By Samantha Wohlfeil
Feb 12, 2026
Last week, the Northwest Power and Conservation Council met in Spokane to take public comment on its draft Columbia River Basin Fish and Wildlife Program, a plan that is updated every five years.
Congress created the power council to represent the interests of people in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana, with the passage of the Northwest Power Act in 1980. In addition to tasking the council with creating a plan to mitigate fish and wildlife impacts from the region’s hydroelectric dams, the act also calls for the council to create and regularly update a power plan for the dams, which are managed by Bonneville Power Administration, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Bureau of Reclamation.
The current draft Fish and Wildlife Program, which was released in December, is one of the main updates before the council creates the Ninth Power Plan, which is expected to be released later this year.
The Fish and Wildlife Program calls for consistent spring and summer spill (noting voluntary spill over the dams has changed frequently over the last decade) in order to reliably track how it may help juvenile salmon reach the ocean. It also calls for increased management of predators, including walleye, northern pike and northern pikeminnow, which are all voracious eaters of other fish and thrive in the river conditions created by the dams.
The program also calls for habitat restoration, including land acquisition and maintenance, and vegetation planting to restore ecosystems that are vital to weakened fish runs.
The many goals in the nearly 200-page document will translate into real projects that the Bonneville Power Administration pays for, to the tune of about $300 million per year, including funding for state and tribal fisheries, hatcheries, and more.
‘THEY’RE NOT HERE’
After dams were built across Northwest rivers over the last century, historically abundant salmon and steelhead populations in the Snake and Columbia rivers plummeted, and access was completely lost to some tributaries, including the Spokane River.
Since 1987, the Northwest Power and Conservation Council’s goal has been to get the number of fish returning to the Columbia River back up to 5 million among all species.
“We are nowhere near that, with less than 2.5 million fish returning annually (and the majority are hatchery fish, not wild),” says Tanya Riordan, policy and advocacy director for Save Our Wild Salmon, via email to the Inlander.
The Northwest Power and Conservation Council notes the “10-year rolling average has been 2.3 million fish, a significant improvement from the 1990s when the average dipped to a low of 1.3 million and many stocks were listed under the Endangered Species Act.”
During the Spokane public hearing on Tuesday, Feb. 3, Save Our Wild Salmon staff and others called on the council to include explicit accountability measures for Bonneville Power to meet the fish goal.
“In previous iterations of the Fish and Wildlife Program, clear accountability metrics, timelines, and actions defined if fish recovery goals are not met have not been included,” Riordan writes. “With the Resilient Columbia Basin Agreement terminated by the Trump administration and continued efforts to weaken protections for endangered species, the NPCC 2026 Fish and Wildlife Program (and the Ninth Power Plan) is the best path right now to mitigate further harm to fish from hydropower operations in the Columbia and Snake rivers and make actionable progress towards recovery goals.”
Several speakers also asked for increased summer spill over the four lower Snake River dams through Aug. 31 (the program currently calls for elevated spill from mid-June to Aug. 1). They also requested the council include the potential for breaching those dams in the Ninth Power Plan.
Harvey Morrison, conservation chair of the Spokane Falls chapter of Trout Unlimited, told the council the hearing should have been conducted a day earlier, on Groundhog Day.
“Seems like I’ve played this day over and over and over,” Morrison said, referencing the 1993 movie that sees Bill Murray’s character stuck in a timeloop reliving the same day. “I first testified before this council on this Fish and Wildlife Program over 30 years ago.”
As he’s argued before, Morrison said the four lower Snake River dams never should have been built, and he noted that some fish runs now hover near extinction.
“For many years, I held the optimistic hope that this council would recognize that building these dams was a tragic and costly economic and ecological mistake, and that breaching them was the only sensible thing to do,” he said. “I urge the council to structure the Fish and Wildlife Program to facilitate the inevitable day when it becomes obvious that removing the dams is the only reasonable alternative.”
Craig Hill, 27, the youngest fluent speaker of the Spokane interior Salish language, spoke of the importance of fish to the Spokane Tribe and his great-great-grandmother, Sadie Boyd, who was alive before the Little Falls dam was built on the Spokane River in 1907-1910.
Similar to other speakers, he requested additional spill over the four lower Snake River dams, and consideration for breaching them.
Hill is from the Middle Band of the Spokane Tribe, known as snxʷméneʔi, and told the council the word for salmon, smłič, means “many backs,” a reference to abundant runs that used to populate the rivers before the dams.
“The literal translation of snxʷméneʔi is steelhead. I can’t call them smłič if they’re not here,” Hill said. “I can’t call myself snxʷméneʔi if they’re not here.”
Later, Hill tells the Inlander he finds it sad that some Spokane tribal members don’t realize they come from fishermen, because multiple generations have now grown up without having that connection to the river.
“My ancestors didn’t have a choice of whether they could have electricity or salmon. … Three generations of my family have lost our culture and language due to these impacts,” Hill says. “I enjoy electricity just as much as the next person, but I’d be willing to learn how to live without electricity if I could have salmon back. I know that’s not possible, not realistic, but that’s how important it is to my great-great-grandmother and my people.”
Public comment on the draft can be submitted by March 2 online.
