Salmon Protection Plan to Target Urban Habitats

Endangered species regulation will move from the rural back-country to the heart of one of the nation’s fastest-growing metropolitan areas today with the federal government’s expected decision to extend protected status to salmon in urban waters around the cities of Seattle and Portland, Ore.

Never before has the 26-year-old Endangered Species Act been invoked to demand protection and recovery of a dwindling species whose habitat--from key navigation routes like the Willamette River to small neighborhood creeks--permeates the housing tracts, industrial parks and shopping malls of a major urban center.

The National Marine Fisheries Service said it would specify that nine salmon and steelhead groupings in Washington and Oregon are threatened with extinction. The agency plans to defer until September decisions on whether to extend similar protection to chinook salmon along the California coast and in the Central Valley.

The Pacific Northwest listings, combined with others that already have been made or are pending later this year, will affect areas that are home to two-thirds of the population of Washington and Oregon. The region’s major cities are undergoing rapid growth--the Seattle area alone is gaining 60,000 new residents a year--that is threatening to choke out the habitat of the remaining wild fish.

With today’s expected listings, the long arm of the federal law will be brought to bear for the first time not only on rural logging and grazing, but on neighborhood road culverts, strip malls and gas stations near rivers and creeks--and possibly even on homeowners who wash their cars in their driveways and fertilize their lawns.

“This mandates us to do what we should have been doing many, many years ago. It certainly reflects the poor state of our waterways, and Portland already has made the commitment that we’re going to do whatever we can to reach the goal of fish recovery,” said Portland Mayor Vera Katz.

Officials in Seattle and Portland said the federal listings could add muscle to attempts in both regions to check urban sprawl. Both areas already are taking steps to halt building adjacent to streams, remove road culverts, aggressively restore natural habitat around watersheds, control the amount of land that is paved over and step up enforcement of water quality standards.

But evidence of sharply declining fish stocks indicates that more will need to be done, said David Moskowitz, salmon coordinator for Portland Metro, the area’s regional governing council. “In a sense, no one can avoid participating in solving the problem,” he said. “The Endangered Species Act is telling us you have a problem with your watersheds. Everybody’s got to lay a shoulder to the wheel.”

“We’re not going to tear down the Seafirst Bank building and replant it with Douglas fir,” said Ron Sims, county executive of Washington’s King County. “The key right now will be to make sure we’re smarter with the land mass that’s available.

“We thought the fish could live in any environment, and that our water would always be clean. We are paying the price for that now,” Sims added. “The area is going to have to become greener.”

The chinook to be listed as threatened today in Seattle’s Puget Sound is the brawny king of the salmon world--some of which have been known to weigh up to 120 pounds. But its numbers have declined severely since the record 700,000 wild chinook that spawned in Puget Sound in 1908. Last year, only about 40,000 wild chinook returned.

On the upper Willamette River in Oregon, only about 4,000 fish are believed to be spawning outside of hatcheries.

The listings go into effect within 60 days on federal lands and on projects requiring federal permits. The fisheries service subsequently will make determinations of how they will be enforced on state, local and private lands. Theoretically, the listings would prohibit any development that would come at the expense of a salmon or its habitat. However, the Clinton administration has attempted to develop cooperative agreements with local jurisdictions and landowners that will result in species and habitat protection without day-to-day federal involvement in land use decisions or an outright moratorium on new development.

Portland already is spending $1 billion in a project to prevent sewage overflows into the Willamette River and is considering removal of a small dam on the Little Sandy River--in addition to an exhaustive review of virtually every city policy to improve water conditions for salmon.

In Washington, the three-county Puget Sound area has developed a comprehensive plan for habitat protection and restoration that officials hope will come close to meeting federal requirements. King County has budgeted $9 million for scientific studies and watershed improvement plans and an additional $6.5 million for purchase of crucial salmon habitat. Seattle has announced it will halt all logging and tear out logging roads on the huge watershed that provides most of the city’s water, a plan that undoubtedly will result in higher water and power bills.

Washington Gov. Gary Locke’s $100-million-a-year plan for the rest of the state is currently stalled in the Legislature.

One of its key components is a cooperative agreement worked out with the timber industry that specifies harvest practices on 10 million acres of forest near salmon habitat over the next 50 years, a plan the timber industry claims will cost it $2 billion in revenue. In exchange, the state would cut the industry’s taxes by $14 million to $18 million a year.

The plan has drawn criticism from environmental groups, who generally say the two states are not moving aggressively enough to check the sharp downward slide of the salmon.

“Business as usual is not working. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be at the point of listing every species of salmon and steelhead that swim in our waters. We’ve spent a hundred years taming and damming and destroying. We’re going to have to spend the next hundred years figuring out how to save what we’ve destroyed,” said Bill Arthur, regional director of the Sierra Club.

But Arthur and others said that could be a good thing. Indeed, the response of most local officials was not to challenge the federal listings but almost to welcome them.

“The salmon are very much an icon of the Northwest,” said Seattle Mayor Paul Schell. “The irony here is that if we work hard to save the fish, we may indeed save ourselves. It’ll translate into the benefits of sound transportation planning, growth management planning and a move past rampant consumerism to think about what we’re doing as it impacts the next generation. If any area of the country has a chance to attack this problem, it’ll be us.”

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