House Panel Starts ‘War On Salmon’ Plan Would End Forest Service Protection Strategy For Fish East Of The Cascade Range

A proposal moving through Congress would force the U.S. Forest Service to abandon its fish-protection strategy east of the Cascade Range and lead to more lawsuits, an Agriculture Department spokesman said Thursday.

“If the language stays as it is, it will just create a whole slew of new lawsuits, which will bring about more gridlock,” said Jim Peterson.

The House Appropriations subcommittee on the interior voted Wednesday to cut spending for the “Pacfish” strategy protecting fish in Eastern Oregon, Eastern Washington and central Idaho.

The language, included in the Forest Service’s budget bill, also takes money from the “Infish” strategy pending for North Idaho and Western Montana and maintains only a fraction of the money for the interior Columbia River basin project.

Rep. George Nethercutt, R-Wash., helped insert the language in the bill, arguing that Congress never authorized the protection measures and the Forest Service never completed all the required environmental analyses.

Under the bill, the Forest Service would have to scrap the regional plan, which makes stream-side buffer zones off-limits to logging, and redraft guidelines for each national forest involved.

The full House Appropriations Committee was scheduled to consider the bill Thursday but postponed its meeting until Tuesday.

The subcommittee said in an accompanying report that the East Side projects have collected important information on forest health.

“Despite this accomplishment, the project has grown too large and too costly to sustain in a time of fiscal constraints and has drawn away personnel and funding that should be employed for on-the-ground management,” the report said.

It said the Forest Service had used a single environmental assessment to draft generic guidelines for all the forests, without considering their differences.

Of the $6.7 million originally planned, only $600,000 would be maintained for the fish-protection efforts. The Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management could spend that money to gather public input and collect additional data.

Bruce Lovelin of the Columbia River Alliance, a coalition of industrial users of the Columbia and its tributaries, said the subcommittee’s action is “not too surprising.” He said his group would welcome changes in rules for habitat protection.

But Steve Moyer, a spokesman for Trout Unlimited, said the proposal would mean a major setback.

“If this bill became law, it would drive a stake through the heart of fledgling and overdue trout and salmon habitat recovery work on Forest Service lands in the Northwest that has been years in the making,” he said.

Bob Doppelt, executive director of the Pacific Rivers Council, said the formal amendment process for national forest plans is so lengthy “there will be no protection for a long time, if ever,” for salmon habitat in the East Side forests.

“It stops all salmon-protection efforts by the Forest Service and all federal land management salmonprotection efforts in the upper Columbia basin,” he said. “It’s a war on salmon and a war on our streams and forests.”