Into the Breach

Idaho’s Republican Senators Mike Crapo and Jim Risch have emerged as unlikely progressive voices calling for a broad collaboration to preserve endangered runs of salmon that must pass four dams on the lower Snake River. Even if it means talking about breaching the dams.

They are joined in this previously unmentionable view by freshman Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), who stated during his campaign that he is willing to support removal of the lower Snake River dams if it is supported by science and if losses to hydropower and barging interests are addressed.

One voice that so far is silent on the call for collaboration and discussion of dam breaching belongs to Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.). The Inlander was unable to reach Murray, but her spokesman, Matt McAlvanah, said in an e-mail that court-ordered remedies have “resulted in historic agreement. Sen. Murray believes the region must now move forward and implement solutions to ensure that those hard-won compromises don’t unravel.”

The translation seems to be no collaboration as envisioned by her colleagues.

Rocky Barker of the Idaho Statesman, in many ways the dean of Northwest journalists writing about the complexities of salmon preservation, writes in early May, “Murray was responsible for killing, at least for now, Idaho Republican Sen. Jim Risch’s ambitious efforts to begin a regional forum on resolving the salmon issue before U.S. District Judge James Redden takes it into his own hands.”

Risch, in an interview last week, says he found Oregon’s Senators Merkley and Ron Wyden “enthusiastic about pursuing a collaborative effort.” Washington’s senators, he says, “want the problem resolved [but] are a little more reluctant” on collaboration.

Crapo, while also not being critical of other senators, adds, “I would expect that the political leadership in all states would be very supportive of a collaborative effort.”

It’s surprising where one finds the bones in the long-running and sprawling story of the perils of Northwest salmon. They are in your power bill. They are in the price of wheat. They show up in southern California air conditioning. They determine how many fishing boats leave the dock in Astoria, Ore.

Some of the bones of this story can be found in a basement in Boise, where a piano teacher taps away at a computer keyboard crunching Army Corps of Engineers data on hour-by-hour Snake River dam power generation, revealing that output of electrical current is often limited by low flow of river current.

Other bones for this story can be found in a dim restaurant meeting room in Ritzville in 2005 as the sun was still struggling to roll out of bed on a reluctant October morning. A sprinkling of taciturn farmers sat cradling their brown coffee mugs. Peter Goldmark, himself a wheat rancher, was striving to sell himself as the antidote to Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers in the mid-term Congressional elections.

One key exchange was just this brief:

Farmer: “Snake River dams?”

Goldmark: “Keep ’em.”

It was a striking realization that not even a Congressional challenger could give the merest whisper of dam breaching in wheat country.

The four Snake River dams, and their locks, make low-cost barging of wheat available as far inland as Lewiston, Idaho, 465 river miles from the ocean.

Who, one wondered, had the chops to even convene a dialogue on dam breaching as an option to save the region’s teetering salmon runs when weighed against transportation and hydropower generation?

The fact that it is Crapo, who long labored in the shadow of former Sen. Larry Craig, is a surprise. Craig for years dominated the debate, advocating for power and barging, and was so hostile to conservation of fish that he pulled funding (later restored) for the Fish Passage Center that provides data on how many salmon return to the river each year.

In recent years former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt has advocated for Snake River dam removal. Former Idaho Gov. (also a former Interior Secretary) Cecil Andrus has famously noted that, upstream of the dams, Idaho “has habitat, needs fish.”

“Those are people who once were in a position of influence,” Risch says in a telephone interview from his office in Washington, D.C. “There has to be a new generation of leaders.”

Risch is not certain if he or Crapo will be the ones. Neither Idaho senator supports dam breaching, but both say it at least needs to be hashed out to bring two decades of litigation to an end.

“I don’t support breaching the dams and I haven’t supported it since I’ve been in Congress, I’ve never supported it,” Crapo says. But as he recently told a conservation-based group in Boise, “All options must be openly and fairly discussed. Does that mean dam breaching must be on the table? Yes. But that also means not dam breaching must be on the table.”

Julie Edwards, a spokeswoman for Merkley, says, “He has consistently said he would like to see all stakeholders come together to find a solution — representatives from agriculture and representatives from BPA [the federal Bonneville Power Administration], representatives from the fishing industry and from tribes and from the communities that would be impacted by removal of dams.”

The Pacific salmon stocks, which range as far north as Alaska and as far south as Sacramento, cover such a wide swath that particular perspectives can often collide.

Idaho’s delegation, for instance, wants more fish reaching streams far inland, mainly for sport fishing. Oregon’s delegation is concerned about its coastal fishing fleet.

“Oregon’s fishing industry is really hard-hit. We are having a fishing failure again this year. We had one last year,” Edwards says.

It’s easy to point fingers at who is taking what away from whom, which seems to have informed 18 years of litigation.

Redden, the federal judge in Portland, released a letter on May 18 to attorneys involved in the long-running suit.

He lays out blunt statements that he has “serious reservations” about the latest “biological opinion” presented by the federal government to show salmon can survive with the Snake River dams in place.

Redden writes that the government agencies “improperly rely on speculative, uncertain and unidentified” actions to conclude salmon are “trending towards recovery,” and that the government has spent “the better part of a decade treading water and avoiding their obligations under the Endangered Species Act.”

He sees hope, Redden writes, but he too says breaching the lower four Snake River dams may be necessary.

Such a huge step, even if Redden were to authorize it, would require Congressional approval and a years-long chain of evaluation, permitting and funding.

But at last — inside the Portland courtroom and out — the concept of breaching is mentioned aloud by judges and United States senators. Damn.