[6] 92 Members Of Congress Say Feds' Columbia Salmon Plan Needs More Work

Nearly a hundred members of the House of Representatives have signed a letter to NOAA head Conrad Lautenbaucher that says the feds' new salmon plan doesn't go far enough. Since it doesn't study removing any Snake River dams, they said the new hydro BiOp should contain "a suite of measures, short of dam removal" that would give ESA-listed fish "safer" inriver migration conditions.

They said the plan needs a more proactive stance in the face of climate change, and since it's going to cost another $7 billion to $8 billion on top of the $7 billion already spent, it shouldn't contain measures "that appear to fall drastically short of what's necessary to protect and restore these species."

They called on Lautenbaucher to produce a bolder and more comprehensive plan. But conspicuously absent from the signatories are most members from the Northwest delegation. Only Washington's Jim McDermott (D), Oregon's Earl Blumenauer (D) and Darlene Hooley (D) signed the letter.

Rep. Blumenauer and Thomas Petri (D-WI) led the effort. "This is the third biological opinion under consideration by the region since 2000, and we can't afford not to get it right," Blumenauer said in a press release distributed by the Save Our Wild Salmon coalition. "The potential impacts of global warming on endangered Northwest salmon make this task even more critical. I hope the administration will seriously consider the suggestions in our letter."

"In signing this letter, Congress is sending a strong message to NOAA Fisheries that all salmon recovery options must be considered, including alternatives that the agencies have ignored until now, despite their sound scientific basis and economic viability," said Autumn Hanna, Senior Program Director for Taxpayers for Common Sense. "With more than $7 billion in taxpayer dollars already spent and salmon still in decline, we must target our resources to the most cost-effective, scientifically credible recovery solutions."

The letter is also supported by American Rivers, Idaho Rivers United, Earthjustice, National Wildlife Federation, and the Sierra Club.

But it's unlikely that the federal agency in charge of writing the new BiOp, due now May 5, will change course much from the draft released in December. NOAA Fisheries' regional administrator Bob Lohn has said his staff will not study dam breaching because his agency has no authority to breach them, so it is an "action not reasonably certain to occur," one of the main reasons a federal judge threw out the agency's salmon plan in 2000, that has led to the government's second and third tries at developing a defensible plan for operating federal dams and improving salmon and steelhead stocks in the Columbia Basin.

The politicians' venting on salmon is getting to be a tradition. In Oct. 2004, 52 members of Congress, including McDermott and Peter DeFazio (D-OR), sent a letter to President Bush that said the draft BiOp "does not ensure self-sustaining harvestable populations by relying on legal technicalities to justify not having to fully mitigate for the operation of the hydro system." They urged Bush to direct the agencies to revise the draft to ensure "significant recovery" of the basin's fish runs. -B.R.

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