Northwest Power and Conservation Council’s latest fish program allocates $300 million per year on salmon recovery

By Kendra Chamberlain.
January 13, 2026

The Northwest Power and Conservation Council has released the latest draft plan for its 40-year-old Columbia River Basin Fish and Wildlife Program. The plan steers the next five years of hydrosystem operations for dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers to support salmon, steelhead and other species.

The council says its proposed actions will result in cooler water temperatures, elevated spill levels in spring and summer, reductions in ramping and daily flow fluctuations and reduced predation.

Funded by the Bonneville Power Administration, the plan allocates $300 million annually toward the cause, including funding habitat restoration projects throughout the Columbia River Basin.

The nearly 200-page document underscores the scale and complexity of salmon recovery.

“There are many factors that affect salmon recovery. Our focus here is on mitigating for hydrosystem impacts, and we have an ‘all of the above’ set of tools that we use to apply to that,” Kris Homel, program performance biologist at the NPCC’s fish and wildlife division, told Columbia Insight.

The NPCC has set a goal of reaching five million salmon returning to the Basin each year. Current estimates peg the 10-year rolling average at about half that number.

The NPCC’s Fish and Wildlife Program is one of the larger management plans in the region.

Since the Trump administration decided to abandon the historic Columbia River Basin Restoration Plan with Tribes agreed to in 2023, some conservationists are looking to the NPCC’s Fish and Wildlife Program, and the companion power plan the Council will develop next, to fill the gaps.

“This is absolutely the best path right now to mitigate further harm to fish from the hydropower operations and make actual progress toward important recovery goals,” Tanya Riordan, policy and advocacy director at the conservation nonprofit Save our Salmon, told Columbia Insight.

Regulating spill

One of the stickier issues at play is spill levels at dams during spring and summer migration periods for salmon.

Spill levels have been altered a number of times over a relatively short period of time, according to Patty O’Toole, NPCC’s fish and wildlife division director, making it difficult to draw reliable conclusions about their impacts.

A key goal of the draft plan is to hold spring and summer spill levels at dams at a consistent level long enough to study the impacts of that level.

“Spill levels, spring spill particularly, have really changed every couple of years, and there hasn’t been enough time at any one level to learn that much,” O’Toole said. “That’s resulted in a lot of debate over the effectiveness of this spill level or that spill level.

“A salmon life cycle is not just a couple of years. We’re talking five, seven, eight years for some species, just to turn around one single life cycle. So if you really want to know if things are helping it takes longer than a couple years to learn from that.”

The draft plan prioritizes spring spill to the 125% gas cap 24 hours a day from April to the middle of June. “Gas cap spill” means spill to the maximum level that meets, but does not exceed, the “total dissolved gas” criteria allowed under applicable state water quality standards.

Higher spill levels will be prioritized from mid-June through Aug. 1 at the lower Snake River dams, and through Aug. 15 at lower Columbia River dams.

But Save Our Salmon’s Riordan pointed out that tribal fish managers have called for elevated spill levels to be held through the entire month of August, to support remaining wild stock of some salmon species.

“Juvenile salmon migration throughout the warmer August period yields a significant, oversized portion of the wild spawners returning to the Columbia and Snake rivers,” said Riordan. “So it’s a really crucial timeframe to include that elevated level of spill for the juvenile out-migration.”

The Council is accepting public comment on the plan through March 2, and will be holding public hearings across Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana.

Columbia Insight: Trump kiboshed salmon recovery deal. Can this plan fill the gap?