Dam Stupid

According to the draft Columbia/Snake salmon and steelhead plan released October 31, 2007, the same old useless and occasionally counterproductive measures previously ruled illegal by the courts (barging, and the like) will cost $800 million a year. And current effusions of NMFS notwithstanding, the agency previously admitted that this kind of alleged "mitigation" will only slow the fish-extinction process.

Maintaining the navigation system costs taxpayers about $43 million a year yet saves Idaho farmers only about $6 million. And each time a lock passes a barge, water that could have produced electricity is lost.

There are more and bigger costs. The most ruinous expense may turn out to be legal liability. Facilitating the ongoing extinction of Columbia/Snake river salmonids (and even the current reduction to non-harvestable levels) violates the Stevens Indian Treaties of 1855 and could cost U.S. taxpayers as much as $12 billion in damages.

What's more, the courts are fed up with federal flouting of the Endangered Species Act in five illegal Columbia/Snake River salmon plans since 1993. U.S. District Court Judge James Redden, who declared the previous plan illegal in 2005 and its amended version illegal in 2006, was so incensed by the Bush administration's third (October 2007) draft that he threatened to vacate it if it isn't adequately rewritten (rather than remanding the final draft back to the feds as he has done in the past). Because the 1,291-page document is mostly Styrofoam peanuts and bubble wrap, there's not much to "fix," and it's hard to imagine that NMFS can come up with anything that can satisfy Redden by his imposed deadline (at this writing late March 2008), even if he grants the two-month extension the service has asked for.

If Redden follows through on his threat to vacate the final plan, it will leave the Corps, the Bureau of Reclamation and the Bonneville Power Administration without an Endangered Species Act take permit for the listed salmonids they kill with eight main-stem Columbia and Snake river dams. This would plunge the whole Northwest into economic chaos. Every environmental group and fish-advocacy outfit would be suing these agencies. They'd win, of course; and U.S. taxpayers would have to cover billions of dollars more in fines, damages, settlements and legal expenses.

"This administration is bent on preserving the Snake River dams at all costs," comments Bert Bowler, who recently left Idaho Rivers United to run a private advocacy group called Snake River Salmon Solutions and who worked 29 years as a fisheries biologist with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. "It has said right along that dam breaching is off the table, that we're just not going to look at it. In this salmon game all the administration has done is badmouth the federal judge -- It's our way or the highway,' the old, arrogant Bush gamesmanship. Right now we have only one state defending the fish and that's Oregon. And the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission has made some very critical comments even though the Bonneville Power Administration has been trying to buy them off. Idaho, Washington and Montana are all in with the feds."

"The Bush boys went backwards," says Bowler. "Standards were better in 1995 than they are now."

Inadequate as they were, at least the Clinton administration's plans in the 1990s admitted that the dams jeopardized the existence of salmonids, that recovery should be the goal and that if the plans failed, dam breaching should be considered. The current administration denied all these realities in its 2004 document. In fact, the NMFS had the gall to proclaim that paperwork rather than saving wild fish is its mission. "The Endangered Species Act does not mandate recovery; it mandates a recovery plan," it asserted.

"Little more than an analytical sleight of hand" is how Judge Sidney Thomas of the 9th Circuit Court defined the 2004 plan after the Bush administration unsuccessfully appealed Redden's ruling. Under this approach, added Thomas, "a listed species could be gradually destroyed, so long as each step on the path to destruction is sufficiently modest. This type of slow slide into oblivion is one of the very ills the Endangered Species Act seeks to prevent."

A perfect example of the "sleight of hand" that so angered Thomas and appalled the scientific community, including NMFS' own biologists, was the proclamation that there's no difference between wild fish and hatchery fish and that, henceforth, the latter would count equally in determining whether or not a stock requires listing and protection (See "Salmon Shell Game," FR&R November 2004).