Editorials

Daily Astorian Editorial: North of Falcon is good news: There are chinook and coho seasons

Monday, April 15, 2013

“North of Falcon” might sound like the title of a Hardy Boys adventure novel, but it is the key to real-life adventures for thousands of real people who fish in Pacific Northwest maritime and coastal waters.

The 2013 North of Falcon process was concluded last week at the Pacific Fishery Management Council’s meeting in Portland. Council members conduct weeks of meetings leading up to this decision each year, with PFMC staff putting in much additional preparation time. Interested parties avidly monitor the entire process.

The good news is there will be seasons for Chinook and coho salmon in the Columbia River, coastal watersheds and offshore waters. This has not always been the case and it is no small thing. For example, subject to change as salmon runs develop, the iconic Buoy 10 recreational salmon season will start on its traditional date of Aug. 1. Until Sept. 1, there is a daily limit of two salmon, only one of which may be a Chinook. Other opportunities continue through the end of the year.

However, the overall tenor of 2013 continues a long trend of essentially conservative seasons. Managers tend to react quickly to any negative trends, and slowly or not at all to unexpected strength in returns of hatchery-produced fish.

This is a result of the need to rigorously protect any possible wild salmon mixed among the returnees. Minimizing the number of endangered fish that are hooked and injured before being released dictates a degree of caution that can sometimes be agonizing to fishermen and the businesses that depend on them.

The worse news is that salmon returns continue to be little but a shadow of what they once were. The hydropower system, habitat degradation and barriers to passage, past management errors, ocean conditions and other factors all combine to produce seasons that are pathetic by historical standards.

Although she is most familiar with the situation around Puget Sound, comments by the Swinomish Tribe’s fisheries manager are relevant throughout the Northwest:

“Salmon habitat continues to be lost and damaged at an alarming rate, and this trend shows no signs of improvement. Every year it is increasingly difficult to develop fisheries that meet the needs of Indian and non-Indian fishermen while still protecting weak wild stocks. Conservative fisheries, such as those developed for this year, must go hand-in-hand with protecting and restoring habitat to return salmon to abundance.”

Fixing degraded habitat is far easier said than done. It requires money and cooperation. But there are positive developments. Watershed restoration and preservation are now very much on the agenda. They are forethoughts rather than afterthoughts.

Much has been lost that will never be recovered. But from a court order that requires significant culvert restorations in Washington to dam removals on the Elwha and Klamath rivers, incremental improvements are being made. These may or may not be enough to counteract damage elsewhere, but they are a start.

Seattle Times Editorial: BPA, the next 75 years

Managing Northwest hydropower interests puts the Bonneville Power Administration into local frays and national skirmishes.

January 28, 2013

THE Bonneville Power Administration bids farewell to a good steward of a major Pacific Northwest institution and asset, as it welcomes a new administrator.

Steve Wright is stepping down as chief executive of BPA at the end of January. He has been in the top job since November 2000, in a long career that began with the power-marketing agency in 1981.

BPA was 75 years old in 2012, which means its role in the regional economy has long been taken for granted. The availability of cheap hydropower has driven everything from the development of an atomic weapon to the aerospace industry, aluminum plants, agricultural irrigation, server farms and, now, the bright lights to grow marijuana.

BPA’s dams have provided electricity, enabled the development of inland ports and caused havoc with salmon populations.

Wright has been in the middle of all the fights. He gets credit for doing a good job under difficult circumstances in the wake of the West Coast energy-marketing crisis in the early 2000s.

He also receives praise for reviving BPA’s energy conservation and efficiency efforts.

Wright earns lower marks for BPA’s stunted efforts to restore endangered salmon with a mantra about improving habitat.

Wright leaves his post after recent tensions over integrating wind power into the region’s menu of energy options.

His successor is Bill Drummond, who comes on board as an epic federal court battle over salmon, which has been in a court-ordered hiatus, will return to life.

Drummond joined BPA in October 2011 as deputy administrator.

He was manager of the Western Montana Electric Generating and Transmission Cooperative in Missoula, Mont., for 17 years.

He led the Public Power Council, representing the Northwest’s publicly owned utilities, from 1988 to 1994.

Drummond knows the region, BPA and its customers. That was Wright’s strength, along with an affable manner.

Bellingham Herald Op-ed: Basin stakeholders talks could break stalemate

By Buzz Ramsey

December 30, 2012

With the election over, it’s time for our new and returning elected officials to get to work making good on their campaign promises.

