[1] BiOp Settlement Talks Take Several Tacks
An attempt by Northwest states and federal agencies to reach an agreement on how to operate the federal hydro system for the next 10 years has been going nowhere fast, say some parties to the talks. That's because until last month, environmental groups, tribes and Bonneville Power Administration customer groups weren't even invited to the table.
Optimists like Oregon policy advisor Mike Carrier, say it takes time to "rebuild" relationships, in hopes of getting to a regional agreement on how to run the dams. But after environmental groups, the chief plaintiffs in the BiOp remand litigation, told participants at a recent meeting in Spokane that the draft settlement was too much "status quo," there's little hope that any agreement can be reached by Sept. 14, when they all meet with Federal District Court Judge James Redden to discuss the future of the BiOp remand.
The draft settlement floated by federal agencies is pretty much straight out of the 2004 BiOp, with an addition: Any cost savings from using removable spillway weirs to pass fish at dams with less water would be ploughed back into fish-recovery actions.
Bob Nichols, representing Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire, says his state is not on board with the federal agency's draft plan, but is focusing attention on what Judge Redden wants next month.
Nichols said the judge's order calls for an "across-the-board, you-all talk" settlement. "He is sure we can all come up with something," Nichols told NW Fishletter. In his June 10 opinion, that called for summer spill at five dams, Judge Redden denied the plaintiffs' call for added flows, but he directed all parties to collaborate "to resolve issues related to flow," hoping they could also agree on future spill scenarios.
"So . . . I do want you to get together and sit down, and I want another thing from that: Talk, discuss the flow theory," the judge told all sides during the June 10 proceeding. "You got plaintiffs at 10 percent reduction and well, maybe 3 percent. You know, is there enough in that flow business for us to reduce the amount of spill? Can something be worked out even before the summer is over? Certainly it would be on its way to do it during the remand."
In late July, at a meeting in Spokane, environmental groups suggested that future dam operations should be more like the annual plan offered by the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission (CRITFC), which calls for more spill and flow augmentation, including large amounts of water from Canadian reservoirs. They also said the draft plan floated by Oregon earlier this year is more to their liking.
That draft drew heavily from the annual CRITFC recommendations for river operations, few of which have ever been implemented. They include the call for another million-acre feet of water from both Canada and Idaho to boost flows. Perhaps the most stunning proposal was the call for deep drawdowns at lower Snake and John Day reservoirs to boost fish survival, but it never cited any documentation that might connect fish survival with the increases in water velocity that might occur.
The proposal called for a 17-foot drawdown behind John Day (mainstem reservoirs currently operate within a five-foot range) in two-thirds of the summers to increase water velocity. That would render both the juvenile and adult passage systems unusable and make it hard for turbines to generate power, critics said. It would also make the navigation locks unnavigable and cause irrigation systems to suck air. The bypass systems at lower Snake dams would not work either if the 13-foot spring (in 34 percent of the spring migration periods) and 9-foot summer drawdowns (82 percent of the summers) were implemented as the proposal recommended.
Oregon policy advisor Carrier said his state spent months discussing the plan with federal agencies to determine the feasibility of those measures. He said some have proven to be undoable within the constraints of current operations. The current discussions grew out of Oregon's discussions with other states after its own draft fizzled.
A hydrographic analysis of the drawdowns and water particle travel time was completed last October for Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife policy analyst Ron Boyce by the Fish Passage Center. The analysis cautioned that with drawdowns of more than a few feet below operating minimums and maximums, "problems would be encountered [at] fish ladders, navigation channel depth, and turbine[s]. The severity of each of these problems and the repairs that would be necessary to allow significant drawdown are unknown to the FPC at this time."
Now that BPA customers, environmental groups and tribes, both upriver and downriver, have been invited to take part, Carrier is optimistic, though he doesn't think much more than a framework for the talks will be completed by Sept. 14. He said more meetings were scheduled with tribes and environmental groups. He is also pleased with Idaho's participation and expects Montana to be more of a player as well. With the four governors behind it, he hopes the collaboration will lead to a common vision.
