Trump administration spikes update to dam study

LEWISTON – The Trump administration is formally ending the government’s nascent effort to update the environmental documentation of federal dams on the Snake and Columbia rivers.

A notice in the federal register Thursday announced the pending withdrawal that will be published Monday. The move has been expected since last month when President Donald Trump issued a memo killing a sweeping deal made between his predecessor and salmon advocates led by Columbia River tribes like the Nez Perce.

That 10-year agreement exchanged a pause in fish-versus-dams litigation for investments in salmon recovery, tribal renewable energy projects and studies on the best way to replace the hydropower, irrigation and commodity transportation made possible by four dams on the lower Snake River in Washington. While the agreement stopped short of sanctioning dam breaching, it was designed to lay the groundwork for the move.

Another part of the agreement between Biden and the tribes called for the 2020 environmental impact statement on the dams to be updated with new information, including a report released last year that said development of the dams caused substantial and ongoing harm to tribes with treaty fishing rights in the Snake and Columbia river basins, and a 2022 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries report that said wild Snake River salmon can’t be recovered to healthy and harvestable levels without dam breaching.

The deal between Biden and salmon advocates was expected to bring more than $1 billion in federal investments to help recover wild fish in the Snake and Columbia rivers and to help tribes develop renewable energy projects. The output from the energy projects would have been devoted to replacing power generated at the four lower Snake River dams.

The process to update the 2020 environmental impact statement had started with a process known as scoping in which initial public comment is collected. But it had not otherwise progressed.

The Trump administration may yet seek to update the 2020 document. The presidential memo ordered its withdrawal but also included language directing federal agencies to develop another update to the document “as appropriate” that takes into account “any updated National Environmental Policy Act procedures.”

The 2020 document, like others before, attempted to document harm the hydropower system causes to 13 runs of wild Snake and Columbia river salmon and steelhead that are listed as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act and to detail how to mitigate that harm.

The tribes and other salmon advocates challenged the 2020 plan that led to the settlement with the Biden administration. While that case did not progress to a judicial decision, a series of federal judges overturned previous versions of the plan dating back more than 30 years, ruling they did too little to protect the fish.

Before 1850 and the overexploitation of the runs by commercial fishing and along with habitat damage that was followed by development of the hydropower system, as many as 16 million wild fish returned to the Columbia River Basin annually. Today, annual returns average about 2.3 million fish, the vast majority of which are from hatcheries.