Plan to save chinook salmon sent to feds

SEATTLE – A long-range plan to boost chinook salmon populations in Puget Sound will require retooling hatcheries and dams, protecting wetlands and floodplains, restoring feeding grounds and more research.

The tab: as much as $150 million a year – more than twice what the region currently spends on recovery efforts for the struggling species.

Shared Strategy for Puget Sound, a group set up to come up with goals that environmentalists, farmers, fishermen and business leaders would support, sent its proposals to the federal government on Thursday.

If the National Marine Fisheries Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service approve the plan, it would become the roadmap for chinook recovery from the Canadian border to Mount Rainier and from the Cascade Mountains to Neah Bay at the northwest tip of Washington. It’s expected to be released for public comment in September.

The plan aims to increase area salmon populations by 20 percent to 270,000 over the next 15 years and calls for improvements in several areas, including:

•Providing fish enough water to live.

•Making sure fish aren’t cut off by dams, roads and other blockages from streams where they spawn.

•Restoring estuaries, where salt and fresh water mix, providing habitat for young salmon to find food and hide from predators as they prepare to go to sea.

•Protecting wetlands and floodplains alongside rivers, which give young fish a place to swim during floods.

•Carefully managing the salmon catch.

•Rejiggering the operation of salmon hatcheries so they don’t harm wild fish.

So far the plan, and the group that put it together, have drawn praise from conservation groups and business leaders alike.

“I definitely think the Shared Strategy process did a good job of bringing people together and building a plan from the ground up,” said Allison Butcher, spokeswoman for the Master Builders Association of King and Snohomish Counties, which represents development interests.

Mike Grayum, executive director of the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission, acknowledged that many daunting tasks like ahead.