Panel Good Way To Get Accounting

If the spending of money was all it took to save the Pacific Northwest’s wild salmon runs, they’d be flourishing. Over the years, the region’s electricity consumers have spent billions on hatcheries, fish ladders, reservoir spills, dam modifications and scientific research. Yet the salmon runs are vanishing.

So it is fair to examine how salmon recovery dollars are appropriated and spent. Panels of leading regional fish biologists have done so, and one of their conclusions is disturbing: The same organizations that spend the salmon recovery dollars also wield effective control over how much money each organization receives and how it is spent.

Scientists familiar with this incestuous process charge that the money is going not to the best interests of the fish or to original scientific inquiry, but rather to perpetuate institutional agendas of those who spend it.

“It’s like having the Defense Department ask Boeing to decide which brand of aircraft the military will use,” says U.S. Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash. He’s right. He has embraced a solution, one recommended by the scientists who’ve studied the problem.

Tuesday, the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee approved a Gorton-sponsored amendment that will take control of salmon recovery appropriations away from a coalition of those who also spend the money and give it to a neutral committee of fish scientists. This five-member Scientific Review Panel would be chosen by the Pacific Northwest Power Planning Council from a list of experts compiled by the very credible National Academy of Sciences.

The spending in question comes to $100 million a year in operating dollars plus $112 million a year in related outlays for capital improvements. The dollars go to such things as salmon hatcheries and, most crucial for the salmon’s future, to research projects that guide the whole region in the controversial, complex struggle to save salmon runs.

Under Gorton’s bill, scientists who recommend how the money will be spent cannot have a financial stake in projects under consideration for funding.

This reform is a simple matter of good government. It would build a credible scientific firewall between appropriations for the salmon and the entrenched institutional motives of those who have spent so much, and achieved so little, to save this precious remnant of our region’s ecological heritage.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board