PUD officials laud proposed salmon policy

Hatchery fish inclusion would better recognize PUD's fish-recovery efforts, says commission president

Officials at the Grant County PUD are pleased with the possibility of counting hatchery fish in determining the status of endangered Northwest salmon, but they realize that the proposed federal policy may not become law.

Last week, news leaked to the media that the federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) will no longer solely look at the health of wild salmon in determining whether the species can be removed from the endangered species list.

The decision was contained in a draft document, according to The Washington Post, who broke the story.

Linda Jones, the PUD's director of natural resources, said the PUD will closely follow NOAA as it formulates the policy, which is expected to be officially released in June.

The news will not change the PUD's environmental policies, which Jones said have been effective in protecting the salmon population in the Columbia River.

"Whatever policy comes into plan, we will be able to adapt to that," Jones said.

The new proposed policy is designed to enforce a federal judge's 2001 ruling that NOAA Fisheries, formerly known as the National Marine Fisheries Service, should have considered hatchery fish when it listed Oregon coastal coho salmon, according to news reports.

Each of the 26 distinct West Coast populations of salmon and steelhead trout that now receive protection under the Endangered Species Act are being re-evaluated, and decision on changing the status of at least eight

of them could be announced as early as June, Jim Lecky, inter-government program adviser for NOAA fisheries, told the Associated Press.

Grant PUD Commission President Tom Flint applauded the proposed change and said it fixes a policy that did not make sense before.

Flint said the PUD has not received credit for some of its fish-friendly programs because hatchery salmon were the only ones to benefit. For example, the inclusion of hatchery salmon would help salmon mortality

rate at the PUD's Priest Rapids and Wanapum dams.

"The decision is something we've been working on for a very long time — that there is not a distinction between the wild and hatchery salmon," he said.

Flint founded the Save Our Dams coalition before becoming PUD commission, and through that group Flint said he learned that science does not show a need to reduce the amount of water spilled over dams to protect salmon runs.

The proposal to count the hatchery salmon has not pleased environmental groups, who fear the new policy could allow the federal government to spend less money on salmon-recovery programs.

"This is the same sort of mechanistic, blind reliance on technology that got us into this problem in the first place," Chris Wood, vice president for conservation at Trout Unlimited, told The Washington Post.

"We built dams that block the fish, and we are trucking many of these fish around the dams. Now the administration thinks we can just produce a bazillion of these hatchery fish and get out from underneath the yoke of the Endangered Species Act."