Fisheries Service Delays Decision On Steelhead Protections To Cover Oregon, California And Lower Columbia

Federal biologists have postponed announcing whether more West Coast runs of wild steelhead will get Endangered Species Act protection.

Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber said Monday the decisions were delayed several weeks to resolve remaining issues with California designed to stave off a threatened species listing in the Klamath Mountain Province, which covers rivers in southwestern Oregon and northwestern California.

The National Marine Fisheries Service was scheduled to announce today the long-delayed decision on whether to protect steelhead in California’s Central Valley and Northern Coast, in Western Oregon and the lower Columbia River and its tributaries.

NMFS spokesman Rob Jones said the announcement had been delayed indefinitely but refused to say why.

Environmentalists were unhappy that the steelhead decision appeared to be following the same path as Oregon coastal coho salmon, which was deferred from listing as a threatened species last year after Kitzhaber began an innovative restoration plan.

“The fact that the federal government is nearly two years late in providing protection to the fish is bad enough,” said Mark Hubbard of the Oregon Natural Resources Council, which originally petitioned to protect steelhead in the Illinois River in 1992. “For them to delay beyond a court-ordered deadline with the idea of ultimately denying protection is really too much.”

The NMFS had set the deadline for deciding whether all species of salmon and steelhead merit protection under the Endangered Species Act after environmentalists went to federal court with a lawsuit complaining the agency was dragging its feet.

Kitzhaber said NMFS was not ready to issue a decision this month on steelhead on the central Oregon Coast and has indicated that the state’s steelhead recovery plan would not be sufficient to stave off a listing for steelhead native to the lower Columbia River and its tributaries.