By Peter Rice

Pilot staff writer

Meetings of the Chetco River Watershed Council are typically about as controversial as motherhood and apple pie.

Then Port of Brookings Harbor Manager Dave Scott showed up.

The council had invited Scott to give an overview of Chetco dredging, the annual federally-financed operation that keeps the river from silting up and moving around – something that would spell doom for the fleet of commercial and sport boats that call the port home.

That part of the talk lasted only for a few minutes. The dredge funds had been cut back because of Hurricane Katrina relief efforts, Scott said, but President George W. Bush is proposing to bump them up to $451,000 for 2007. The money doesn't go to port coffers, but is given to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which in turn sends the dredging ship Yaquina to suck up the silt at the mouth of the river. How much money Congress gives to the Corps is what determines how much dredging the Yaquina will perform.

Scott added that he's confident annual dredge funding will continue because of the presence of the U.S. Coast Guard station at the port.

Then, Scott turned to the topic of fisheries, something he said he had a lot of experience in, having worked with watersheds and fish while employed by the logging and lumber processing firm Miller Redwood.

"Everybody says we are in this horrendous decline in fisheries. We are not," he said.

He called for a return to past fish management practices, with an emphasis on gravel extraction, something he said would deepen stream channels, keeping the water cool.

Scott presented as evidence of fish abundance a two-page handout detailing numbers of fall Chinook runs on the Klamath and Columbia rivers. The data shows that over 25 years, fish numbers cycled up and down, peaking at about 900,000 on the Columbia and nearly 250,000 on the Klamath. On the down cycle, the numbers dwindle to 186,000 on the Columbia and less than 30,000 on the Klamath. After a light sport harvest this year, federal managers project that 21,000 fish will return to the Klamath.

Scott's views on fish abundance generally fall outside of mainstream scientific thought on the subject, which holds that a combination of dams, development, logging and many other factors have contributed to a massive decline in salmon populations over the last several decades.

In his landmark book, "Salmon Without Rivers," fisheries consultant Jim Lichatowich estimated that historically, 10 to 16 million fish returned to the Columbia every year.

"Right now salmon production is about 20 percent of historic levels south of British Columbia," he said in an 1994 interview with the newsletter Environmental Review. "If we lost eighty percent of our forest production or eighty percent of our agricultural production, we would consider it serious trouble I think. Yet there were those who just a short time ago were trying to argue that there was no salmon problem."

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Reach Peter Rice at price@currypilot.com.