January 9, 2007

KBC readers,

We want to again extend our thanks to the two groups who financially supported Klamath Basin Crisis website in 2006, Oregon Women for Agriculture and Ganger Insurance, and also our past supporters? Your support is very much needed to help fund the services that we provide. 

Also thank you to others who have performed services or otherwise contributed to KBC in 2006: Global Machinery Network, Global Creations, Klamath Media (Pat Ratliff), Anders Tomlinson, Lewie Baker, and Larry Turner. And to the many people who send us comments, stories, forward articles, and participate in our discussion forum, thank you.

Services that we at KBC continue to provide for our readers: daily Klamath Basin news related to our water and ESA situations, science, meeting notices, newspaper and magazine articles, commentaries, well reports, crop reports, archives, real people stories, issues, prayer, Klamath River Tributaries, transcripts of meetings, tours and speeches from videotape, KWUA reports, press releases, photos, wildlife, weather, river flows, and lake levels. We share our website with fishermen, miners and timber communities who have information and articles regarding their fight to use and manage resources and keep their communities whole.

With the help of your financial support, we filmed and produced Klamath ESA, and wrote and produced Homesteading in a Promised Land, which are available on KBC and several stores to tell our story. The purchase of these help support KBC.

We answer several calls and/or emails weekly from our readers needing information, connections or contacts.  We work with Klamath Water Users Association, and also host a subweb for Tulelake Growers Association. We average 20–30 hours per week working on this website. 

The goal of KBC remains the same—to preserve irrigated agriculture in the Klamath Basin.  We do not support the current ‘water bank’ that is taking over 100,000 acre feet of water from irrigators annually in spite of National Academy of Science findings that lake-level/river-flow management is not scientifically justified. We believe this water bank is devastating the farm economy, and according to Oregon Water Resources, it is depleting our aquifer by five feet per year.

We support extra water storage and peer-reviewed science. And we are dedicated to making available facts about the Klamath Basin and irrigators. And we are dedicated to exposing schemes to downsize or hamper agriculture in the Klamath Basin.

This year we videotaped the NRC meeting in Yreka and tour and have attended and taken notes at several local meetings for reports on KBC to share with our readers. We’ve had many of these articles published in the Pioneer Press and agricultural magazines.

We made a section of KBC to include fishermen and farmers working together. We attended the 3-day Klamath Watershed Conference in Redding, a Yreka meeting with miners and fishermen, and the FERC public meeting to make available this information.
 

Some of the past projects we’ve done for KBC readers were videotaping and transcribing a tour of the Klamath Project and a tour by the Klamath Tribes of the forest they hope to acquire, and tours of the Fish and Wildlife refuges with farmland.

We’ve formed a continuous photo display of farmland and wildlife working together.

We have expenses of web costs, film, still and video camera equipment, computer equipment, transcriber fees, gas, office supplies, and travel expenses. Our annual web costs alone of DSL connection and web server come to around $800. Currently all costs and labor are borne by us, with the help of contributions.  We  had two donations  in 2006 which helped pay webcosts and purchase a new computer for the website. We also bought a camera and equipment to better tell our story on video and with still photography.

Colleges and Universities, high schools and elementary schools, government agencies, power companies, international and national media, representatives, state government offices visit KBC. FERC visits KBC every day. We are averaging nearly 5,500 visitors per week and around 35,000 weekly hits.
 

Thank you for visiting KBC. If you'd like to contribute financially, please send checks to:

KBC

PO Box 314

Tulelake, CA 96134