation on the Newlands Project,the conservation study that was done,extensions to that that I had done.

Seney: The efficiency study and so forth?

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Bettenberg: Yeah, the efficiency study and then some add-on studies that I had Reclamation look at. Itwas kind of interesting when they finally said,"We can agree with that," it was theconservation proposal that they were reallyagreeing with.

Seney: This is the Fallon community.

Bettenberg: The Fallon community. The interesting thingwas that we simultaneously had a proposal onthe table that was a little more favorable to thecommunity than the conservation group. Whythey settled on the conservation group, I don'tknow, because the conservation group wouldhave gone with ours, and vice versa. Butagain, they didn't have the community behindthem, so they couldn't have an agreement.

Seney: Let me turn this over.


Seney: What else would I have learned? I'm getting alittle annoyed now; I see I missed a lot. [Bothlaughing.] But what else would I havelearned?

How the Negotiations Went

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Bettenberg: Well, I suppose how difficult it is to do thesekinds of negotiations. Sometimes thefacilitator [Gail Bingham] was helpful in theprocess and sometimes she was in the way ofthe process.

Seney: Overall, did she do a good job would I havelearned?

Bettenberg: I think a reasonable job. It's a difficult issueto do, and facilitating negotiations aredifficult. I've actually sponsored the first onethat Interior did dealing with SouthernCalifornia Air Quality, and that one ultimatelydidn't result in a deal. That was because ourpolitical leadership ended up being toointransigent, and Congress ended up a coupleof years later taking the entire program awayfrom Interior. Another example of notlooking down the road and seeing what youhad and where you were.

Seney: Who got it, the EPA?

Bettenberg: EPA did, yeah, who had aces up their sleevesand we didn't. That was a difficult one to do.

The Participants and the Various Interests

Seney: What would I have learned about theparticipants and the various interests?

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Bettenberg: Good question. The conservation communitywas fairly well organized, had goodleadership. I tend to think of David Yardasand Graham Chisholm as part of my braintrust, if you will, on issues. They're creativeand think in interesting ways about theseissues, and if you hand them a problem, theywill give it a fresh look and come back withsome interesting things. Sometimes that's oneof the key things we as feds are lacking, oneof the more difficult things I've had gettingout of the group here, if you will, but I thinkthat they saw the issues pretty clearly.

Bob Pelcygar is very able, represents hisclients well. Sue Oldham was trying to comeup with ideas that would help reachsettlement, and she's also very creative andvery knowledgeable. The Reno-Sparks-Washoe crew was basically there for theirown issues; they had no reason to be thereotherwise. The Upper Carson group turnedout to be kind of interesting there.

Seney: Glad you included them, finally?

Bettenberg: Yes. It became clear, number one, that theycould represent the three upstream counties;number two, that they really do, in fact, have along view. They're looking out there at 2015and 2020, and what the water needs will be,

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and water situation will be and so forth. Theyare not stuck in 1995, 1994, by any means.

The Newlands community had difficultyputting their proposals together, had difficultyputting things on paper, had difficulty gettingthem cleared and getting them out. In part,there, I think, you don't know what goes onbehind the scenes, but my feeling was thatthey weren't well represented by theirnegotiator.

Seney: Mr. Clinton?

Bettenberg: Yeah.

Seney: Mike Clinton.

Bettenberg: Mike Clinton. He had far too much goingother than this. I never heard or tried to digout what was going on, but there were somepersonal complications simultaneously goingon there. He didn't give it the time that itneeded, and if anybody was going to bring thecommunity around and get them to look athow the outside world, or the rest of theworld, was looking at these problems, it wasgoing to have to be a good part of his job, Ithink, and that didn't happen. But he oftenwould be flying in from D.C., or from some

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other part of the country, just in advance ofthe meetings, little preparation.

Seney: What about the Fallon Tribe?

Bettenberg: Fallon Tribe was basically there for kind oftheir own issues. They made a point of sayingthey didn't want to intrude into most of this,that they didn't have a dog in the hunt on a lotof it, but they had some specific issues, andthey wanted to work with us, basically, onthose.

