[5] Fish Passage Center Tries End Run Around Science Panel

After two science panels recommended that the Fish Passage Center stop PIT-tagging downriver stocks in its controversial 10-year-old Comparative Survival Study, the FPC is looking to fund the efforts by moving them to another project administered by the Center--its smolt monitoring program.

The study has been looking at the potential benefits of barging, and compares survival between upriver and downriver stocks. But the science review said the CSS upriver/downriver comparison was confounded by too many variables to be of any value. However, that hasn't stopped FPC head Michele DeHart from requesting a change in the BPA-funded Smolt Monitoring Program to add $144,000 to pay for tagging 15,000 spring chinook at Carson Hatchery and 6,000 wild spring chinook in the Warm Springs River.

DeHart's request for the added tagging money will be taken up in January by a budget oversight group (BOG) that deals with within-year changes to BPA's F&W projects.

Mark Fritsch, staffer with the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, told NW Fishletter that the BOG will make its recommendation on the proposed change after its Jan. 8 meeting. If it recommends the added funding, the change must still be approved by NWPCC members and the earliest that could happen is sometime in May.

According to DeHart's Dec. 4 request, "The action shifts groups from one project in the CSS to the SMP as the result of an ISAB/ISRP review that recognized the groups as important to monitoring but not as part of a CSS analysis."

But the reviewers only said that existing CSS tagging of wild spring chinook and steelhead in the John Day River was not justified for CSS, but "may be justified for other evaluation purposes. The John Day tagging effort is already funded by another project."

Fish and wildlife managers may have to make a new case for tagging the Carson and Warms Springs fish in the future.

Some BPA customers have already taken notice, including Scott Corwin, executive director of the Public Power Council.

"If the experts on the ISAB have questioned it, and Northwest Power and Conservation Council staff recommend against funding," Corwin said, "it makes you doubt whether this is the best use of ratepayer dollars ... it seems like a strange request."

At its meeting last week in Portland, the Northwest Power and Conservation Council voted in favor of a staff recommendation that echoed the science review and said not to fund any future downriver tagging work unless information gathered from it would be useful in other areas. But their recommendation included a call to tag more steelhead from the Snake River. During discussion with staffers, the Council learned that the downriver Carson hatchery fish had already been tagged for the 2008 year.

State fish and wildlife managers weighed in with a Nov. 29 letter to the power council that called for funding the PIT-tagging program for all the current CSS stocks, both upriver and down, saying the scientific review supports the addition of more downriver stocks to determine SARs and population metrics "as part of regional monitoring and evaluation." -B. R.

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