Washington's Nichols says it's just too soon to say whether it will work, while others say that many participants are just plain burned out. Most parties had already spent a year in court-ordered mediation that began in early 2002 before the 2000 BiOp was litigated. Plaintiff groups eventually walked away from that process and continued their suit. During the remand of the 2000 BiOp, before the current BiOp was written, Judge Redden ordered collaboration between state, tribal and federal scientists over scientific issues of flow and fish survival. State and tribal representatives said federal scientists had little use for their input. -Bill Rudolph
[2] Critical Habitat Designated For West Coast Salmon
Federal fish authorities have made their final call on the critical habitat needed by 19 ESA-listed fish populations on the West Coast, and cut about 80 percent of the original habitat designated by NOAA Fisheries as essential to the conservation of the listed species.
The final rule doesn't differ much from draft recommendations released last December that also proposed an 80 percent cutback.
The proposals were scaled back from the original February 2000 designations, which included all watersheds in the fishes' range, whether inhabited by listed fish or not. At that time, the federal agency judged no economic impact from the designations, other than what was already associated with the species listing.
However, after a lawsuit by homebuilders, farm groups and irrigators, the agency withdrew its designations in April 2002, admitting it had neglected to weigh these other economic concerns. They hired a few economists and spent several years coming up with the latest designation that includes more than 20,000 miles of Northwest streams, lake and estuarine habitat, along with more than 2,200 miles of nearshore marine habitat in Puget Sound.
"This Administration believes strongly in providing incentives for private landowners who are already protecting species voluntarily, and these designations recognize their hard work," said Bob Lohn, regional head of NOAA Fisheries Service. He said the agency "has focused very specifically on those areas that are most important to recovery of salmon and steelhead, allowing us to most efficiently use our resources to protect fish."
After weighing economic factors and balancing them against projected benefits to the species, nearly 2,000 stream miles in the Northwest were excluded from the designations, which was estimated to reduce impacts by more than $240 million. The agency estimated that fish conservation actions tied to the federal hydro system in the Columbia Basin were expected to cost $500 million to $700 million annually, including forgone power revenues.
Nearshore habitat in Seattle deemed critical under the new rule.
Almost 800 stream miles were excluded from the California designations, which was pegged to reduce impacts in that region by $100 million.
Military bases, tribal lands and other areas covered by habitat conservation plans were also excluded from the critical habitat designations.
Some regions, like Puget Sound, where chinook and Hood Canal chum are listed under the ESA, had significant reductions in the final rule, about an 18-percent reduction in stream miles, with impacts reduced from $91 million to about $71 million annually.
The entire Lake Sammamish watershed was excluded for protection, which is expected to reduce impacts by $4 million. The Baker River watershed, where Puget Sound Energy maintains a hydro project was also excluded, reducing impacts by another $6 million.
For listed chinook and steelhead in the upper Columbia region, only 3 percent of the proposed critical habitat was reduced for economic reasons, including all tributaries of the Lower Wenatchee, Icicle/Chumstick, Lower Methow, and Lake Entiat. But the exclusions were expected to cut economic impacts by $3.4 million or 19 percent of the $17.6 million in costs from the designation.
In Oregon's Upper Willamette region about 30 percent of the stream miles in the area were excluded for economic reasons, reducing the expected impact of $25 million by $4.4 million, or 30 percent.
"So far, NMFS is getting a B for the effort, but it's still really an incomplete at this stage," said Russell Brooks, attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation. Brooks said it was a vast improvement over the invalidated rule, but his office still hadn't completed a review of the 550-page economic impact analysis to see if the feds had taken all the pertinent economic information into account.
But environmental groups deplored the final rule, especially its exclusion of habitat where listed fish are no longer present. "That'a a problem when you are talkig about species threatened primarily due to habitat destruction," said Earthjustice attorney Kristin Boyles. "Removing protected areas where fish have been within peoples' recent memories is not a recipe for recovery."-B. R.
[3] Feds May Face Lawsuit Over B.C. Sport-Caught Salmon
A new coalition of sports fishers and Snohomish County PUD say they will sue the federal government if it doesn't take immediate action to obey the ESA's stricture that prohibits the import of endangered species. The coalition wants the feds to crack down on chinook salmon caught by U.S. sportfishers in British Columbia's recreational fishery and brought across the border.