Seney: You alluded to, a few minutes ago, that theyhave kind of backed off of having their owndistrict. Why would they do that?

Bettenberg: Well, it's a split community. Like a lot ofreservations, they have allottees and they havethe tribe. The allottees have a lot of politicalinfluence, but they're not the tribe. The tribe,as a tribe, was saying, "We want to be adistrict," and that sort of thing, but when theindividual allottees who get the irrigationwater looked at it, they said, "Well, we're notsure that we would get the kind of service weneed, and we're not sure that we want you."

Seney: The allottees are the ones who've been allottedtribal lands on which to farm.

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Bettenberg: Right. The land is held–actually, the InteriorDepartment's relation to the allottees, so far astrust is concerned, is precisely what it is totribes. This is not tribal land. This isindividually held, allotted land.

Seney: This was the land that was traded years agofor the water rights.

Bettenberg: For the ten acres. And it's within the outerreservation of the boundary, but the tribedoesn't own the land. The individual allottee,I guess in both cases, the U.S. holds it in trust,but in one case it's for the tribe, and in theother case it's for the individual allottee. Thatcomplicates relations on many, manyreservations throughout the country.

Collapse of the Negotiations

Seney: So you weren't surprised, again, when thenegotiations collapsed.

Bettenberg: No. I'd have been euphoric if they'dsucceeded, and extremely pleased. Ipersonally put a tremendous amount of timeand energy into trying to do that. I was outhere almost twice a month, from the first ofAugust through March, the better part of thetime for a week at a crack, and during thelatter stages of it I was going through some

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parental crises up in the state of Washingtonas well. There were sometimes I would comeout here, go to meetings, go up toWashington, take care of things up there andthen come back down here.

Seney: Your father was ill, as I understand.

Bettenberg: Yeah, he was ill. There was just a tremendousamount of work there.

Establishment of the Truckee-CarsonCoordinating Office

Seney: One of the things that came out of it in termsof the federal side is that the Truckee-CarsonCoordinating Office that was set up. Am Iright?

Bettenberg: I've been in kind of the continual search forthe right coordination mechanism out here. Ican't remember if it was '92 or '93, but at anyrate, we initially got together and talked aboutall the tasks and who had to do what. Itseemed that everybody knew what they had todo and so forth, but as issues kind of keptcropping up and so forth, it became clear thatwe needed better coordination out here, andwe were also really short of creative ideas outhere.

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So I worked with the regional offices and puttogether a team that consisted of Ed Solbos,Chet Buchanan, Tom Streckle, and RonAnglin, I guess it was, to be our coordinationteam out here. They were supposed to try tomake sure that we coordinated all of ouractivities and to come up with fresh ideas. Iinitially tried this out on taking a look at thefederal perspective and interests in theTruckee River Operating Agreement. Whatwere they? Were there some things that mightbe being missed? What things should we beasserting? They did a relatively nice job ofthat, but that's a relatively bureau-neutralthing, if you will. As soon as they starteddealing with things like recoupment, orOCAP, or–

Seney: Where they could really quarrel.

Bettenberg: Yeah. It didn't work. At best we could getBIA and Fish and Wildlife together, andReclamation in a different camp, wasprobably about the best. We weren't gettingany ideas out of it. But anyhow, tried that fora while and that wasn't working.

As we got into things, it became clear to methat we were going to have to do a newOCAP, that the reasons for doing it werereally abundant, and that if we were going to

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do that, we were going to have to do a thirdEIS. I put that together with kind of thecoordination responsibility and concluded thatwe really needed to pull some people in, kindof apart from the bureaus, to do some of thatcoordination. I raised that with Betsy on myfirst trip out here with her at the beginning ofApril, getting ready for the hearings, duringthe next month or so sold her on that idea, thatwe needed to do that.

