Battle Brews Over Summer Spills for Salmon

PORTLAND, Oregon, December 17, 2003 (ENS) - Conservationists, businesses, commercial fishers and the state of Alaska are urging the Bush administration to maintain support for "summer spill" - a policy that requires water be spilled over federal dams to help young salmon migrate to the sea in the summer. The provision is considered by many to be an integral part of the federal plan to protect and restore salmon and steelhead in the Columbia and Snake River Basin, but dam operators say the practice wastes money and does little to help the fish.

The Bush administration is currently rewriting the salmon plan, which a federal judge ruled in May as invalid and in violation of the Endangered Species Act.

The judge determined there was no certainty that the recommended actions in the plan would be carried out and ordered the Bush administration to revise it by May 2004.

No decisions have yet been made on the revisions, but there is rising concern that the administration is considering the elimination of the summer spill requirement.

Columbia and Snake River salmon and steelhead must survive up to eight dams in order to spawn. (Photo courtesy Save Our Wild Salmon)

Summer spill allows fish to move past dams without going through the turbines - an impediment often lethal to the migrating salmon.

But utility executives are keen to bypass the requirement, which they say is expensive, ineffective and unnecessary. This past summer the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) requested a reduction in spills and said the practice cost it some $100 million during July and August.

Water diverted into spill gates - instead of through spinning turbines - reduces the output of hydroelectric facilities.

The BPA is the federal agency that oversees 31 federal hydroelectric projects in the region, including dams on the Columbia and Snake Rivers.

Fear over the court's reaction to reducing summer spills kept the federal managers from approving the policy for the BPA this past summer, but the agency has again requested reductions.

Bush administration officials acknowledge that the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) and the Army Corps of Engineers are developing a plan to test the impacts of reducing summer spills, but insist no decision has been finalized.

Even the suggestion of such reductions has drawn the ire of a coalition of conservationists, businesses and commercial fishers - and from the Alaska State Department of Fish and Game (DFG).

"The present request for reduced summer spill is a poor indicator of progress in meeting the standards set forth in the [federal salmon plan]," DFG Commissioner Kevin Duffy wrote in a letter to the NMFS Northwest Regional Administrator. "A request for reduced spill should not be routinely granted. Absent compelling justification, the request should be denied."

Wild salmon are considered by many to be an irreplaceable icon of the Pacific Northwest. (Photo courtesy Columbia & Snake Rivers Campaign)

"The bottom line is that spill is the safest way for salmon to get past the dams," said Rob Masonis of the conservation group American Rivers. "A decision by the administration to cut summer spill would be like coal in the stockings of salmon dependent families and businesses."

A recent assessment by utility consultants to the federal government found that on average only 15 fish are saved by summer spill - an assessment widely disputed by state, tribal, and federal agencies.

Tribal estimates suggest at least 10,000 adults would be impacted by this decision and a new study from the Fish Passage Center, which provides technical advice to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, shows that in August 2003 alone there were more than one million young salmon that would have been impacted by such a decision.

"These fish get a rare opportunity from Mother Nature to rebound a bit and the administration reacts by searching for ways to squander it," said Alan Moore of Trout Unlimited.

Robust returns to the Basin in recent years, which scientists say are the product of an unusual convergence of good water years and favorable ocean cycles, are a reason to continue summer spills, Moore said, not to curtail them.

In August President George W. Bush told an audience at Washington's Ice Harbor Dam that the disappearance of salmon from the Columbia and Snake Rivers would be "a huge loss." (Photo by Paul Morse courtesy White House)

The BPA's plea for economic relief is disingenuous, the coalition wrote in its letter to President Bush, because it ended fiscal year 2003 with a $550 million surplus.

"Though we share regional concerns about high electricity rates, it is difficult to argue in the face of BPA's surplus that cutting spill will provide needed financial relief," the coalition wrote. "Federal taxpayers and Northwest ratepayers have invested over $3 billion in recovering Columbia and Snake river salmon and steelhead since the early 1980s, without yet achieving sustainable wild returns. That investment should not be squandered."

Glen Spain of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations says a decision to limit summer spills would have "serious and real impacts on fishermen and the larger economy in the Northwest."

"We have already lost more than 25,000 jobs due to the decline of salmon populations and it is simply unfair to ask fishing communities that offer real, family wage jobs to cut back even further," Spain said.