Fruitless Salmon Spending Faulted House Panel Member Questions Outlay On ‘Feel-Good Things’

The federal government is spending billions of dollars to save Northwest salmon from extinction but has little to show for the money, several Republican lawmakers said Thursday.

Reps. John Doolittle, R-Calif., chairman of the House Resources subcommittee on water and power, and Wes Cooley, R-Ore., a panel member, said the failure of past strategies to help the fish raise questions about the wisdom of spending more money.

“We have spent $2 billion and are receiving nothing,” Cooley said. “We don’t want to just keep throwing money at feel-good things.”

But river conservationists said the continued decline of salmon can be blamed on faulty barging operations intended to get the fish around hydropower dams. They said the only way to save the fish is to alter dam operations to speed water flows.

“I agree with you, we need to do something different,” Katherine Ransel, co-director of American Rivers’ regional office in Seattle, told Cooley.

Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., also accused the region’s largest power wholesaler of inflating the costs of salmon protection.

The exchanges came during a subcommittee hearing about plans to refinance the debt of the Bonneville Power Administration, a federal power marketing agency that sells electricity generated by the dams.

BPA administrator Randall Hardy said the agency’s fish and wildlife costs rose from $150 million in 1991 to $325 million in 1994, an estimated $400 million this year and close to $500 million next year.

Over the last seven years, BPA has spent $2 billion on fish and wildlife, Hardy said.

Doolittle, chairman of the subcommittee, said, “This testimony suggests we are spending billions of dollars without much to show for it.

“Where does it end?” he asked Hardy.

“I simply do not know, Mr. Chairman,” Hardy replied. “The trend is still up.”

Doolittle said, “It sounds like it’s a little trial and error at ratepayers’ expense.”

Hardy answered, “Whether you call it trial and error or adaptive management … there is a huge amount of legitimate uncertainty about what works and what doesn’t.”

DeFazio said BPA inflates the cost of salmon recovery by including the costs of power that could have been produced were the dams and water flows not altered to help the fish.

Bonneville does not typically assess that cost to other river uses, such as irrigation, flood control and navigation, he said.

Hardy acknowledged that forgone power due to irrigation costs $150 million to $300 million a year. He provided no estimate on the power potential lost to flood control or moving ships through locks.

James Anderson, an associate professor at the University of Washington, said his research funded by BPA and the Army Corps of Engineers shows that barging has helped fish and that many other factors caused the population declines.

“Poor ocean survival is likely the most important factor in the recent decline,” he said.