Then I went to work on putting the teamtogether. I basically reached out for peoplewho were kind of long in coordination,facilitation, with a strong dose of NEPAexperience, so that we would have a veryseasoned NEPA team, and worked out thefunding and staffing arrangements for that andstarted moving people out here in August oflast year, before the negotiations started. Infact, we had everybody but one on boardbefore the negotiations.

Seney: So Jeff Zippin, who was heading this team,was out before. You must have known himfrom the–

Bettenberg: From MMS.

Seney: Yeah, right. Right.

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Bettenberg: Yeah. It may sound parochial, but I guess Iwould say during the 1970s, clearly the best-run bureau in the Interior Department was theBonneville Power Administration, just kind ofthe intellectual quality, the staff work that yousaw.

Seney: Was this Watt's operation?

Bettenberg: No, this was Hodel's operation, actually, but itwas good before Hodel was the director. Itwas good when he was the deputy director,and probably was good before that, but I didn'tdeal with it before that.

During the eighties, I think if you asked anysecretary, they would say the best staff work,kind of the best thinking, the best esprit decorps, was coming out of the MineralsManagement Service. We had a really highintellectual plane, and I'd like to think that Ihad something to do with that, and I think Idid, but there was a good foundation therebefore. The NEPA work during the 1980swas probably the best in government. I'vebeen told that by outside NEPA people, andthe reason was because there was such ahistory of litigation on NEPA, and so weorganized to do it really well, and if wemissed something, the courts would tell uswhat it was and we then fixed it. We had the

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system fixed in such a way that we not onlyfixed it for that EIS, but we fixed it for allEISs, all regions.

We had an EIS team in every region, and anEIS core crew in headquarters. Steve Alcorn,who's on the team, headed the West Coastteam, for instance, on that. I had had such anintense experience with NEPA kinds of issuesin MMS that I knew what you were lookingfor.

The Fish and Wildlife Service was justfloundering like a fish out of water. Everytime they'd do a NEPA document, it's amateurnight. They'd create a new team. Theydecided that they would take the LahontanValley one on at the regional office, becausethat was where things came together, so theywould do it there. They were a year into itbefore they finally ended up turning it over toRon Anglin, and they had part of one chapterin poor condition to turn over, and that was it,within two months of when they weresupposed to be out with a draft. So Anglinthen had to assemble a team. There wasnobody on his team that had ever done aNEPA document.

They were clearly floundering, so I went toBill Martin and said, "The Pacific Regional

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Office and OCS is downsizing, and I just sawa notice come through. They're doing awaywith their entire NEPA group for leasing." Itwas one of the two NEPA groups they had. "The guy that heads that up is really good, andI think he could really help you. He's awildlife biologist, actually a specialty infisheries, but a good dose of wildlife as well."

He said, "Well, I guess I could talk to him." Itwas clear they weren't terribly interested insomebody from some other bureau, but theymet him and instantly liked him and said,"Yeah, this guy could help us a lot." So theyagreed to bring him on, so he became one partof the team.

Then Jeff had been my leader for the air-quality negotiations, had had a tremendousamount of facilitation training, and has just agood presence about him. He was also thestar, I understand, of the training programs puton last year and the year before for theRussians on mineral leasing, as theyprivatized their economy.

Seney: So you have this team now in place out here tocoordinate, and Jeff is the team leader tocoordinate.

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Bettenberg: And to do the EISs, especially, but one of theproblems is things are going along in a bumpyenough fashion right now that too much timeis being burned up in coordination and notenough time in doing it.

TROA Negotiations

Seney: How are the TROA negotiations comingalong?

Bettenberg: Oh, I think that they're okay. It's a little hardto say.

Seney: They're not nearly complicated enough, youknow, from my point of view, as a participantof one meeting only. You know, let me say,one of the things that struck me about thatmeeting, which was very interesting to me,and that is, you, of course, were there, andLynn Collins from the Department of theInterior solicitor's office in Salt Lake City. Sue Oldham and Gordon DePauli from SierraPacific Power, Bob Pelcygar from thePyramid Lake Tribe was there. FredDisheroon from the Department of Justice wasthere, and there were a couple of guys fromCalifornia, I think. Was John Kramer there?