At the top of everyone’s list is job creation. We’ve got to get people back to work. Fortunately in the Northwest, I see some good prospects to do just that.

One of our region’s biggest challenges, to restore endangered Columbia Basin salmon, is also a tremendous opportunity to craft a comprehensive plan that recovers salmon while creating — some of us would say re-creating — good jobs right here in the Northwest.

Last year, a federal judge rejected the federal government’s Columbia and Snake Rivers salmon plan. It was the government’s third consecutive failed plan in a decade. The court ordered a new plan, due in just over a year at the end of 2013.

Rather than ask the agencies to simply update their old plan with small tweaks, however, my company, Yakima Bait, and hundreds of other Washington businesses believe that our economy and our towns would be far better served by a new, collaborative approach.

The Obama administration and our region’s leaders need to recognize that the Columbia Basin’s salmon problem is also a jobs problem. The opportunity is to fix both together. Done right, a lawful, science-based plan crafted by the people of the region can create thousands of new jobs in Washington and across the Pacific Northwest.

Thirty years ago, five or six major tackle companies operated in the Northwest, each with a strong customer base here, along with a national market.

Today, Yakima Bait is the only one left standing. The others went out of business or shrunk and were bought out. The decline of these businesses has paralleled the decline of salmon and steelhead in the Columbia Basin. I fear our sector will continue losing ground without serious and durable improvements in the fishery.

I know that times change. We can’t re-create the past, nor should we. But we can work toward a better future, as Northwesterners who care about healthy salmon, clean and affordable energy and a reliable inland freight transportation system.

If we succeed in moving salmon and steelhead off the endangered species list by dramatically rebuilding their numbers, we can create conditions that will lead to fishing and recreation jobs on a scale much greater than today’s.

Just the modest bumps in salmon numbers that we’ve seen over the past couple of years (the result of good ocean conditions and more spill at the dams, ordered by the court to help fish) have helped give our industry some temporary relief after years of decline. Completing the job by achieving sustained salmon recovery is our next step.

Yakima Bait is a $10 million-a-year company, based in Central Washington, supporting 200 family wage jobs here and in Mexico. I see young people coming to work for us, full of ideas and wanting to raise their families here. They deserve a bright future, and they can have it — right here in central Washington — if these salmon recover.

I know other good jobs also depend on the Columbia and Snake rivers. None of our sectors can stand still. Changes are under way to the federal dams and their role in our economies quite apart from salmon. The sportfishing and tackle industries believe further change is needed at the dams to restore salmon, but I also believe we can find paths forward, together, that work for fishermen, farmers, energy producers and users and others with a stake in a thriving Columbia Basin.

In that spirit, hundreds of Washington businesses have asked the president and our members of Congress, to change salmon policy so it is lawful, science-based, puts job creation center stage and lets river users collaborate directly with each other — along with Northwest states, Columbia River tribes and federal agencies — to find lasting solutions. The time for that collaboration is now. Let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work.

A cold-water sport fishing authority, Buzz Ramsey is brand manager for Yakima Bait Co. He lives in Klickitat with his wife, Maggie, and their boys Blake and Wade.

http://www.bellinghamherald.com/2012/12/30/2818980/basin-stakeholders-talks-could.html

Daily Astorian Editorial: Will NOAA’s new process matter?

Stakeholder consensus may show divisions over salmon are shifting

Monday, December 17, 2012

To borrow a metaphor from the Bible, it can seem easier to fit a hundred sea lions through the eye of a needle than it is to find regional agreement on wild salmon recovery efforts.

Such consensus is the goal of a new effort by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the front-line agency in charge of bringing Northwest salmon and steelhead back from the brink of extinction.

NOAA Fisheries is spending more than $200,000 with the Oregon Consensus program at Portland State University and the William D. Ruckelshaus Center in Washington state for interviews with about 200 stakeholders. A report will be produced about regional opinions on how best to proceed with the long slog toward viability for iconic species that were hammered flat.

Read more...

Oregonian Editorial: Saving Columbia Basin salmon requires a boost in the Northwest's focus and ingenuity

December 20, 2012

Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber, not typically given to hyperbole, issued a call in September decrying failures in "the war to save salmon." The problem with the word war is that it connotes immediacy and, even in the long term, daily calamity. But a war over salmon?

How about attention fatigue?

The region has spent more than $10 billion over the past two decades struggling to rebuild wild runs of the once-profuse Northwest fish. Along the way, U.S. District Court in Portland has four times rejected as inadequate the federal government's plan to save our salmon despite mandates to do so under the sweeping Endangered Species Act.

