[5] BPA Customer Groups Sound Off On Salmon Program
Representatives of several utility groups have told the Northwest Power and Conservation Council that they should wait until the next hydro BiOp comes out before they get serious about amending the region's fish and wildlife program.
The Council is poised to embark upon the amendment process next fall, and plans to have the new plan in place a year from then. The habitat-heavy program, paid for by the Bonneville Power Administration, is expected to be the future home for many of the habitat improvements expected in the next BiOp.
At the current pace of the remand, a draft BiOp is expected by Oct. 31 and a final version is scheduled to be in place by the end of January 2008.
At the July 11 meeting, John Saven, CEO of Northwest Requirements Utilities and chair of Northwest RiverPartners, said he wasn't arguing for any particular financial outcome.
"However, given the vast sums of money that are involved here, we are obligated to urge the Council and other decision makers to carefully plan the process for allocating resources," he said.
Saven said about 12 percent of the power rate is going to pay for direct fish and wildlife costs, with another $360 million a year in forgone revenues from fish passage strategies.
He recommended that additional time for collaboration over the next fish and wildlife plan be developed after the draft BiOp comes out.
Scott Corwin, new director of the Public Power Council, also called for starting the Council's amendment process a little later than scheduled, to build on the next BiOp. He said it was "critical" for developing confidence in the Council's program.
"And that's not just on our part, the customers," Corwin said. "That's a confidence and a defense against critiques from outside the region as well, that come against any massive effort like we have going on in the Northwest, on the fish and wildlife side."
Corwin said later he was referring to groups like the Washington, D.C.-based Taxpayers for Common Sense, which has waged a long battle against BPA. The group has supported dam breaching in a misleading campaign to save taxpayers' money.
He said postponing the amendment process could actually save time in the long run, if parties go into it with a partial settlement already in mind.
Dan James, PNGC vice president, told the Council that that the utilities were "really thrilled" about getting into the process from the start and finding areas where consensus with other parties could be established as the amendments are produced.
"While we don't know where the process will lead, we do see this as an opportunity to perhaps find some consensus or establish some areas of common ground," James said.
He said the Council's amendment process "could be the glue that holds the various fish and wildlife pieces in the region together, including non-listed species." '[It] could be the glue that holds the various fish and wildlife pieces in the region together.'
James said utilities want to be sure that the investments made will promote an efficient, cost-effective program with measurable improvements.
Larry La Bolle, from Avista and Northwest RiverPartners, said some utility folks were meeting on an ad hoc basis with members of the Columbia Basin Fish and Wildlife Authority to discuss biological objectives. CBFWA is the umbrella group representing many of the region's tribes, and both federal and state fish and wildlife agencies.
La Bolle said development of the biological objectives could be five years in the making.
"I know that sounds disheartening but the work on the front is important to get established," he said. "I think we can inform a sea change in the region, if you will, as we think in the future about the Council's fish and wildlife program role, as some day, as it should some day, be making subordinate the court's role in running the river system."
In the shorter term, La Bolle said, if they could go into the PFR [Power Function Review] process with much more agreement with CBFWA and others, "I think we land with much more unanimity on funding levels and a range of program reviews that make more sense and cause a lot less consternation in the region."
But the optimistic view may get bogged down in the most basic dispute of all among parties--just how many salmon should the fish and wildlife program aim to create?
The last iteration of the program called for restoration efforts in the Columbia Basin to produce 5 million salmon by 2025.
A recent report by consultants BioAnalysts Inc., produced for the Pacific Northwest Utilities Conference Committee, says that the goal is unreasonable for a variety of reasons. The April report says that number of fish hasn't been observed since fish counts began in 1938 at Bonneville Dam.
Instead, counts between the years 1938 and 2006 have averaged about 690,000 fish, ranging from a low of 211,000, on up to 1.99 million.
"Furthermore," the report notes, "if this historical variability in run size holds in the future, to achieve an average of 5.0 million fish we would need to observe run sizes ranging from 1.52 million to 14.4 million adults passing Bonneville Dam."
The report pointed out that the 14.4-million fish figure is only slightly less than the Council's own estimate for the basin's historical run size. "Given the loss in both the quantity and quality of habitat, and increased harvest that has occurred throughout the Columbia River Basin since the 1800's, observing run sizes of this magnitude appears highly unlikely."
The report also mentioned that the current fish and wildlife program never specified the proportion of different salmon species to aim for, nor how much hatchery fish should contribute to the goal.
But that's only one issue raised by the report, which included more than a dozen serious questions, and noted that abundance objectives developed by other agencies like the NMFS technical recovery team are substantially less than the Council's 5-million fish and CRITFC's [Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission] 4-million fish goals.
These goals include hatchery fish, which means a huge increase in artificial production--from the current 130-million-fish releases, to around 700 million--a strategy unlikely to pass muster with agencies administering ESA medicine like NMFS, and an interagency group that is developing a hatchery-reform effort.
The report also noted another basic inconsistency that should be addressed in the Council's future program. When the consultants added up expected benefits from the subbasin planning effort overseen by the Council after the 2000 program was finalized, they found an expected gain of only 600,000 fish--principally natural-origin fish.
The report said federal estimates of a 20-year time frame to determine whether fish objectives have been met, may be too optimistic. In fact, they say, given Bonneville Dam fish counts since 1938, it's hard to tell whether fish production has increased or decreased since then, "let alone determine its cause. In fact, if the last 5 years of data were not considered, Bonneville Dam counts in 1938 and 2000 are nearly identical."
The big difference since the late 1930s, says the report, is the dramatic shift in proportions of hatchery and wild fish.
Maybe returning fish numbers at Bonneville Dam is not such a realistic goal after all, said the report, if the region cannot easily determine how many of them get back to each one of the basin's ecological provinces, where specific Council efforts are focused.
Further confusion develops because federal efforts to improve ESA stocks don't use the provincial boundaries in their analyses, but rely on the distribution of "evolutionarily significant units" for analyzing fish productivity and abundance.
Even the independent panel of scientists who reviewed the F&W program in 2001 was confused about it. It noted that the program "laid out" a vision and scientific principles and biological objectives at the basin level, but that most implementation would occur at the subbasin level, with projects picked for funding prioritized through a planning process.
But the panel said the mechanism was "unclear" for just how those priorities determined by the planning process resulted in actions on the ground. -B. R.
The following links were mentioned in this story:
A Review Of Salmon Recovery Strategies For The Columbia River Basin, ISAB, August 22, 2001
Subscriptions and Feedback
Subscribe to the Fishletter notification e-mail list.
Send e-mail comments to the editor.
THE ARCHIVE :: Previous NW Fishletter issues and supporting documents.
NW Fishletter is produced by Energy NewsData.
Publisher: Cyrus Noë, Editor: Bill Rudolph
Phone: (206) 285-4848 Fax: (206) 281-8035
