[2] BPA Picks Short-Term Replacements For Fish Passage Center

The Bonneville Power Administration announced last week that the Battelle-operated Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, one of nine Department of Energy labs situated throughout the country, will take over coordination of the data analysis functions previously conducted by the soon-to-be-defunct Fish Passage Center. Five proposals were received by BPA to take over the FPC work that included analyzing potential flow and spill measures to benefit fish passage.

Greg Delwiche, BPA vice-president for Environment, Fish & Wildlife, made the announcement at a special Jan. 26 meeting of the Northwest Power and Conservation Council. He said Battelle has both a national and regional reputation for excellence, and a broad record of technical work on the Columbia River dealing with salmon passage and monitoring functions.

PNNL and its predecessors in eastern Washington have been operated by Battelle since 1965. The lab performs work for other government agencies besides the Energy Dept., as well as private industry.

Delwiche said Battelle Northwest's duties will include prioritizing requests for analysis, seeking governing committee advice as needed, assigning requests to technical analysts, and arranging for and enforcing peer review.

He said their very first task will be to develop a pool of scientists and biometricians who will actually do the analyses.

Delwiche said BPA has proposed that the policy coordination activities of the FPC's previous director be taken on by the Columbia Basin Fish and Wildlife Authority through a contract modification. "In doing so," said Delwiche, "it would insure a clear separation between the policy coordination and the science analysis."

BPA has had to scramble to replace the Fish Passage Center, whose funding is due to run out near the end of March. The Center's funding was killed in report language added to a Congressional water and energy appropriations bill last fall by Idaho senator Larry Craig (R).

Craig said the BPA-funded Center played too much of an advocacy role in the region. Environmental and fishing groups have relied on several FPC analyses in their ongoing litigation to add more flow and spill to federal dam operations in the Columbia and Snake rivers.

Delwiche also announced that the FPC data collection and warehousing functions will now be maintained by the Pacific States Marine Fish Commission, an entity created by Congress more than 50 years ago to help resource agencies and the fishing industry manage ocean resources in California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Alaska. PSMFC already maintains large fish-related databases under BPA contract and handles the huge PIT-tag database that keeps tracks of millions of salmon and steelhead detection histories.

The meeting allowed supporters of the controversial Fish Passage Center one more venue in which to voice their displeasure with the state of affairs. Seattle-based economics consultant Kevin Bell said that the new contracts would cost more, and that Battelle was far less qualified scientifically "even to look at the numbers" than Center personnel. He called the move an act of political vengeance. "What we're seeing here is Bonneville taking control of the information. There is no longer an independent information function on what is happening with salmon in real time in the Columbia."

Delwiche took issue with Bell's remarks. He said Pacific States will hold the contract for the data warehousing. "We will not have a role in being any filter on the data," Delwiche said, noting that the clear intent is to have data that is open to the whole region.

John Platt, attorney with the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, said he feared the NW Power Act had been "sullied by today's announcement," and consigned to a court battle that would pit state authority against federal authority.

He argued that the report language used to kill the FPC lacked the force of law. "Let's not mistake the fact that the purpose of this language was to deprive the federal and state fish and wildlife agencies and tribes of the information that they need to make informed requests for operations of the hydro system to protect anadromous fish while considering the needs of resident fish," Platt said.

Scott Corwin, vice president of the Pacific Northwest Generating Cooperative, said there were aspects to the current proposal that raised questions, "but it looks like a vast improvement" to get credible science the region could rely on.

Judy Danielson, one of Idaho's representatives to the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, also voiced support for BPA's announcement.

However, Melinda Eden, Oregon's NPCC member, questioned the closed BPA process that picked the proposals. Delwiche said the process was undertaken that way after legal advice was received on the matter. He said he would discuss the issue with Eden in the future if he had a procurement attorney on hand to answer her legal questions.

Several groups have already served notice they will take the demise of the Fish Passage Center to court. The Northwest Environmental Defense Center, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility and the Northwest Sportfishing Industry Association have petitioned the 9th U.S Circuit Court of Appeals to review BPA's decision. They argued that it violates the NW Power Act, is inconsistent with BPA's fish and wildlife program and that the power marketing agency exceeded its statutory authority by unilaterally amending its fish and wildlife program.

The other regional entities that had proposed to take over some or all of the Fish Passage Center duties included a joint effort between CRITFC and ODFW, WDFW, and the University of Washington. Most have also submitted proposals to take over former FPC duties through the 2007-2009 funding cycle. The Columbia Basin Fish and Wildlife Authority has also submitted a proposal for the longer time-frame. -B. R.

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