Bettenberg: Probably.

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Seney: What struck me was how all you knew eachother so well and that you've been obviouslydoing this for such a long time. It was veryinteresting to observe.

Bettenberg: Yeah. One of the things that's reallyinteresting about the Interior Department, Ithink, and I guess why I've had a career-longlove affair with it, if you will, is that it's amicrocosm of the outside forces. You've gotthe Bureau of Reclamation that usuallyrepresents the irrigation, Western waterinterest. You've got the Fish and WildlifeService that is caught some place between thehunters and the environmentalists but doesn'tgive a damn about irrigation and irrigators. The Bureau of Land Management that's got allthe grazers and a lot of critters out there, too,you know, including owls and so forth up inthe Northwest.

We actually fight about these issues. We takethem on big time, and we know that we willget decisions, and we will move on, and wewill be fighting, if it's not least terns this year,it's otters, sea otters, you know, or whatever. So you get to know one another. It's differentfrom how HEW [Department of Health,Education, and Welfare] used to be, youknow, where the health people believed inwelfare, the welfare people believed in

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education, the education people all wanted tolive a long life. There's no debate there. Youknow, it's a different kind of an agency. When you spend that much time negotiatingand dealing with difficult issues, you get toknow one another, and that's what's happeninghere. We've been doing this–I've been in it forwhat's going on six years now, getting close tothat.

Seney: Well, you're a relative newcomer.

Bettenberg: Yeah. Some of these people, you know, goback another decade or more in this.

Seney: Well, that's about all the questions I have foryou. Is there anything we've left out here thatwe should understand about this? You know,there's lots more details I could ask for.


Seney: But your interview, like others, are all piecesof the puzzle, so when you put them alltogether, we hope the whole picture will bethere. But is there something that we need toadd that I haven't asked you about?

The Advantage of Having a Wide Range ofPostings Within the Department of the Interior

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Bettenberg: No. Probably the only other thing that I canadd is that probably one of the things that hashelped me in this process is that I come atthings trying to look at the wholeadministration, the whole federal government,certainly the whole Interior Department. I'vehad the luxury of having postings, if you will,in a variety of different parts, and havingworked with all the parts of the department. My view is that the Interior Departmentdoesn't do nearly enough of that, doesn't trainenough people to do that. That's one of thereasons why you so rarely see things wellcoordinated amongst the bureaus in the field.

I guess one of the things that drives me on thisis the importance of working together as afederal government, unifying it. Congress hasdone a great job. Political scientists, youknow, do a great job of balkanizing theexecutive branch of government.

Got a call from Kathleen Eagan [phonetic],mayor of Truckee, or I guess she's now pastmayor of Truckee, but had been mayor ofTruckee, on the cui-ui spawning run decisionmade this past spring. She said she justwanted to let me know that her complimentswere out to the Interior Department, that wehad presented such a unified position, and it

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was just good to see the bureaus workingtogether and speaking as one.

That was coordinated entirely out here. Ididn't have to get involved in doing that, andthey did a wonderful job of it. I guess that'smy vision of how the Interior Departmentought to work and how the federalgovernment ought to work. Instead, if wedidn't have a Justice Department, the differentfederal agencies would be in court with oneanother all the time, and it's crazy. But that'sone other theme that I have in these kinds ofthings.

I think it's important that we try to do thingsin-house and get a position and speak as agroup instead of having the Bureau ofReclamation out with irrigators saying onething, the BIA out with irrigators sayingsomething else, and the same when they meetwith the tribe and so forth, they really need tobe coordinated in speaking with one voice. It's very difficult to keep that together.

Seney: Well on behalf of one part of the InteriorDepartment, the Bureau of Reclamation, Iappreciate your taking part in the project as acontribution. I may be back to see you again.

Bettenberg: Okay.

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END SIDE 2, TAPE 4. DECEMBER 5, 1995.END INTERVIEW.

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