Fish Value Exceeds Cheap-Power Benefit

Wed., Feb. 10, 1999

D.F. Oliveria For The Editorial

For 47 years, two dams and cheap power have taken precedence over Lake Pend Oreille’s fish - to the point that the lake’s kokanee are struggling to survive. Now, it’s the fish’s turn. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers acted correctly this week by deciding to keep the lake’s level four feet higher than normal again next winter, extending a three-year experiment to save the kokanee. However, corps managers hedged enough to make us nervous. The level still can be adjusted, they said, “as circumstances require.”

The kokanee’s fate may be decided this fall when the Northwest Power Planning Council rules on a request to continue funding the lake-level study. We urge the council to follow the recommendation of its own science review panel that the study be extended - not only for next winter but for the next seven years.

Preliminary results from the first three years of the experiment indicate Idaho state biologists were right: Higher lake levels increase the kokanee’s chance of survival by providing more spawning places. Unfortunately, three years wasn’t enough time to form conclusive results, largely because 1997 flooding washed so many kokanee out of the lake.

The main opposition to the extension comes from the Pend Oreille Public Utility District, which claims it has lost income and its customers have been hard hit by the study. But it’s difficult to sympathize with the utility because its customers pay the country’s lowest power rates - half what Sandpoint pays. And the decline of fishing-related tourism has hit Bonner County harder.

“North Idaho is being taken to the cleaners so people downstream won’t have to pay as much for utilities in the winter,” said Dale Snipes, whose father was forced to sell his resort when kokanee began to decline. Kokanee are popular with anglers and a vital food source for the lake’s larger “trophy fish.” The kokanee managed to hang on even after the lake level was altered by the 1952 construction of the Albeni Falls Dam, which controls the lake level, and of Cabinet Gorge Dam upstream. But the fish apparently couldn’t handle a further compromise, the decision some 30 years ago to drop winter levels from 2,055 to 2,051 feet above sea level.

As the kokanee go, so goes the Lake Pend Oreille fishery. It’s unthinkable to risk losing sport fishing in the state’s largest, once most productive lake for what amounts to a penny or so more per kilowatt hour downstream.

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