No Money For River Basin Plan Feds Defend Columbia Project, But Admit They Don’t Have Funds

Clinton administration officials defended a comprehensive strategy for managing natural resources in the Columbia River basin, but acknowledged Thursday there’s no money in the president’s budget to put it into practice next year.

The pending Columbia Basin blueprint is intended to help restore 75 million acres of federal forests and rangeland in seven states.

Opponents fear the sweeping proposal will dramatically reduce logging and livestock grazing. Backers say it is necessary to save a variety of fish and wildlife species from extinction.

Agriculture Undersecretary James Lyons confirmed the lack of money under pointed questioning from Rep. George Nethercutt, R-Wash., a leading critic of the plan, at a congressional hearing.

Nethercutt said it appears commercial activities on national forests and federal grazing lands would come to a virtual standstill for one to four years as additional watershed studies and other environmental reviews are completed in connection with the basin strategy.

“It’s an awful lot of study rather than management,” Nethercutt said. “Is there any money in the FY98 budget to implement it?”

Lyons answered, “We don’t know what we’re going to need.”

“I take that to mean the answer is no,” Nethercutt said.

“Yes,” Lyons responded. “The answer is no.”

Part of the basin-wide strategy, which is unlikely to be made final until next year, would require more thorough assessments of the health of fish-bearing streams before any logging or livestock grazing is allowed within certain distances.

“It will probably be another year before we get a final” environmental impact statement and preferred management alternatives, Nethercutt said.

“There has to be a practical application of the science at some point,” he said.

Nethercutt, a member of the House Appropriations subcommittee on the Interior, resumed the line of questioning later in the day when Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck appeared before the panel.

“If there is no money to implement the science, you are going to have a problem,” Nethercutt said.

“That would be a problem,” Dombeck agreed.

Nethercutt said the Forest Service supervisor of the Colville National Forest in his Eastern Washington district estimates that in order to complete all the analyses required for the strategy, he would have to hire 43 additional staff members at a cost of about $4.7 million - a 50 percent increase in his current budget.

Otherwise, timber harvests on the forest would drop from the current 60 million board feet annually to close to zero the first year, Nethercutt said. One alternative under consideration would permanently eliminate logging on the forest and another would produce only about 4.4 million board feet a year, he said.