Environmentalists Urge Clinton To Save Salmon In Some Cases, Proposed Plans Would Come At Expense Of Hydropower Production

Environmentalists want President Clinton to bite the bullet, follow the law and spend what it takes to save several salmon species from extinction in the Pacific Northwest.

Along with tribal leaders and fishing groups, they lobbied the White House last week for the most ambitious plans to help the salmon, in some cases at the expense of hydropower production at dams on the Snake and Columbia rivers.

Shippers, irrigators and representatives of industries dependent on cheap electricity want Congress to waive federal laws protecting the fish and set a limit on salmon spending at around $300 million a year.

Sen. Mark Hatfield, R-Ore., chairman of the Appropriations Committee, already has set legislation in motion to suspend the laws at least temporarily and cap salmon expenses of the region’s largest power wholesaler, the Bonneville Power Administration.

Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash., likes that idea but also wants to extend the spending protection to public utilities who otherwise might see BPA passing on higher costs to them.

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., is reluctant to go along with exemptions to the environmental laws as a way to reduce salmon costs, but she isn’t ruling anything out.

Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., former chairman of a congressional task force on the BPA, said the power marketing agency has lost the region’s confidence and that Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary should convene a salmon summit to address the problems facing the fish and the Northwest’s power supply.

Environmentalists tried to persuade White House officials that Clinton must take administrative action to head off the momentum building in Congress to suspend the laws.

“A cap puts a death warrant out for our fish,” said R. Lane Hansen, president of Idaho Steelhead and Salmon Unlimited in Boise.

Leaders of four Northwest tribes said in a letter to Hatfield that they oppose any legislative limit on salmon spending.

“Good policy demands that we look to the quality of our salmon restoration actions before we address the costs,” they wrote.

Bruce Lovelin, director of the Columbia River Alliance representing river users in the region, warns that without a cap the Bonneville system could collapse leaving no one to finance the expensive measures needed to help the fish.

BPA could be left in a situation where it is unable to meet the payments on its federal debt, building additional pressure in Congress to sell off the federal power marketer, a move that would bring dramatic rate increases to electric customers, he said.

Karen Garrison, a salmon specialist for the Natural Resources Defense Council based in San Francisco, said a cap won’t solve Bonneville’s financial problems.

“It will only put them off and probably not for long,” she said, pointing to a huge debt for a failed nuclear reactor as BPA’s biggest problem.

Jim Baker, the Sierra Club’s Northwest salmon campaign coordinator based in Pullman said it wouldn’t be necessary to waive the laws if the administration could commit to a level of spending that would make sure the salmon survive.

He argued that setting multi-year spending levels and adopting a plan regarded to be in compliance with the laws would in effect accomplish the same thing as a cap with the certainly that the government wouldn’t get sued.

BPA expects to spend about $400 million on salmon recovery this year and as much as $575 million next year. A large part of those estimates are not actual spending on dams or fish habitat; rather they represent so-called “forgone power” costs arrived at by figuring electricity that could have been generated if water flows weren’t dedicated to salmon.

Environmentalists say those estimates are not fair because the same accounting is not used for other users, such as irrigators and shippers.

Garrison said irrigators cost BPA an estimated $150 million to $300 million in foregone power. She said actual expenditures on salmon are closer to $180 million a year.

“It’s ludicrous to charge every drop of water to the fish and not require the others to account for the water they use,” said Hansen, who used to fish the middle fork of the Salmon River in the 1940s and 1950s.

“Many of these businesses were started on the backs of the fish,” he said.

BPA, regional NMFS officials and at least one member of the Northwest Power Planning Council have been pushing a 10-year framework that would spend about $435 million annually on salmon recovery efforts, perhaps $475 million in later years.

The water flows and water spills at dams are key to the plans backed by conservationists and tribes.

Industrial users say it’s cheaper and more beneficial to put the fish in barges to bypass the dams to help them survive.