Seattle attorney Svend Brandt-Erichsen, counsel to the Salmon Spawning and Recovery Alliance, said recent data shows that about 5 percent of all the chinook caught off the West Coast of Vancouver Island are made up of three chinook stocks listed for protection under the ESA that come from Puget Sound, and the Lewis and Snake rivers.
Brandt-Erichsen told NW Fishletter that fish marking techniques are now available that allow fishermen to identify ESA-listed fish, so they can net only unlisted hatchery fish marked by a clipped fin.
According to the Aug. 17 letter to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and U.S. Border and Customs Protection, federal agencies "have an obligation to resolve uncertainties in favor of ESA-listed species."
"This means," the letter went on, "that to properly implement the ESA's import prohibition, the Customs Service should not allow the import of salmon that cannot be demonstrated to be from non-listed populations."
Though the NMFS biological opinion on harvest allows for the Canadian take of the listed fish, the letter said the document did not evaluate the participation of U.S. citizens in the B.C. recreational fishery. Therefore, it said, such trade isn't authorized as an incidental take, and those imports are not exempt from the ESA's general prohibition on importing listed species.
The letter says that fin clipping could differentiate between protected salmon and unprotected hatchery fish. And, "with some additional effort, it should also be possible to identify wild salmon from non-listed stocks, based on where the fish are caught."
Brandt-Erichsen said that was a reference to creating more terminal fisheries, where stocks are not mixing as in most ocean fisheries. He acknowledged that it would be more of a challenge in the Columbia with Upriver brights, since relatively few, but ESA-listed, Snake River fall chinook are migrating upstream at the same time as the URBs headed for the Hanford Reach.
The coalition's letter cites testimony from the July meeting of the Northwest Power and Conservation Council (see NW Fishletter 200). where harvest managers said over 20 percent of all returning Snake River fall chinook were caught off Vancouver Island (sport and commercial fishery).
At that meeting, managers discussed in-season DNA testing, a cutting-edge management tool used by Canadians to determine stock composition of their commercial troll fishery off Vancouver Island. The results for the 2003-04 season show that the Canadian fishery catches mostly U.S. salmon--about 88 percent, about half of that is made up of fall chinook stocks from the lower Columbia. Another 19 percent are bound for Puget Sound.
The Snake fall chinook made up about 1.5 percent of the Vancouver Island catch, or 2,500 chinook, but that's about 21 percent of the number of Snake falls that made it over Lower Granite Dam by the end of 2003.
The letter also says that Canadians catch about 70 percent of the natural-origin chinooks bound for the Nooksack River, near Bellingham, another listed stock from Puget Sound. Recently, Canadian harvest rates have been boosted as B.C. stocks rebounded from poor ocean conditions. They're up 36 percent from 2003 to 2004.
The coalition, which includes sportsfishing groups Friends of the East Fork (Lewis River) and Fish First, along with Snohomish County PUD, also received support for their letter from the Portland-based Native Fish Society and the Clark-Skamania Fly Fishers. Brandt-Erichsen said some other groups have shown support, but chose not to sign.
There have been few lawsuits that have successfully challenged harvests in recent years, though litigation against the federal government did force the feds to complete an EIS on the salmon fisheries that caught listed fish. But only two weeks ago, at the latest NWCC meeting, independent scientist Dan Goodman warned the council of the potential train wrecks that might appear soon in the form of lawsuits over current harvest practices. Goodman was part of the group that reported in July that current harvest levels of listed stocks may not be justified.
A lawsuit [PNGC v. Brown] that challenged harvest practices in the context of the ESA was turned back in 1994. Plaintiffs had argued that commercial fishermen were violating the ESA by selling listed salmon. But the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said that "it was impossible to enforce the trade or transport law as to the few forbidden fish harvested in the ocean or rivers. Impossibility in our view is sufficient answer. It was not the intention of the statute to ban all salmon fishing or to place upon the federal defendants an enforcement burden no one could accomplish."
Brandt-Erichsen said times have changed. Now fish from most federal hatcheries are marked, along with stocks from some tribal hatcheries. He pointed out that federal fish managers themselves have said in their harvest BiOp that some Canadian harvest levels are higher than the highest rate the agency believes would allow recovery of some listed stocks. -B. R.
[4] BPA Explains July Power Shortage
Two representatives of the Bonneville Power Administration say they will manage resources more conservatively after dodging a potential power shortage in July. BPA managers Rick Pendergrass and Dave Armstrong explained how the agency got in the power pickle at last month's Northwest Power and Conservation Council meeting in Missoula.
