Expanded Threatened Salmon List Urged

The government proposed on Friday that more Northwest salmon be declared threatened species, the latest step in a high-stakes battle between protectors of the dwindling fish and users of the region’s vast Columbia River basin.

The National Marine Fisheries Service softened the potential economic impact by recommending lumping two fish runs together as one population and finding another does not warrant protection because its native strand already is extinct.

Fishermen, shippers, farmers and hydroelectric ratepayers all stand to feel the impact of government action requiring the diversion of water to help the salmon make their trip to the ocean and back to river spawning grounds.

Environmentalists say the fish are headed for extinction largely because of dams built on the Snake and Columbia rivers.

Officials have suggested saving the salmon could boost utility rates by 10% to 33% because water used to generate power would have to be released free of the turbines.

The National Marine Fisheries Service, the government’s fish experts, took the first major step in April, proposing endangered species protection for the Snake’s sockeye salmon. The agency said that distinct species already may be past the brink of extinction.

Regional lawmakers and business leaders feared the sockeye proposal signaled the agency eventually could find all of the more than 200 Northwest salmon runs to be distinct population groups worthy of federal protection.

But Friday’s announcement broke in the other direction, finding that the spring and summer chinook constitute a single group.

“Nature is more complex than (the National Marine Fisheries Service) wants to admit,” David Bayles of the Oregon Rivers Council said in criticizing the proposal.

“Lumping the spring and summer chinook together just hides the depth of the problem. We need to respect and restore the complexity that is out there,” he said.

The agency Friday proposed that the Snake River’s fall chinook salmon be listed as threatened next June under the Endangered Species Act. It determined that the Lower Columbia coho does not warrant a listing.

Rep. Jolene Unsoeld (D-Wash.) said the new listing proposals are a sign that the region’s quality of life is eroding.

“Within the last year, we have come to understand that despite good intentions, we have neglected the Columbia River and its salmon,” she said.

The federal agency said Friday that Snake River spring-summer chinook once numbered more than 1.5 million annually during their returns to spawning grounds but have declined to fewer than 10,000 distributed over the entire Snake River basin in Idaho, Oregon and Washington.