Yet here we are, anticipating from a new presiding judge in 2013 another ruling on whether the correct fish-saving measures are being taken. That's while some wild runs remain at risk of extinction and the Bonneville Power Administration <http://www.bpa.gov/Pages/home.aspx>; annually forks over hundreds of millions of dollars in ratepayer money to underwrite habitat restoration projects and bolster water flows through the Columbia Basin's hydroelectric system, the engine of modern life and commerce hereabouts.

If it isn't war, it is one fight with no apparent end in sight. The weapons are legal briefs, and among the combatants are biologists who dispute whether a wild fish differs from a hatchery fish and throw into question the effectiveness of remedies. Throughout, core strengths of Pacific Northwest culture -- a frothy mix of rural and urban interests, riverfront industries and irrigation-dependent farms, tribal values and federal management of Columbia River dams -- often collide, with wreckage landing in court. Lost in the many ecologic, political, cultural and economic benefits assigned to salmon is the amount of work their survival has meant to lawyers.

Kitzhaber's call was heard widely and apparently by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration <http://www.noaa.gov/>; , headed by former Oregon State University marine biologist Jane Lubchenco. NOAA, long involved in the fight to save salmon, this month announced it will underwrite a survey of the region's diverse interests in salmon with an eye to helping Northwest leaders find a productive way forward. Up to 200 interviews will be conducted across four states by neutral representatives from the Oregon Consensus program at Portland State University and the William D. Ruckelshaus Center in Washington state.

But there will be no quick solutions on a plate. NOAA's first goal, according to Deputy Regional Administrator Barry Thom, will be to establish by mid-2013 whether it's even possible to structure a regionwide conversation that could find enough common purpose to end the fight. If so, promising approaches will be outlined.

We're weary of any next discussion rooted in belief. The fish made it plain in their decline that modern life and development brought them within sight of doom before an historic effort was mounted to save them. But we're all for any discussion that can have as an outcome fewer lawsuits, fewer collisions of fish-saving strategies, fewer derailments in policy-setting. And we're all for Kitzhaber's argument that changes ahead in energy production -- from renewables to plain old conservation efforts -- could increase flexibility in dam operations for the benefit of fish.

The salmon are worth saving. But so many diverse constituents in the region will need to get on the same page to do so. We look to NOAA and Kitzhaber to bring what it takes to end a fight that, in taking so much money and so much time, threatens the recovery effort itself.

http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2012/12/saving_the_salmon_requires_a_r.html

Idaho Statesman Editorial: Our View, Idaho salmon: The $9,000 sockeye? There is a better answer

December 5, 2012

Compared to Lonesome Larry — who swam from the Pacific Ocean into legend two decades ago — today’s Idaho sockeye have a lot of company.

In 2012, 243 sockeye salmon made the improbable trip to Central Idaho’s Redfish Lake, following the migration route Lonesome Larry traveled alone in 1992. Returns topped 1,000 apiece in 2010 and 2011.

This considerable improvement has come at a considerable cost — calculated by the Seattle Times at $9,000 per fish since 1991.

The money has come from ratepayers who purchase electricity from the Bonneville Power Administration. The money has gone largely into hatchery programs to keep the sockeye from swimming ever closer to extinction.

But the sockeye have not recovered, in a legal or in a biological sense. They remain on the federal government’s endangered species list, where they landed one year before Lonesome Larry’s return home. And even the strongest sockeye returns pale in comparison to recovery goals: annual runs of 2,500 wild sockeye.

Idaho’s sockeye have only begun their long journey back.

Without the hatchery programs, the wild sockeye’s genetics could have been lost to the ages — and with that, Idaho could have lost a storied species and an irreplaceable component of its mountain ecosystem.

But while the hatcheries have their role, they also have their limitations. Hatcheries do not replace wild and naturally spawning sockeye. And despite the cost to ratepayers, hatcheries allow the region’s policymakers to comfortably avoid the more difficult decisions about salmon.

That most difficult, but most sustainable decision: breaching the four lower Snake River dams in eastern Washington. Since 1997, we have advocated dam removal as the best, and perhaps only, way to recover Idaho’s wild salmon and protect Idaho’s water users.

But there is an another advantage to breaching: It can eliminate the need for costly hatchery programs. Hatchery breeding is not true recovery. And at $9,000 a fish, it is not sustainable.

Read more here: 

http://www.idahostatesman.com/2012/12/05/2369572/the-9000-sockeye-there-is-a-better.html