Meanwhile, the Bush administration should get its wobbly act together and dispatch the millions of additional dollars needed to help West Coast fishermen whose livelihoods are jeopardized by this year's sharply curtailed salmon season.

The emergency state funding is needed as a stopgap, because the Bush administration has been maddeningly slow in considering the governor's request for a disaster declaration. Earlier this week, Congress finally approved an amendment to federal fisheries legislation making fishermen eligible for federal disaster assistance. But lawmakers have yet to earmark any actual dollars.

Fishermen - and the coastal businesses and communities that depend on them - need help in the wake of the federal government's decision in April to limit the commercial salmon season in order to protect imperiled runs of chinook salmon in the Klamath River. That decision left hundreds of salmon trollers in Oregon with drastically reduced catches and incomes. Some are in imminent danger of losing their boats.

There are many demands for the finite resources controlled by the state Emergency Board. Education, law enforcement and social services all have legitimate needs that could swallow up the $2 million requested by Kulongoski and put it to excellent use.

But lawmakers must put top priority on helping fishermen because they simply have nowhere else to turn.

No, the job of bailing out fishermen shouldn't fall to the Emergency Board. That's the responsibility of the federal officials, whose policies of diverting excessive amounts of water for irrigation, destroying wetlands and building dams have turned the Klamath River into a lethal environment for salmon. Yet so far, there's no sense of the same urgency to provide federal assistance that marked the crisis experienced by Klamath Basin farmers four years ago.

State lawmakers should toss this $2 million life preserver to Oregon's beleaguered salmon fishermen and hope it enables the hardest hit to survive until federal help arrives - if it ever does.