[5] Feds File Third Progress Report On Remand
NOAA Fisheries sent its latest update to a federal judge on its progress in developing a new plan for operating the hydro system in the Columbia and Snake rivers.
Federal attorneys told the U.S. District Court's Judge James Redden that the government is continuing to make a good faith effort in the collaboration with sovereign entities, as Redden instructed. But they reminded the judge they still have the right to make the final call on areas of disagreement.
And they also noted that executive branch agencies can't bind Congress to make future appropriations for any given federal action, or to pay for recovery of species listed under the ESA. Redden has several times intoned from the bench that the government wasn't spending enough to save listed salmonids.
The Goals and Gaps Workgroup is compiling information on the so-called gaps between current listed fish populations and their "desired status," lofty goals that include a measure of sustainable harvest. But for some participants, it is still unclear how the group will address the conundrum of reaching a population goal sufficient to avoid ESA jeopardy, while also defining the further actions required to achieve full-blown recovery. So far, NOAA Fisheries says all seven ESUs have survival gaps and need both short- and long-term improvements to reach recovery.
The report also recognizes that some participants have raised questions about the interior Columbia's technical recovery team [TRT] and the way the gaps were developed. The team analyzed the health of listed ESUs with the help of a popular conservation biologist tool called "population viability analysis." But critics say it isn't especially suitable for animal populations such as salmon that have high natural variability, nor does it realistically portray recent upward trends in most stocks.
More discussion is slated over ways to update stock status to account for recent fish survival improvements not incorporated in the TRT estimates.
The latest report says a framework workgroup has completed an "interim" human impacts report that estimates the human-induced mortality levels of the seven listed ESUs in the interior Columbia Basin. One of the perennial questions still haunting BiOp writers is possible latent mortality effects from dams, which leads to wide-ranging estimates in the latest analyses as well, though no numbers were released with the report.
Another collaborative workgroup has been assessing habitat to develop a limiting factors analysis that will be used to weigh future actions to recover salmonids in the broader effort outside the hydro system.
Others are looking at hatchery and harvest issues to both reform artificial propagation practices and develop alternative harvest strategies that include the possibility of asking for a reduction in ceremonial tribal fisheries of spring chinook.
The latest report says preliminary results from the passage modeling workgroup are expected in a couple of weeks. A public split has grown between state and tribal representatives and federal scientists who are trying to quantify the fishes' life history both in and out of the hydro system.
Federal participants met with an independent panel of scientists in Seattle on June 30 to update the group on their progress. The panel has already given a provisional thumbs-up for the new effort and reportedly gave the feds another OK after the latest review.
States and tribes say that some of the model's built-in assumptions would shortchange the estimates of beneficial actions from such drastic options as breaching lower Snake dams.
But the breaching option, and another one that calls for assessing fish survival from operating dam reservoirs at spillway crest, will not be assessed, according to the latest remand report, despite letters to the feds from the environmental group American Rivers and lower Columbia tribes that called for adding these scenarios to the seven already planned for analysis.
In their response to the latest report, plaintiff environmental groups said the feds still haven't explained the new jeopardy standard that is under development, which "at least raises the specter of a repeat of the 2004 BiOp experience." The groups also complained about the federal agencies' refusal to consider any new actions "other than minor tweaks" to status quo hydro operations, or model scenarios that includes aggressive, non-breach strategies like spillway crest drawdowns, or removing the four lower Snake dams.
The groups told BiOp judge James Redden they would like to discuss opportunities to consider and evaluate additional hydro operation alternatives. Redden has scheduled a July 21 status conference in Portland. -B. R.
The following links were mentioned in this story:
Third Quarterly Status Update, July 3, 2006
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