"I am very upset," said Rep. Mike Thompson, D-St. Helena, whose Northern California coastal district will be hit hardest if the commercial season is closed. "Those bureaucrats dragging their feet still get their paychecks and their benefits while fishermen suffer. If this is political, or even if it's just incompetence, every one of them should lose their jobs."
Congressional delegations from California and Oregon asked the Commerce Department for an emergency economic disaster declaration that would have authorized Congress to appropriate money to help fishermen pay their boat loans and aid other fisheries-dependent businesses, from packing houses to restaurants and hotels, to recover some of their losses.
"The situation is so extreme that we are writing to urge you to direct the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) Fisheries to expedite this process," 37 members of the Oregon and California delegations wrote in a May 12, 2005, letter to Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez. The signers, all Democrats, asked for a decision by the end of that month.
Brian Gorman, NOAA Fisheries spokesman in Seattle, said Thursday that - 10 months later - work on the 2005 declaration is still in progress. But with the 2006 season now in danger of being scrubbed, the 2005 report is unlikely to be finished any time soon.
"We're still working on it," Gorman said. "But we're likely to roll it over in anticipation of a request for a new determination this year."
In making a decision on a disaster declaration, the Bush administration must decide whether its own policies created it.
Fisheries decisions are made by NOAA Fisheries, a branch of the Commerce Department. Klamath water decisions are made by the Bureau of Reclamation, an arm of the Interior Department.
"One of the reasons the administration has been loath to take action on this is because they, through their 2002 water decisions, caused a large part of the problem," said Glen Spain, northwest region director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations. "The problem is that the agencies that adopted the water plan and created the disaster don't want to admit liability."
The Bureau of Reclamation's Sacramento spokesman, Jeff McCracken, said factors affecting the Klamath River are so complicated that it is unfair to lay the blame on the agency.
"This whole thing is very sad," he said. "No one is happy with this problem with salmon."
But McCracken said it's hard so see how the Bureau of Reclamation, which manages the Klamath River flow under a NOAA Fisheries biological opinion protecting endangered salmon stocks, is responsible for the problem when on the upper end of the river it waters less than 40 percent of the irrigated lands.
"It's an easy one to pick on us," McCracken said. "But you'll never solve the Klamath River problems looking only at us."
Gorman said the process for declaring an economic disaster for commercial fishermen is clearly laid out in the Magnuson-Stevens Fisheries Management Act. The first step is to determine whether the fisheries collapse is a result of natural forces, management practices or commercial overfishing.
"This was not brought on by overharvesting," Gorman said. "The fishermen are very much the victims."
But Gorman said there's no determination yet whether the collapse was the result of management decisions, and more specifically whether the law even allows Bureau of Reclamation water policy to be lumped under "management decisions" upon which a disaster declaration can be based.
"We do these declarations so seldom that I don't know if we've ever used management decisions by someone other than NOAA Fisheries in a disaster declaration," he said.
A year ago it was estimated that the reduced season would cost fishermen and related businesses as much as $100 million in losses. But those estimates were made before the season opened on May 1. Spain estimated actual losses between $40 million and $60 million, when compared to 2004 - the last healthy fish run.
Most salmon have a two-or three-year life cycle. After hatching from eggs laid and fertilized in sandy stretches of the river, the young head out to sea where they feed and mature, later returning to the same part of the river where they were hatched to spawn the next generation.
That means that the offspring of the 70,000 or so dead salmon in 2002 would have been returning to spawn in 2005 and 2006, and to some extent even in 2007, with the biggest impact this year.
The run this fall is expected to be below the minimum numbers needed to maintain a healthy stock. Because salmon from one river system mix with those from other river systems while at sea, protection of the Klamath River run could mean total closures of seasons for other river stocks, including the healthy Sacramento River runs.
"We've got people who can't pay for mortgages, who can't pay for boats and have no other place to go," said Spain. "This is going to impact tens of thousands of people up and down the coast."
That's why an economic disaster declaration is so critical, Spain said. Without the federal help that Congress can give only after a declaration is issued, the assistance available to fishermen and businesses is minimal.
Thompson, in a letter to the Commerce Department earlier this month, sought to hasten a decision on the 2005 season.
"I am mystified as to why NOAA Fisheries has yet to make any disaster determination for last year's salmon season," he states in a letter to Gutierrez demanding a decision by last Wednesday. Thompson said his deadline passed without any response.