No more cut-rate power.

Byline: The Register-Guard

The Oregon Public Utility Commission has made a major contribution to the long-term health of the Klamath River and its beleaguered salmon population by ending nearly a century of bargain-basement power rates. The availability of cheap power has discouraged water conservation by enabling irrigators to pump water with little regard for cost.

As a result of last Wednesday's decision, electricity rates paid by Klamath Basin farmers will increase tenfold over the next seven years, eventually rising to the same level paid by other farmers across Oregon. Barring an unwise state or federal bailout, that should encourage more efficient use of water by farmers, which in turn will increase the amount of water available for the Klamath River's depleted salmon runs. Declining runs are forcing a federal closure of most commercial trolling off much of the West Coast this summer.

Klamath farmers have enjoyed a sweetheart deal on power rates since 1917, not long after the federal government established the Klamath Reclamation Project to build a network of irrigation canals by draining Tule Lake in California and Lower Klamath Lake in Oregon. The project now irrigates 180,000 acres of farmland that produce grain, alfalfa, onions, potatoes, horseradish and cattle in Oregon and California.

On most western irrigation projects, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation built dams to provide low-cost power for farmers. But in the Klamath Basin, the government ceded that responsibility to PacifiCorp's predecessor, California & Oregon Power Co., which built dams to produce electricity.

Other than a modest rate adjustment in 1956, the project's power rates have remained frozen in time. For an astonishing half century, Klamath farmers have paid the same electricity rate of 0.6 cents per kilowatt hour. That's less than a tenth of the 6.98 cents per kilowatt hour that other Oregon farmers currently pay to power their irrigation pumps. Meanwhile, PacifiCorp has passed on the cost of this multimillion dollar annual subsidy to ratepayers across the state.

A similar change occurred last week across the border in California, where Klamath farmers have long enjoyed rates similar to those in Oregon. The California Public Utility Commission last Friday approved a proposal to require the state's farmers to pay market rates for electricity within four years.

This long-overdue shift to market-rate prices - and realities - should help restore balance to the basin. The availability of cheap electricity has long encouraged wasteful water use, including the irrigation of marginal lands that would never have been farmed without the availability of cut-rate power to pump water.

In addition to reducing the incentive to irrigate marginal lands, the rate increases will also encourage greater water conservation. Most importantly, they eventually will put more water in a river that has long been plagued by excessive diversions and the fish-killing conditions they help produce.

Coming on the heels of a federal judge's order for the federal government to leave more water in the Klamath for threatened salmon, that's good news. It ought to help the river that The Washington Post recently called "one of the nation's most thoroughly fouled-up rivers." Helping the river will help its fish - to the benefit of the fishing industry and the communities that depend on it.