Salmomid Policy Will Shift Focus

If you’re like all but a minority of fishermen, you don’t know much about Washington’s proposed “Wild Salmonid Policy” that puts the recovery of wild salmon and steelhead ahead of the old policy that emphasized the production of salmon in hatcheries.

The new policy, scheduled to be approved by the Fish and Wildlife Commission Dec. 5, amounts to a revolution in anadromous fisheries management.

Already, it’s being attacked by timber, agricultural and other interests that don’t want to sacrifice incomes to save fish and by some environmental and sports fishing groups that believe it doesn’t have teeth to enforce necessary regulations to protect habitat.

Pete Soverel, chairman of the Federation of Fly Fishers Steelhead Committee, suspects Washington’s salmonid recovery program, as well as that of Oregon’s plan, is “a fig leaf for the National Marine Fisheries Service to avoid listing stocks in the lower Columbia and the Northwest’s coastal areas” as endangered.

Such a listing would entail a significant level of federal intervention, mandatory standards, enforceable recovery plans and restrictions on land use practices.

Fish and Wildlife Department director Bern Shanks said the policy will change the department’s management direction from one primarily regulating fisheries based on hatchery production to preserving, protecting and perpetuating wild salmonids in their ecosystems.

The department has published two thick environmental impact statement volumes containing hundreds of pages. The EIS was distributed to state residents last month. The Wild Salmonid Policy is to be considered in December.

“The central intent of the proposed policy is to ensure abundant, genetically diverse and productive wild salmonid populations that provide a variety of sustainable benefits,” Shanks says in a cover letter to two documents that outline the policy.

“The department’s strategies,” he says, “will require working with interested public and co-managers (federal, state and tribal) in three main areas: 1) to develop a combination of regular and selective fisheries that sustain harvest while putting abundant numbers of wild fish on the spawning grounds; 2) to provide a strong commitment and direction for quality salmonid habitat, and 3) to manage cultured production that provides fisheries and achieves important genetic conservation and ecological objectives.”

The department developed the WSP through public input, scientific review and with the Western Washington Treaty Tribes.

Considering the fact that the department is limited in what it can do, it seems to have done a good job compiling the proposed policy. However, it has to depend upon cooperation by loggers, farmers, barge operators and others if the policy is to work.

The most detailed of the two documents that make up the WSP is the one that was negotiated with the treaty tribes. On issues where agreement was not possible, the department and tribes deferred the issues to be dealt with individual tribes. The other document includes matters that were excluded from the joint policy.

Managing the salmon harvest will be a major problem, although not as big a problem as managing people. Eighty-nine wild salmon populations are being over-fished. Thirty-seven are in Puget Sound, 20 are along the Washington coast and 32 are in the lower Columbia River.

The department, with the backing of the Fish and Wildlife Commission, should be able to manage the harvest.

However, logging and agricultural practices have degraded the habitat and dams kill 10 times more steelhead and salmon downstream migrants than finally swim into the ocean.

The commission can order big cuts in fishing opportunities. But it can’t, without new laws, direct those who have damaged the habitat in the past to adopt practices to protect ecosystems. Nor can it direct dam operators to improve fish passage facilities.

“This policy shall guide the department’s implementation of existing statutes, regulations and other legal responsibilities,” one of the documents says. “If amendment of statute, regulation, court order or applicable law is needed to implement the policy, then staff shall use the policy to propose appropriate changes.”

If laws must be changed, the department and commission will have to go to the Legislature. Anyone who has watched the lawmakers in action knows that anything can happen.

Can the salmonids be saved? Some pessimists think it’s too late. At least, many concerned Washington residents think everything possible should be done to save the fish that have meant so much to the state, both commercially and spiritually.

, DataTimes MEMO: You can contact Fenton Roskelley by voice mail at 459-5577, extension 3814.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Fenton Roskelley The Spokesman-Review