HomeMy WebLinkAbout063026 email - Subject_ Perpetual Fraud in the Dungeness River and Refuges Salmon Restoration ProgramsALERT: BE CAUTIOUS This email originated outside the organization. Do not open attachments or click on links if you are not expecting them.
June 30, 2026
Subject: Perpetual Fraud in the Dungeness River and Refuges Salmon Restoration Programs
To the Commissioners, Department of the Interior, and Members of Congress:
The Refuges need real stewards, not deceitful ones.
The Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe (JKT) has not demonstrated that they can make the right decisions for the Dungeness River, let alone the Refuges. JKT formed a partnership with Clallam
County and the State of Washington (the Consortium), making promise after promise to restore wild salmon. Since 1999, this well-funded effort by the Consortium has been a complete failure.
What is worse than the failure to restore wild salmon is the clear use of the "restore wild salmon" narrative to achieve aggressive property buybacks. For 27 years, the Consortium has
come up with "solutions" that do nothing for the fish. There is no doubt that JKT threw its weight around the Consortium, using treaty rights as a power play to dictate final decision-making
and goals in order to acquire ancestral lands. JKT led, and continues to lead, this Consortium by the nose and by the taxpayers' wallets, solely for the benefit of JKT’s own financial
interests. Furthermore, the Dungeness River Management Team (DRMT) has become totally tribal-centric.
The first of this Consortium’s "solutions" in 2004 was to plug and pipe irrigation ditches so that the Dungeness could "store fine sediment." The Consortium plugged and piped 66 miles
of irrigation ditches for that purpose, long before the Dungeness Water Rule was established. This project, and the millions of taxpayer dollars spent on it, was doomed to fail for
two major reasons:
1. Property Buyback Focus & Flooding:
Because the irrigation ditches were only plugged to facilitate property buybacks, they failed to stop fine silt from being diverted by the upper east highland irrigation ditch system
and other upper irrigation ditches on the west side of the Dungeness. These ditches have now risen in level because they are caked with fine sediment, creating system-wide flooding
problems. Whatever fine silt managed to head downriver was flushed out into Cline Spit by the sheer flow of the Dungeness. Salmon don't spawn at Cline Spit.
2. Failure of Jimmycomelately (JCL) Science:
The project was also doomed because the Consortium sat on its Jimmycomelately science and failed to create and protect a JCL fixed meandering coil. The failure to administer JCL science—which
would create a place for fine silt to gather at a 4 percent grade so wild salmon can spawn—has been an epic 27-year failure. JCL science includes the clear assertion that stormwater
should be diverted from the fixed meandering coil because large sediment and logs gouge out salmon beds.
The snapshot of the DRMT’s work is clear: there is no fine sediment being managed properly to restore wild salmon. When this failed, the Consortium blamed the lack of a floodplain for
the loss of salmon habitat. Their new plan was to "restore wild salmon" through the River's End project. You would think the Consortium would have used this project to build upon JCL
science and the fixed meandering coil. You would be wrong.
Simultaneously, alongside the Strait Ecosystem Recovery Network (SERN) property buyback program, the Consortium allowed the Meadowbrook estuary restoration grant to engineer a three-crabs
flooding project. This intercepted the River's End floodplain efforts, which never included the fixed meandering coil in the first place. The Consortium took taxpayer money under the
guise of wild salmon restoration to build competing floodplains in a rain shadow. Only under severe stormwater conditions is there enough water for both. This leaves all salmon at all
life stages in shallow water, highly vulnerable to predation. This is devastating for the ecosystem, but great for the property buyback program.
To make things worse, the Consortium then conjured up the restoration of Olympia oysters to the area. They spent even more taxpayer resources scattering bags of Olympia oysters along
the shorelines. Most of us have seen the signs that say "do not feed the birds." Yet, the Consortium apparently thought that lowering the level of the river and feeding birds at the
mouth and nearby beaches would be safe for salmon exposed in shallow, rain-shadow water levels. They were wrong.
Recently, the Consortium discovered that plugging the irrigation ditches did not have the outcome they hoped for. The irrigation ditches originally fanned out and recharged the water
levels above the Dungeness, which naturally flowed into the lower reaches during the dry summer months. The Consortium openly illustrated this incompetence on their screens at the last
DRMT meeting. Rather than restoring the irrigation ditches to do what they have always known was needed, the Consortium is now plotting with the Department of Ecology to install meters
on all wells private and commercial.
Once again, the Consortium does what is best for the "willing seller, willing buyer" element of its property buyback program—not what is best to restore wild salmon. The Consortium thinks
it can ignore these failures and simply shuffle new members of loyal ideologues in and out of the organization to be led around by JKT, all while defrauding the taxpayer to acquire
ancestral lands.
I will not let them. I do everything I can to expose the "willing seller, willing buyer" scam embedded into the property buyback program and the perpetual fraud of this salmon restoration
narrative.
Please block the transfer of the Wildlife Refuges to the Jamestown Tribe.
Sincerely,
John Worthington
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