[3] Talks Begin On How To Break Up Fish Passage Center
Discussion began last week in earnest on how to transfer operations from the controversial Fish Passage Center to other regional entities. A Dec. 2 conference call between the Northwest Power and Conservation Council's fish and wildlife committee and the Bonneville Power Administration picked up the beat, beginning a new debate that's likely to last through the winter.
The FPC will cease functioning in March, after a few months of temporary funding runs out. BPA has footed the cost, now at $1.3 million a year, since its beginnings in the 1980s, when it was created to help the Corps of Engineers make decisions on when to use extra water for migrating fish.
Since then, the Center has become more than a data collection agency, and has evolved into the analyzing arm of state fish agencies and tribes, providing long-standing support for more flow and spill throughout the federal hydro system to help migrating salmon and steelhead, despite scientific uncertainty over some of these strategies.
But the Center incurred the wrath of Idaho Sen. Larry Craig after its analyses of fish survival were used by environmental groups in their successful push to get a federal judge to boost spill at federal dams last summer. Craig added language to a spending bill that called on BPA to stop funding FPC operations in 2006.
Despite a furious attempt by environmental groups and tribes to have the language stricken, the language survived through conference committee and has become law, signed by President Bush Nov. 19.
"Idaho's water should not be flushed away on experimental policies based on cloudy, inexact assumptions," said Craig on Nov. 10 after the House passed the spending bill. "I will continue to look for ways to ensure that dams and salmon can coexist and thrive, rather than give in to the myth that the Northwest can only have one or the other. This is the first step in getting the region back on track to salmon recovery."
The language calls on BPA and the Power Council "to ensure that an orderly transfer of the Fish Passage Center functions (warehouse of smolt monitoring data, routine data analysis and reporting and coordination of the smolt monitoring program) occurs within 120 days of enactment of this legislation. These functions shall be transferred to other existing and capable entities in the region in a manner that ensures seamless continuity of activities."
Greg Delwiche, who heads BPA's Fish and Wildlife Division, told participants at the Dec. 2 discussion that his agency was nearly ready to send out Requests-For-Proposals in the three areas mentioned in the congressional language that would deal with them "in a broad way."
What has state agencies and tribes concerned most is whether an analytical function will be maintained in the future.
NPCC Chair Melinda Eden said her state of Oregon and the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission are also developing an alternative because they both want the functions to be kept together. She said they all had to be careful not to eliminate one of the functions the FPC has performed [analysis], but she appreciated the concern over what Delwiche called the "perceived advocacy" of the FPC.
Power Council members said they would try to schedule a meeting of the full Council later this week to accommodate more discussion of these sensitive issues.
But three Northwest senators already have problems with that directive. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) sent a Nov. 29 letter to BPA and the Council that urged the two agencies to make sure all the "current responsibilities and functions of the FPC" are not divided up among existing entities, but are transferred to a single entity. Among other things, they want the new entity to be housed independently of BPA, the Council or any other existing agency, or university.
That may come into conflict with what is most likely to happen, that the job of data collection will be taken over by the University of Washington's Columbia Basin Research group, which already runs the extensive DART [Data Analysis in Real Time] database on fish numbers and hydro conditions.
Craig's language leaves out any mention of the analysis task, which the other senators say should be part of the new entity's responsibilities, and available to the public at no cost.
Scott Corwin, vice-president of the Pacific Northwest Generating Cooperative, said the senators' letter seems to request the creation of the same entity that was just de-funded. "Why would Congress add report language to create the same agency," he asked. And he wanted to know why Washington state senators wouldn't approve of the transfer of data collection duties going to a reputable institution like the UW.
Sen. Cantwell's office did not respond to questions by press time. It was also reported that Oregon Congressman Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) and Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) had also sent a letter expressing their views on how the issue should be handled.
Power Council member Larry Cassidy told participants in the Dec. 2 discussion that he didn't think it "would be that difficult to comply with most parts of those letters."