"We were still in the tail end of the runoff," said Pendergrass. "Inflows were declining, but still strong. Headwater projects--Libby, Dworshak, Grand Coulee, Hungry Horse to some extent--were full or nearly full and passing inflow. Some of those projects, at, or near turbine capacity. Grand Coulee and Chief Joe were at full load during heavy load hours trying to move water through the system."
He said models were indicating the need to move water and energy throughout the week of July 18 to keep the system managed "as we were coming off the end of the runoff."
On the morning of July 18, Pendergrass said regional temperatures were in the 90s. He called it "one of the first warm days in the summer," and said the initial forecast showed about an 800 MW shortfall for a couple of hours in the afternoon.
Three hours after the sale, at about 9 a.m., BPA's real-time marketer put out a bid for about 120 mills, 50 mills above market, to cover the afternoon deficit, but got no response. So BPA called the Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation for added generation to cover the deficit. Pendergrass told the council that they found about 200 MW from a combination of Hungry Horse, projects on the Willamette, and Libby.
"In talking with the Corps, there was concern about whether we'd have to use emergency actions to cover load in the afternoon," Pendergrass said. He said it was decided to set up an emergency meeting of the Technical Management Team (TMT) for noon, to initiate discussion before any action was taken.
Just before 11 a.m., about 250 MW was booked for the afternoon, and BPA told the Corps the market was responding and it looked like the deficit could be covered and that they didn't see the need for a discussion of emergency actions. But it was decided other contingencies might be faced, such as a lightning strike at Libby, so the meeting was held.
At 11:30, the remaining 400 MW was booked to cover the rest of the afternoon load. At the TMT meeting, members were told that the loads had been covered by market purchases, and barring any other contingencies, the situation was covered. Pendergrass said priorities of emergency actions were discussed, "and that discussion is still continuing."
Other factors that contributed to the day were a planned power outage over the weekend that had BPA's marketer and power scheduler in the emergency scheduling center in Ditmer, at Vancouver. They were having some IT issues and were concerned about the validity of the data, Pendergrass said. Communication with analysts and managers was more difficult since it was all by phone, he added.
The lower river was also close to empty on the morning of July 18, though that was not uncommon. McNary Pool was also at the bottom of its operating range to help with work on the Yakima River bridge.
Pendergrass said another factor was the loss of flexibility at McNary and the lower Snake projects from the court-ordered spill, which made between 1500 MW and 2000 MW of short-term capacity unavailable.
BPA's Dave Armstrong said the initial non-response to BPA's request for power was likely due to other power players making sure they had their own loads covered for the day. But after prices rose, projects were coming on line that weren't operating in the morning, he said.
"So, the market developed, and we're finding when we get into those situations, we won't be as able to quickly cover a future set of hours, but as you get closer, and we've seen this in the past, you are able to get the energy you need as long as the region as a whole isn't in a deficit situation," he said
He said there was plenty of energy available well before the period of concern. He said BPA got a lot of calls from marketers and actually turned down a lot of power during this period.
Washington Council member Tom Karier asked the BPA officials if they would do anything differently today with the same signals they saw before the July 18 situation.
Pendergrass said they'd be careful about scheduling a pool restriction on McNary for a Monday morning, and would like to keep the lower river "a little fuller" to increase the flexibility they no longer have at other projects.
He also said they would likely be more conservative on their approach to surplus sales, which got Karier's attention. In response to another question, the BPA manager did acknowledge that they had made some surplus sales at the start of the month and on the "day-ahead" market, including the Friday before the July 18 squeeze.
"That's not unexpected, it will happen occasionally," said Pendergrass, who said BPA will approach the market more conservatively now that they better understand the loss of flexibility on the lower Snake.
But sources told NW Fishletter that at 6 a.m. on July 18 BPA sold a "surplus" 400-MW, 11-hour block in the market.
Sources also said that the VISTA forecasting model used by BPA may have played a role in developing the over-optimistic scenario about surplus power, and had overestimated surpluses for several weeks.
Later that day, the administration paid nearly twice the price to re-acquire the power they sold as excess in the morning. The cost of filling the deficit hole that afternoon amounted to $110,000.
