Panel hears kokanee bed testimony

BONNERS FERRY, Idaho – The silt has settled in front of the Harborview Marina in Bayview, but the post-mortem continues on the thousands of kokanee salmon fry that were crushed and smothered there two months ago because of illegal construction practices.

On Tuesday, officials with the Northwest Power and Conservation Council met in Bonners Ferry to consider the issue, as well as other fish and wildlife restoration work being funded by the council, which includes governor-appointed members from four Northwest states.

Along with developing long-range power forecasts for the region, the council directs the annual spending of about $2.5 million worth of hydropower generation revenue toward fish and wildlife restoration programs in the Columbia River Basin, including projects aimed at helping Lake Pend Oreille’s imperiled kokanee.

“We want to make sure our investments are taken care of,” explained Tom Karier, a natural resource economist from Spokane now serving as chairman of the council.

The kokanee fry and eggs were crushed April 17 when a tugboat and a barge pounded pilings through the spawning bed in front of the Harborview Marina.

Developer Bob Holland did not yet have a permit to conduct the work. Apart from pounding steel pilings through the spawning gravels – just as the eggs were hatching – the tugboat repeatedly plowed through the gravel and stirred up sediment in the bay, according to Idaho Fish and Game officials.

Kokanee serve as the foundation for a $17 million sport fishery on the lake but have been in fast decline in recent years thanks to exotic predators and the loss of spawning habitat. The destroyed bed in Bayview held about 15 percent of this spring’s wild kokanee fry, said Chip Corsi, regional director of the Fish and Game Department.

Holland has since been fined $2,500 by the Idaho Lands Department – the maximum under state law – and has been ordered to restore the spawning bed.

The state’s Fish and Game Department is still considering possible penalties for the lost fish, which have been valued at $1.4 million, Corsi said.

Holland has apologized and vowed to restore the spawning bed. In a previous interview, his attorney attributed the destruction to a miscommunication between an employee and the tugboat crew.

The council heard differing accounts from government oversight agencies on how the kokanee came to be killed, and whether it might have been prevented. Corsi said his agency was never comfortable with a major construction project atop one of the lake’s last remaining spawning beds for wild kokanee. The agency had sought additional safeguards for the site – including sediment control for on-shore construction last summer – but the agency has no formal authority to stop the work.

“We felt it was an issue at the beginning,” Corsi told the council, going on to explain how fish experts have put the odds of a total collapse of kokanee at 65 percent. “We are very much at a tipping point right now.”

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Idaho Department of Lands have jurisdiction over the work. The Corps of Engineers had issued a permit for earlier renovation at the marina, and the IDL was in the process of reviewing a permit application when the work took place. Both agencies have said they were unaware of the scope of the work.

“In retrospect, I think we all didn’t realize how the work would be performed,” Beth Reinhart, with the Coeur d’Alene office of the Corps of Engineers, told the council. “No one could have predicted.”

Reinhart also told council members, “We did not feel the impact of driving piles was significant.”

The Corps of Engineers will take a harder look at marine construction projects in the future, Reinhart said.

Council chairman Karier suggested to Reinhart it was “not quite accurate ‘no one could have predicted’ ” the outcome, particularly after local residents and the state Fish and Game Department had raised red flags.

“I don’t totally agree,” Reinhart replied.

Karier interrupted, “Because?”

“I’m not going to reply to that at this point,” Reinhart said, ending her portion of the presentation.

After the meeting, Karier said he felt satisfied the Fish and Game Department had worked to protect the public resource, but “I’m not so reassured by the corps.”

Bayview residents Dennis Damon and Skip Wilcox attended the meeting and expressed frustration the agencies didn’t act faster to prevent the destruction. Along with several other residents, the two have been contacting public officials for the past 15 months to point out what they believe are the developer’s continuing violations of environmental protection laws. Although the council directs the spending of large amounts of hydropower revenue, it has no formal regulatory authority. That doesn’t matter to Damon.

“We’re not going stand still,” he said.