[2] Stimulus Funding Will Fill Hole In Corps' Dam-Fix Budget

Though federal fish policy managers say they have already wrung most of the survival improvement out of the hydro system, it's not stopping them from spending another $500 million over the next 10 years to boost fish survival even more.

With the new BiOp calling for performance standards at each dam--96-percent juvenile survival for spring chinook and 93 percent for fall chinook--the Corps of Engineers still has a slew of actions up its collective sleeve. Some dams already achieve those goals, but others do not, especially The Dalles and John Day dams.

The Obama administration had allocated $96 million for these Corps' actions in the 2010 fiscal year, but Congress pared that down to $86 million, with another $5-million cut expected, according to Corps officials.

But fish wonks got some good news in late October, when it was announced that the Corps will get a $5-million shot in the arm courtesy of the feds' stimulus funding, which will boost spending back into the $86-million range for the fiscal year.

The news was broadcast at the Oct. 22 meeting of the Systems Configuration Team, a collection of fish managers and federal agencies whose main task is to prioritize the actions designed to improve fish survival at the eight federal dams.

Top project for the coming year is a $20-million spillway wall at The Dalles Dam that is designed to improve juvenile salmonid survival by reducing the time young salmon spend in the dam's tailrace and being picked off by predators like pikeminnow.

The Dalles Dam is still the one of the toughest spots on the river for salmon passage, due in part to its unusual configuration. To anchor it to bedrock, the dam was built parallel to the river flows, which has caused confused flows in the tailrace and keeps young salmon from exiting in a speedy manner.

The budget also includes some new items that were added after the recent BiOp review by the Obama administration; $600,000 for starting a work plan for lower Snake dam breaching and drawdown studies for John Day Pool, along with development of a salmon life-cycle model based on NOAA Fisheries' dam passage model COMPASS.

Other big-ticket items include more than $9 million to study the feasibility of trap-and-haul fish operations on the Willamette River, $3.7 million for more work to move birds out of the Columbia estuary to reduce predation and $11 million for lower-river BiOp performance testing. Another $4 million has been delegated for various lamprey studies.

The funding for the lower-river performance testing was reduced from $15 million, thanks to $2 million in stimulus money and a change in the testing planned for this year.

The original plan called for acoustic tracking research and other studies to measure dam survival from John Day to Bonneville, but a turbine outage at Bonneville will keep the Corps from trying to measure survival at that dam this year.

The loss of the turbine will likely reduce the ability of Power House II's corner collector's to get juveniles past the concrete, so any attempt to measure overall survival at the dam would probably be underestimated this year. -B. R.

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