Craig aims to eliminate Fish Passage Center

SEATTLE – Angered by a federal court order that spills water over federal dams to save endangered salmon in the Pacific Northwest, Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, has inserted language into a Senate energy bill that would kill an agency that keeps score on the survival of fish as they swim through the heavily dammed Columbia and Snake rivers.

The federal government has spent far more money trying to prevent the extinction of Northwest salmon than it has on any other endangered species. Craig’s move would eliminate the Fish Passage Center, which for more than two decades has been collecting and analyzing data that document how effective that multibillion-dollar federal effort has been.

A spokesman for the Idaho senator calls the rider – attached to an energy appropriations bill that moved last week to the Senate floor – “a shot across the bow” to challenge what Craig believes is an agency that advocates a “controversial and one-sided” approach to salmon recovery.

“Power rates are going up, we think ratepayers ought to have some answers for how their money is being spent,” said Sid Smith, a spokesman for Craig. The Northwest depends more on hydroelectric dams for power than any other part of the country.

The manager of the Fish Passage Center, Michele DeHart, said her staff collects “data that is accurate and, yes, it does show that the federal hydro system kills fish.”

The federal court order that requires summer spill over dams in the Snake River means that some of the electricity that could be generated by those dams is being forgone – at an estimated cost of about $67 million over the three summer months. Much of the data on fish survival that supported the order, which was made last month by a federal judge in Portland and has been appealed by the Bush administration, was gathered and analyzed by the Fish Passage Center.

“Maybe this is one of those deals where when you don’t like the message, you kill the messenger,” DeHart said.

At the heart of the dispute over salmon is a disagreement about how to increase their survival as they negotiate federal dams that have transformed the Snake and Columbia from the world’s premier salmon highway to a series of slow-moving lakes separated by huge slabs of concrete.

Indian tribes, many state fish biologists, fishing organizations and environmental groups say the best way to increase survival is to keep the fish in the rivers while increasing their flow during migration months and spilling water over dams. These groups have long supported the Fish Passage Center, which has published many reports calling for more spill and increased flow – programs that can cost millions of dollars by reducing electricity generation and disrupting irrigation and river transport.

“We all have to rely on some mutually agreeable data in order to figure out what is happening to the fish and, to date, that has come from the Fish Passage Center,” said Charles Hudson, a spokesman for the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission.

On the other side, are federal agencies that built the dams and sell the power, along with irrigation, barging and utility interests that depend on the dammed-up Columbia and Snake for their livelihood. Their side has received considerable support from the Bush administration, which concluded last year that federal dams should be viewed as part of an “environmental baseline” when it comes to saving salmon. U.S. District Judge James Redden rejected that analysis this month, saying that it was made “more in cynicism than in sincerity.”