Test Fishery On Hanford Reach Canceled Murray Intervenes As Tribes, Fishermen Rip Effort To Count Fall Chinook Salmon

A National Marine Fisheries Service plan to establish a commercial salmon fishery near the Hanford Nuclear Reservation was canceled Tuesday after Sen. Patty Murray intervened.

“We’re canceling the test fishery,” spokesman Brian Gorman said Tuesday after Murray, D-Wash., told the agency to drop plans for the 10-day test on the Hanford Reach, a 51-mile-long free-flowing stretch of the Columbia River.

The federal fish management agency announced Friday it planned to deploy drift nets in the Hanford Reach near Ringold to count the numbers of fall chinook salmon.

The plan drew immediate negative reaction from sport fishermen and Indian tribes.

Idaho Gov. Phil Batt was among those who supported the idea of a commercial fishery to take pressure off stocks of endangered chinook swimming toward the Snake River from the lower Columbia River.

Murray said the timing of the test on a stretch of river that is subject to debate over whether it should come under state or federal management was unfortunate.

“We’re in the middle of a discussion about how we are going to protect the reach and it didn’t seem like the right time to conduct this type of experiment,” Rex Carney, a spokesman for Murray, D-Wash., said Monday.

Murray introduced a bill early this year to put the reach under federal control as a Wild and Scenic river.

“I guess we were just unprepared for the reaction, in part because we failed to really explain our rationale,” Gorman said of the opposition to the plan. The agency had hoped the test would find another resource for fisheries shut down because of the Endangered Species Act, he said.

“If we’re going to restrict fishing on the one hand, we need to see if there are alternatives that make biological and economic sense on the other,” he said.

Local officials criticized the federal agency’s methods.

“We want the reach protected and we don’t believe this is the way to go,” Benton County Commissioner Claude Oliver said. “We do not need additional disturbance of the reach.”

“We cannot have federal agencies moving with such major impacts on our resources and not be informed,” Oliver said.

The test fishery idea apparently gained momentum with the backing of Batt in a July 11 letter to Washington Gov. Gary Locke.

“We are convinced that a Hanford Reach fishery is feasible, and once implemented, would help both the fishers and the fish,” Batt said in the letter.

But few others support the plan.

The proposed test fishery followed an Aug. 11 listing of Columbia River steelhead as an endangered species, closing a popular reach fishery.

“I don’t understand how they can put the steelhead on the endangered species list and then have a commercial fishery come up here,” said Phil Motyka Sr., owner of Motyka’s Fishin’ Post in Richland. “If they are going to make steelhead an endangered species, why are they even thinking about putting a net up there?”

Fisheries service biologists planned to use a large-mesh screen that would catch salmon but not many of the smaller steelhead. They also planned to let the nets out at night in the deepest part of the channel where chinook are known to swim.

Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., criticized the fisheries service’s decision in his district.

“This is precisely the problem we’ve talked about time and time again when the critical decisions about our local resources are made by federal bureaucrats instead of local citizens.”

Hastings earlier introduced a bill to put the reach under a federal-state-county commission and give counties the Wahluke Slope land above the reach. For Oliver, the fisheries service’s plans show that the federal government cannot be trusted to run the river.

“It’s very disquieting for the federal government to come along and take such a unilateral action in our back yard,” he said.