Besides the data collection, other main duties of the FPC included a smolt monitoring program that could be taken over by several other entities in the region like the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission, the Columbia Basin Fish and Wildlife Authority, or possibly even the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory at Richland, Wash.
The ongoing fish survival study could be taken over by NOAA Fisheries, or just "junked," as some have suggested, because of its flawed assumptions.
There has also been talk of developing a university-based consortium to do the statistical work that has been found wanting in much of the FPC results. No doubt, discussions will continue at the NWCC meeting in the middle of December.
There will be plenty of pressure from long-time FPC supporters to develop a new entity along the line of the old one. In fact, the Columbia Basin Fish and Wildlife Authority was still stumping for the Center after the FPC's fate was all but sealed.
In a Nov. 15 letter to all members of the Northwest congressional delegations, CBFWA (sans NOAA Fisheries and USFWS, which both abstained) called the Center an "essential" technical resource that provided essential services to fish and wildlife managers and their own limited staffs.
They said it was essential that the FPC remain intact "as presently structured and retain its full suite of responsibilities." But a day earlier, both houses of Congress had approved the conference report on the water and appropriations bill and sent it to the White House.
However, FPC director Michele DeHart is still garnering support for her side of the dispute. In a Nov. 30 story in the Washington Post, DeHart professed amazement at the situation. When reporter Blaine Harden asked if she was mad at Sen. Craig, she responded this way.
"What's the point?" She was quoted in the Post. "I have never met the man," she said. "Never talked to him. No one from his office ever contacted us. I guess I am flabbergasted. We are biologists and computer scientists, and what we do is just math. Math can't hurt you."
However, Dan Whiting, communications director for Sen. Craig, said a Craig staffer had made several contacts with DeHart in September, before the report language became final a couple of months later, including a "substantive" discussion on Sept. 12 that was at least a half-hour long.
But it was the years of strong advocacy analyses that finally brought the FPC down, despite the continued support from state and tribal fishery agencies. For years, some regional scientists have butted heads with DeHart and her co-workers, and fought their zeal for more flows and spill to improve salmon survival, despite any data to the contrary.
Critics have long called much of the FPC's analyses both biased and shoddy. In the last few weeks, BPA and NOAA Fisheries delivered scathing criticism of an ongoing fish survival study supervised by the FPC that the feds say short-changed the benefits of fish barging and survival in general.
The FPC took another hit in a declaration filed Nov. 22 in the BiOp litigation, when NOAA Fisheries Assistant Regional Administrator Bruce Suzumoto pointed out scientific flaws in an FPC memo that was used by plaintiffs to show proof that the summer spill program was a success. Suzumoto said the small sample sizes used in the analysis "does not reflect a biologically sound analysis useful for decision making."
But the Center has a long history of trying to sway policy. Back in 1993, University of Washington professor Don Bevan led a team of regional scientists and economists to develop the first recovery plan for listed stocks. He and fellow team member Prof. Ted Bjornn asked DeHart for some new survival information about spring chinook that was under wraps at the FPC. DeHart refused to turn over the data, telling him that the recovery team would misuse it.
Another member of the original recovery team, consultant Jim Litchfield, confirmed this story last week. Litchfield told NW Fishletter that the data they had sought turned out to be some of the earliest PIT-tag survival research conducted in Lower Granite Reservoir on juvenile spring chinook. He said it clearly showed that the fish experienced much higher survival through the reservoir than commonly accepted at the time, and that their survival did not correlate to flows.
Litchfield said the venerable Bevan, who died in 1996, had two main recommendations to make about the salmon recovery mess. First, the region needed a scientific "court" to sort out differences of opinion and research. That's now in place with the ISAB, the Independent Scientific Review Board that reports the NMFS and the Power Council.
Bevan thought the data on salmon were so critical, Litchfield said, that his second main recommendation was that they should be housed in an independent university setting, where they could be available to anybody. That may happen soon. -B. R.
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