Armstrong confirmed later that BPA had sold some power the morning of July 18, and that a lack of communication during a shift change played a role in the course of events. -B. R.
[5] BC Fishers Keep Fingers Crossed Over Fraser Summer Sockeye Run
This year's Fraser sockeye run has been so poor that commercial fishing has not been allowed to make sure that enough fish are reaching spawning grounds hundreds of miles upstream.
The early run headed for the Stuart, a Fraser tributary, started off slow and ended up quite late, but reached about 80 percent of its forecast. The early-summer run has also been slow to materialize, but its size was bumped up to about 300,000 fish on Aug. 19. However, that's still about 42 percent below the forecast.
The summer run was downgraded last week from about 11 million fish to somewhat more than 3 million. But that estimate was boosted yesterday to 4.5 million after the latest test fishing showed another large pulse of fish heading for the Fraser.
The commission's latest press release said low returns may be due to "high ocean temperatures during a portion of their marine residence period, which likely had a negative impact on their growth and juvenile-to-adult survival rate." The commission said the fishes' small size and warm marine conditions are "likely contributing to their apparent marine timing this season." More than half the returning Fraser run may be heading around the northern side of Vancouver Island and down the inside passage, a typical migration route during El Nino years.
Pink salmon are beginning to show, with test fishing at moderate catch levels. About 16 million Fraser pinks are expected. The commission says it may be able to come up with an in-season run estimate in two weeks.
Flows in the Fraser are 23 percent below average for this time of year, and temperatures were nearly 19 degrees C, about one and one-half degrees above average. -B. R.
[6] Suzumoto Named To Run NMFS Hydro Branch
Biologist Bruce Suzumoto has been named to head the NOAA Fisheries Northwest Region's Hydro Division based in Portland, the group responsible for salmon passage and survival issues at major Northwest dams. One of its main tasks is writing biological opinions on hydro operations dealing with ESA-listed fish in the Columbia Basin.
Suzumoto has spent the last six years working as a program analysis and operations manager at the Northwest Power and Conservation Council. Before that, he worked as a biologist for the Public Power Council, and other utility groups.
He spent many years in Alaska working with the Prince William Sound Aquaculture Corporation, where he eventually became chief executive, supervising a staff of 100 that produced 500 million smolts per year. Suzumoto has also worked for Weyerhaeuser, when the company began its Oregon-based sea ranching business and served in the Peace Corps in Chile, helping to develop a fledgling aquaculture industry in that country. Suzumoto received his undergraduate degree in biology from the University of California at San Diego in 1973 and a master's degree in fisheries from Oregon State University in 1976. -B. R.
[7] USFWS Announces Three-Year Review Of Columbia Basin Hatcheries
The US Fish and Wildlife Service announced last week that it will begin a three-year review of operations at its 21 regional salmon hatcheries as federal agencies move forward with their salmon recovery plans.
"Our goal is to ensure that our hatcheries are operated on the best scientific principles and contribute to sustainable fisheries and the recovery of naturally spawning populations of salmon," said Dan Diggs, Assistant Regional Director of the regional fisheries program. The review will begin with the Warm Springs National Fish Hatchery on Oregon's Warm Springs River, with a draft report expected by January 2006.
In an Aug. 15 press release, the agency said it will pattern its review after recent efforts to reform hatchery practices at state, tribal and federal hatcheries in Puget Sound and on the Washington coast. USFWS says it has adopted the principles of the previous reviews with only slight modifications. Principles: (1) Every hatchery stock and program must have well-defined goals in terms of desired benefits and purpose; (2) Hatchery programs must be scientifically defensible; (3) Hatchery programs must respond adaptively to new information. Goals: (1) Establish the scientific foundations for National Fish Hatcheries and cooperative programs; (2) Conserve genetic resources for salmonid species; (3) Assist with the recovery of naturally spawning populations; (4) Provide for sustainable fisheries; (5) Conduct scientific research; (6) Improve quality and cost effectiveness of hatchery programs.
The agency also said its review will be coordinated with co-managers of the Basin's fisheries, including the ongoing US v. Oregon process, the fish protection and mitigation activities of the Northwest Power and Conservation Council and the ESA processes of NOAA Fisheries. -B. R.
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