Salmon Win Clash Over Administration’s Dam Project

A federal judge Thursday rejected the Bush administration’s $6-billion plan to improve the Columbia Basin hydroelectric dam system, saying it violated the Endangered Species Act by failing to protect threatened and endangered salmon.

Noting that federal law puts salmon “on an equal footing with power production,” U.S. District Judge James A. Redden ruled in favor of a challenge by environmentalists, Indian tribes and fishermen to a NOAA Fisheries plan for balancing dams against salmon.

That plan -- called a biological opinion -- contended that $6 billion in improvements to dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers and other measures would eliminate threats to the survival of the salmon.

Redden rejected the underlying principle of the NOAA plan -- that the dams were part of the ecosystem. Accepting that assumption would make the government responsible only for the small percentage of mortality to salmon from changes in dam operations, not for the greater damages from the dams themselves.

Salmon often are killed or injured as they pass through the dams while swimming out to sea and returning to spawn.

D. Robert Lohn, NOAA Fisheries’ Northwest regional administrator, said the agency’s efforts to protect salmon were yielding measurable improvements, restoring more than 3,000 miles of salmon habitat and producing locally generated recovery plans.

The biological opinion rejected by the judge called for spilling a full measure of water over four dams on the Columbia and two on the lower Snake to help juvenile salmon migrating to the ocean. Lohn said switching to some “untried operation” in a drought year like this one “would be risky and speculative for salmon survival.”

Redden will hear arguments June 10 on changing dam operations now that the biological opinion has been struck down. Issues include how much water to spill over dams to help fish rather than running it through turbines to produce power.

Bonneville Power Administration administrator Steven J. Wright said spilling more water for fish, as plaintiffs suggested, would cost Northwest electricity customers $100 million.

Environmentalists hailed Redden’s decision as a major victory in their long-running battle with the Bush administration.

“The agencies have to go back and come up with an honest analysis of the trade-offs between keeping obsolete dams and restoring salmon and restoring communities in the Columbia Basin,” said Jan Hasselman, an attorney for the National Wildlife Federation, one of the plaintiffs in the case.

Charles Hudson, spokesman for the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, characterized Redden’s ruling as “ridiculing if not chastising what the federal government put forth.”

Redden also found that NOAA Fisheries, a federal agency also known as the National Marine Fisheries Service, was arbitrary and capricious in deciding that long-term improvements to critical salmon habitat, such as dam improvements, would offset other damage.

The judge said the plan stood in sharp contrast to prior proposals, was not comprehensive enough to assure the protection of salmon and did not address the prospects for salmon recovery.

“It is apparent that the listed species are in serious decline and not evidencing signs of recovery,” the judge wrote.

It is the second time in two years Redden has rejected a NOAA Fisheries proposal for balancing salmon and electricity needs.

Under the Endangered Species Act, NOAA Fisheries, must decide whether the federally operated dams -- 14 on the Columbia River alone -- jeopardize the survival of 12 threatened and endangered runs of salmon, and if they do, propose ways to overcome the harm.