No Dam Decision On Clinton Watch Breaching Question Won’T Be Decided This Year, Babbitt Says
FROM FOR THE RECORD (Friday, April 14, 2000): Correction Name incorrect: William Daley is the U.S. Commerce secretary. An incorrect name was used in a Thursday Snake River dams story.
Federal officials say a recommendation about the fate of Snake River dams won’t be made to Congress until after a new president takes office.
And the recommendation may not come for years.
“This decision will not - and should not - be made on my watch,” Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt said during a recent Senate hearing. Babbitt was appointed by President Clinton and likely will be replaced after Clinton leaves office in January.
Both sides of the debate over the four Eastern Washington dams call the delay political. The question of whether to breach the dams to save Snake River salmon has sparked acrimonious debate in the region and has become an issue in the presidential election.
Republican George W. Bush has vowed to save the dams if he’s elected president.
Environmentalists have pressured Vice President Al Gore, the presumed Democratic nominee, to publicly endorse breaching. Instead, Gore has said more studies are needed, a position many view as an attempt to refute Bush’s contention that Gore is an environmental extremist.
Babbitt told the Senate Interior appropriations subcommittee last week that the science needs to be “sharpened” with more studies. That appears to contradict comments he wrote in 1998, that scientists were nearing consensus that dams stand in the way of Snake River salmon recovery.
“I think what Bruce Babbitt is really doing is taking a position that will help Al Gore,” said Bruce Lovelin, executive director of the Columbia River Alliance, an industry group that opposes breaching.
Northwesterners involved in the issue expected federal agencies to make a recommendation to Congress last year. That was prevented by delays in a $20 million study.
Conflicting scientific conclusions about the need to breach the dams is the issue now, said Brian Gorman, Seattle spokesman for the National Marine Fisheries Service.
Gorman said Wednesday that he “can’t imagine” the fisheries service including a recommendation about the dams this year, when it releases a long-awaited plan for saving Columbia and Snake River salmon.
“One of the things it could say is, `Let’s not make a decision immediately. Let’s wait until year “X” and by then we’ll know a lot more,”’ said Gorman.
Babbitt and the fisheries service are key to the debate. Babbitt helps set environmental policy for the administration. The fisheries service, which answers to Commerce Secretary William Cohen, is charged with assuring salmon don’t go extinct.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which operates the dams, is scheduled to make a recommendation about the dams to the fisheries service in late September or early October.
But the corps recently extended for one month a public comment period, meaning the final document may not be released until after the November election, corps spokeswoman Nola Conway confirmed Wednesday.
“We’re saying in the late October, November time frame,” she said.
Interior Department spokesman Mike Gauldin said no one should be surprised by Babbitt’s comments last week.
“The secretary’s been saying for at least two years that this wasn’t going to happen on his watch,” Gauldin said.
If so, that message hasn’t reached either side of the debate.
“We’ve actually been calling it (the upcoming biological opinion) the administration’s decision on breaching,” said Chris Zimmer, spokesman for Save Our Wild Salmon, a coalition of environmental and fishing groups.
Lovelin said the delay hurts port districts along the river, who have had trouble attracting new industry and investors due to uncertainty about the dams.
Babbitt is vilified by those who support the dams. During his seven years as Interior secretary, he has called for the removal of several nonfederal dams, including two aging ones on the Elwha River in Western Washington. Typically, he carries a sledgehammer when visiting dams he feels have outlived their usefulness.
Babbitt cheered last year as he watched demolition of Edwards Dam on Maine’s Kennebec River. Aged and inefficient, Edwards was insignificant as a power producer, but symbolically large. It was the first dam the federal government ever ordered removed against its owners’ wishes.
Babbitt has said he wanted to be the first Interior secretary to preside over the removal of a large dam. But his position on the Eastern Washington dams has been confusing and contradictory.
“I have never at any time advocated any dam removal on the Columbia or Snake Rivers, and I will never favor such a policy,” he wrote in a 1994 letter to Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash.
Yet Babbitt has spurned demands from Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash., that the Clinton administration eliminate dam breaching as an option for salmon recovery. And in 1998, he wrote an article for Open Spaces magazine in which he blamed dams for the demise of salmon in the Snake and Columbia rivers.
“We probably cannot have salmon runs up into the Rocky Mountains and maintain four dams on the lower Snake River,” he wrote. “We have reached the point where the arteries are so clogged that surgery to reduce the blockage may be the only hope …”
Babbitt stopped short of calling for breaching, saying “it will finally be up to the people of the Northwest, their governors and other elected representatives to decide.”
In fact, as Babbitt has acknowledged, only Congress can decide the issue. And that won’t happen until the White House makes a recommendation.
This sidebar appeared with the story: SALMON Meetings planned
The U.S. House of Representatives’ Resources Committee plans a hearing on salmon recovery on April 27 at Columbia Basin College in Pasco. The hearing time has not been set.
Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash., plans a “salmon summit” with invited speakers in Bellevue, Wash.
The meeting is scheduled from noon to 5 p.m. next Thursday, but the location is not set.
Staff writer Clayton Bellamy contributed to this report.