Chinook Protections To Affect City Dwellers Listing Could Boost Power, Water Bills In The Puget Sound, State Officials Say
Ex-logger Jim Carlson is too nice a fellow to laugh at the city dwellers about to become intimately acquainted with the Endangered Species Act he knows so well.
Carlson’s small logging business in Quinault, on the rural Olympic Peninsula, was ruined after the northern spotted owl was listed as threatened in 1990, putting timber all but out of reach for him and scores of other small-scale loggers in the Northwest.
But Carlson says he can’t find it in his heart to poke fun at the city folk in the Puget Sound basin as the federal government moves to protect Puget Sound chinook salmon. “This is too serious an issue to laugh about,” he says. “But there is a tremendous amount of irony to it all.”
Polls showed that urban Washington backed logging curbs to protect the owl, but had scant sympathy for rural folks who felt the sting, Carlson recalls.
Now it is urban Washington’s turn.
A century ago, three-quarters of a million wild chinook were harvested each year in the Puget Sound basin by tribal and commercial fishermen.
This year, “fishers will be lucky to get 20,000 hatchery fish, and they’ll only be allowed to fish in Bellingham Bay,” Gov. Gary Locke says.
The National Marine Fisheries Service is expected to announce this month or next that it wants to list the chinook salmon as endangered or threatened. A final listing decision will follow a yearlong assessment.
Efforts to protect the once-majestic chinook runs will hit Puget Sound people in their pocketbooks, cars, kitchens and bathrooms, state officials say.
Protection measures could boost power, water and sewer bills; stall or kill federal, state and county road-improvement projects; and slap new limits on housing and commercial development in the region, home to two-thirds of Washington’s 5.5 million people.
“Once the Endangered Species Act gets involved in protecting these salmon, we will think that all the hardship caused by the spotted owl listing was nothing at all,” says state Sen. Bob Oke, R-Port Orchard, head of the Senate Natural Resources and Parks Committee.
Puget Sound chinook are found up and down the West Coast, from Alaska to California. Not all wild chinook populations, or “runs,” are in bad shape. But those of Puget Sound are.
Alaskans call the chinook the king salmon for its size, once said to average 40 to 60 pounds in Puget Sound but now less than half that.
Unlike smaller Pacific salmonid species - coho, sockeye, chum, pink and steelhead - the chinook digs its “redd,” or nesting area, mostly in the rough gravel of major rivers rather than in more protected tributaries.
It therefore is hit first and hardest by nest-scouring floods that result from too much development. The fish gets the full blast of pollutants that run off pavement and concrete where wetlands and forests once stood.
To reverse such damage, “We will face a challenge like no other state in America,” Locke says.
A chinook listing would require federal, state and local governments to regulate decisions about land and water use in 14 counties around Puget Sound, including King, Pierce and Snohomish counties, the state’s most densely populated urban areas.
It could lead to controls on everything from hydropower generation by big-city utilities to manure runoff from farmers’ fields.
The pending Chinook listing is part of a larger effort to protect several salmon species in the state. The federal government is expected soon to list the lower Columbia steelhead, Hood Canal chum and Lake Ozette sockeye.
“Warning bells are going off, and everybody is going to feel the impact,” said U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash.
xxxx PROTECTED SPECIES Olympia - The federal government is already protecting several fish species in Washington under the Endangered Species Act and is expected to list several more species over the next few years. Here’s a breakdown, provided by the state Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Already listed: Snake River steelhead. Snake River sockeye. Snake River chinook. Upper Columbia River steelhead.
Likely to be listed in the next two years: Puget Sound chinook. Lower and middle Columbia River steelhead. Southwest Washington coastal coho. Hood Canal-Strait of Juan de Fuca summer chum. Lower Columbia River chum. Lake Ozette sockeye. Lower Columbia River cutthroat. Columbia River Basin bull trout.
Likely to be listed at some point: Lower Columbia River coho. Lower Columbia River chinook. Olympic Peninsula coho.