Went to a neat thing the other night when a celebration was held for an unlikely coalition that’s bonded three disparate entities into one for the benefit of the Wallowa Valley.

The common denominators were Chinook salmon and water, and integral players a nonprofit, Native Indian Tribe, and 115 farmers who irrigate from the Lostine River.

In ways similar to the Salmon Plan drafted years earlier by forerunners of the Wallowa County Natural Resources Advisory Committee, this coalition essentially was conceived by one man – working for an entity now known as The Freshwater Trust – and was designed to save the fast-dying strain of Chinook salmon native to the Lostine River.

And the plan, after 10 years, is working masterfully.

The nonprofit is tapped into a funding source that pays irrigators to keep ample water in the Lostine River south of the city of Lostine in late summer to support Chinook passage for spawning purposes, and the Indian Tribe, the Nez Perce, is reaping benefits from a species that’s being reborn in that river.

There, arguably, are three major waterways that flow out of the mountains into the Wallowa Valley, and water from each of them daily is gaining more worth for irrigation purposes as the value disparity between irrigated acreage and dry land continues to expand.

Innovative plans to infuse new irrigation life into Bear Creek near Wallowa have yet to evolve past design stages, and the Wallowa River seems forever hung up on the fate of the unhealthy, aging dam that judiciously doles out its precious commodity, life-giving water.

It’s well known that the Associated Ditch Companies (ADC) owns that dam privately and can do with it whatever it chooses, yet maybe partnering with an investment company as seems a probability might prove less than ideal for the people of Wallowa County.

Corporate ownership of private property, aka Hancock Timber here, is making a huge dent on another major natural resource Wallowa County has – aided in part by the USFS that owns more than 50 percent of the county and refuses to treat that property other than as a source of employment for firefighters – and giving away major control of the invaluable water behind the Wallowa Lake Dam might prove, in the long run, equally damaging to county coffers.

I cannot imagine the possibility of irrigators off the Wallowa River ever being without sufficient water to feed crops locally. Still, it seems well established that excess water released from the Wallowa Lake Dam could be sold to rich, water-hungry, big-farm irrigators hundreds of miles downstream adjacent to the Columbia River.

In fact, a group called the Northeast Oregon Water Association was exploring the possibility of upgrading the Wallowa Lake Dam in return for reassurances that the NE Oregon group could procure excess Wallowa Lake water to irrigate until that group was informed an investment partner was working with the ADC.

It’s a tricky issue and might require a premier negotiator to reach an equitable resolution, but how about the people of Wallowa Valley forming a tax district to provide an alternative for the ADC before all bucks for water sold out of the area go into the pockets of corporate America? I’d guess irrigators in the Columbia Basin would rather buy water from an entity in little Wallowa County than watch it leave for unseen balance sheets.

The dam is owned by the ADC, and yet fixing it is a community problem.

But what do I know? Money rules, and my salary is minuscule compared to those of corporate lawyers who would draw up papers for the ADC to sign.

Jabberwock II columnist Rocky Wilson is a reporter for the Chieftain.