Compromise Order Of The Day
Picture the Pacific Northwest’s economy and its tattered environmental heritage, fighting on a tightrope high above the spillway at Grand Coulee Dam.
When you read about restoration of the salmon runs, you’re reading about a high wire act that makes the spotted owl fiasco look like a walk in the park. Nobody wants either the economy or the salmon to take a header. But the battle’s so intense that both are in jeopardy. What the region needs is a compromise, not a fight to the death.
The compromise ought to include assistance from Congress, whose legal mandates helped create the current crisis.
During the last few months, two key agencies decided that the hydropower system must change its operations to accommodate the dying salmon runs.
Such a change is warranted. While a few wild salmon runs might be beyond restoration, for many others there is hope. Can we really accept the prospect of sterile rivers, when there’s still a fighting chance for the salmon’s survival?
It is true that the hydro system has spent large sums to save salmon. However, previous tactics such as barging and hatchery overproduction haven’t worked. Those tactics were designed to avoid inconveniencing the dams and the industries they serve.
It was a profound step when the Northwest Power Planning Council and the National Marine Fisheries Service each approved plans to alter river flows and reservoir levels, to make rivers more hospitable to migrating salmon. However, the plans will be expensive. Who should shoulder the cost?
At present, The Bonneville Power Administration must. It will pass the cost along to the region’s power users. However, BPA faces intensifying competition as a power supplier. Some customers are pursuing offers from other utilities. As BPA loses customers, where will it get revenue to repay the federal loans that built the dams, to maintain the power distribution grid … or save salmon?
Meanwhile, federal courts insist that the salmon be protected, as required by the Endangered Species Act, federal power laws and Indian treaties. Those legal mandates are very unlikely to be repealed. Federal courts are not competent to take over management of the region’s fish, forests, streams, farms, barges, dams and major industries - all parties to the salmon problem. But they could try.
Having imposed unfunded legal mandates, Congress also has a duty to help the Northwest bear the cost of compliance. If it fails to do so, the region could wind up in a tangle of litigation, spiraling power costs and broad economic decline. And the salmon would lose, too.
The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board