Clinton Plan Calls for Removing 2 Dams to Restore Salmon Runs

In an unusual move to protect the Northwest’s declining runs of wild salmon, the Clinton administration has budgeted $111 million to remove two aging dams from the Elwha River on the edge of the Olympic National Park.

Stepping into a heated conflict that has pitted the seasonally spawning fish against the hydroelectric dams that power most of the Northwest, the administration included the removal of the fish-impeding dams as a major environmental initiative in the 1997 budget unveiled Tuesday.

The plan to remove the dams, if it clears spending opposition in the Republican-led Congress, would provide one of the first major precedents for dam removal to protect fish runs and would restore a pristine river on Washington’s northern Olympic Peninsula that once was one of the nation’s most productive salmon runs.

“The significance is huge. For President Clinton to take funding on this and make it a national priority is a recognition of the environmental and economic benefits that will flow from restoring the Elwha River,” said Shawn Cantrell of the Friends of the Earth, who called the agreement to restore the Elwha “among the most important environmental settlements in the Pacific Northwest in recent years.”

The proposal is likely to have a rough run through Congress, where Sen. Slade Gorton (R-Wash.) already has indicated that he favors a cheaper plan to buy the dams, built in 1914 and 1927, and install fish passage systems that would be less costly than breaking down the structures.

But Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), who has supported the plan to remove the dams, said the government will be faced with millions of dollars more in litigation costs from Native American tribes if it doesn’t act now to restore the salmon.

“This is a place where we can make a huge difference, and that’s why we’re doing what we should have done back in 1914. They put those dams in without any regard to the salmon, and we are fixing a wrong from a long time ago,” Murray said in an interview.

A coalition of environmental groups, Native American tribes, Olympic National Park supporters and even the Daishowa America Co. paper mill--which gets a third of its power supply from the dams--has agreed after years of conflict that the best alternative is to remove the dams. Most of the major federal agencies, including the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Park Service, also have agreed.

The issue of dam removal is a political tinderbox in the Northwest, where huge dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers generate the bulk of the region’s cheap power. Salmon runs throughout the Columbia basin have dropped precipitously, in large part because thousands of fish die passing downstream over the dams as juveniles and trying to swim back over them when they return as adults to spawn.

Few people are talking seriously about major dam removals. But environmental groups argue that the two small dams on the Elwha provide a good opportunity to successfully restore a salmon run that once included 100-pound chinook salmon, seen nowhere else that size in the continental United States.

At present, the few spawning salmon are stopped short at the first dam, 4.9 miles up the 45-mile river.

Unlike other Northwest rivers plagued by a broad range of environmental degradation, the Elwha could provide a unique chance for full restoration because nearly its entire watershed lies within the preserve of the Olympic National Park, salmon protection groups contend.

“Implementation of the Elwha Act represents the single best opportunity to restore wild salmon anywhere in the Pacific Northwest,” said Bill Robinson of Trout Unlimited.

Daishowa America Co., which through a subsidiary owns the dams, is guaranteed acquisition costs for the dams, plus a payment of $29.5 million for 30 years’ worth of cheap power that the company must forgo.

“Daishowa’s position has been that if all the various interests came together and supported the Elwha Act, then Daishowa would support it too--as long as the act supported its interests, which it does,” company spokesman Bob Hartley said.