[2] If Hydro BiOp Flops, So Does New Harvest Plan, Irrigators Say
A feisty group of Northwest irrigators has raised some serious questions about the latest salmon plan that is about to be tested in court. They say future agreed-upon harvest rates will ensure that the recovery of Snake River fall chinook will never be reached.
Due to their limited intervenor status in the ongoing litigation over the BiOp, the harvest issue is something that Federal District Court Judge James Redden wouldn't even allow them to bring up. He has restricted the irrigators' group to arguing about the John Day Pool drawdown issue, another strategy strongly supported by Oregon.
However, in an Oct. 23 letter to Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski, NOAA Fisheries and BPA, the Columbia-Snake Irrigators Association said that arguments used by plaintiff environmental and fishing groups, the state of Oregon, and some tribes to challenge the latest hydro BiOp could be used just as well against the new harvest BiOp, a plan the plaintiffs all support.
"Our press release points out the duplicity in Oregon's position, relative to the two BiOps," said the irrigator group's principal consultant, Darryll Olsen.
The irrigators said both documents "depend on the same body of technical information--including the Supplemental Comprehensive Analysis (SCA)--for their empirical foundation."
Taking issue with Oregon's arguments, especially recent declarations filed by the state in the newest litigation over the BiOp, the irrigators cited the work of Canadian researcher David Welch. The irrigators said his latest studies show that juvenile fish survive passage through the hydro system at comparable rates to river systems without dams, like the Fraser, in British Columbia.
Welch has also found no difference in ocean survival (to northern Vancouver Island) between barged fish and those that migrated inriver, which could deal a blow to the plaintiffs' arguments about latent mortality (others say Welch's initial findings are very premature).
Furthermore, they cited NOAA Fisheries' own analyses, which has found juvenile fish survival through the hydro system has "little influence on SAR [smolt-to-adult returns]."
"In summation," say the irrigators, "the hydro system survivals are now relatively high, and comparable to non-hydro based river systems. Further marginal system changes will not yield measurable results."
They said Oregon's arguments that find fault with the feds' "trending towards recovery" jeopardy analysis in the hydro BiOp means that the analysis used in the 2008 harvest BiOp is faulty as well.
The state also argued that even if the jeopardy metrics are lawful, the feds were still guilty of using "unreasonably optimistic" time periods to justify their trends.
The irrigators say the same time periods were used in the harvest BiOp. And since the harvest BiOp is partly based on benefits expected from juvenile survival improvement strategies outlined in the hydro BiOp, such benefits cannot be used in the effects analysis of the harvest analysis if the hydro BiOp is defective.
"For these reasons," say the irrigators, "if Judge Redden were to accept Oregon's arguments and find the hydro BiOp, or a portion thereof, 'legally deficient,' his decision would force the conclusion that the harvest BiOp must be set aside as well."
The irrigators commissioned their own scientific report of new harvest regimes that call for inriver increases and planned decreases in ocean fisheries. Longtime regional consultants John Pizzimenti, Charlie Paulson and Tim Fisher worked on it. The latter two have also contributed analysis on various aspects of the feds' latest hydro BiOp.
The irrigators' report says that present harvest rates for Snake fall chinook won't allow for future sustained recovery of the ESU, while a "no-harvest" scenario would ensure sustained recovery by about 2015.
However, even when reduced future Canadian harvest rates were factored in, the report said, sustained recovery rates for the fall chinook won't be reached until about 2050.
"Without further changes to harvest regimes, SRFC [Snake River fall chinook] recovery levels will be highly dependent on positive ocean conditions--the other dominating factor affecting fish survival," the report said.
The irrigators say the region cannot have it both ways--high harvest rates or sustainable ESA recovery standards. They said Oregon's position on the hydro BiOp would necessitate an overhaul of the harvest BiOp, "in order to reach the sustainable recovery standards the state insists cannot currently be achieved."
Olsen told NW Fishletter that he doesn't expect Oregon to respond, but that he does hope the harvest report will get some of the tribes and agencies to sit down and talk about whether they want realistic harvest levels and ultimate recovery or a situation that is never resolved, regardless how many hundreds of millions of dollars are plowed into recovery efforts.
He didn't leave out the possibility that the irrigators might sue over the harvest BiOp themselves. But such a tactic would put them in a position of supporting the hydro BiOp in that litigation, while opposing the harvest BiOp. If they were successful in challenging harvest levels, wouldn't that topple the hydro BiOp as well?
The irrigators' report suggests that harvest levels on fall chinook (inriver and ocean combined) should be brought down to 25 percent from the 43 percent NMFS has suggested to reach recovery within 20 years.
But they also note that "even if a moratorium were to be employed and populations built up to some larger base than today's, it is not possible to return to the harvest levels of today without simply turning those curves [population response to harvest] upside down, at least with all other things being the same as today."
Their bottom line--"We need to reduce harvest dramatically, at least until we can implement habitat expansion and improved harvest methods emerge."
Action agencies were reportedly suffering some anxiety at the timing of the irrigators' statements, worried that it might have an adverse effect on the recent agreements between them and some tribes that traded hundreds of millions of dollars in salmon recovery projects for support of the new hydro BiOp.
Debate over the harvest rates of ESA-listed fish has been a hot topic of discussion for years. Back in August 2001, NMFS' own panel of nationally-known independent experts called the Recovery Science Review Panel questioned what they called the biologically unjustified harvest levels on some ESUs, including Snake River fall chinook. They also called for reexamination of policy constraints caused by Indian treaty fishing rights.
Their ruminations were soon condemned by Washington state tribal leaders and WDFW. NMFS regional administrator Bob Lohn apologized to them in a Feb. 2002 letter that said the panel had strayed into areas of policy.
Lohn said his agency hadn't provided the panel with enough information to "leave the meeting with a clear understanding of the biological basis for setting allowable harvest levels that do not impede recovery of listed salmonids."
Tribal officials were outraged that the panel had recommended looking at whether the ESA trumped tribal treaty rights. NMFS said it would work with the science panel to "help make the science-policy boundary as clear as possible." -B. R.
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