Fishermen take salmon pleas to Washington

John Driscoll

The Times-Standard

April 3, 2008

West Coast commercial fishermen are on Capitol Hill this week urging Congressional leaders to investigate the worst salmon fishery collapse in history.

The seven fishermen from California , Oregon and Washington said in a teleconference Wednesday that government policies on the three major coastal rivers are creating systemic “rolling blackouts” in which fisheries are closed or heavily restricted from year to year. This year, an extreme shortage of salmon expected to return to the Sacramento River is leading the Pacific Fishery Management Council to recommend a paltry fishery -- or none at all.

Increased water diversions and habitat problems in the Sacramento are damaging the runs, the fishermen said, and are making salmon populations unable to handle other challenges like poor ocean conditions. The Klamath and Columbia rivers also suffer similar ills, they said.

”If those river conditions were corrected we would not have the problem we have now,” said Washington fisherman Ron Richards.

They also drew into question the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's opinion that a lack of food in the ocean was key to the collapse, saying that in the past decade fish have been larger and healthier, indicative of good ocean conditions.

Eureka fisherman Dave Bitts said the group hopes Congress will look into the National Marine Fisheries Service's 2004 report that found increased pumping from the Sacramento River delta for irrigation and cities would not jeopardize salmon. He wanted to know if political meddling may have been behind that opinion.

”We would like Congress to do whatever it can to restore the scientific integrity of the work done by the National Marine Fisheries Service on the Sacramento fisheries,” Bitts said.

The U.S. Department of Commerce Inspector General in July 2005 found that the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and the California State Water Project's plans passed muster with the National Marine Fisheries Service -- but that the fisheries agency gave approval without following established processes for ensuring the quality of its work. The Inspector General did not find evidence that the fisheries service changed its opinion of the plan midstream.

Other indicators of the health of the Sacramento River delta include the threatened delta smelt, which have suffered enormous population declines recently. The situation for that fish is so dire that scientists have begun to breed more smelt to backup the natural population in case it goes extinct.

Another interesting twist is that a program by the Fisheries Foundation of California and the state Department of Fish and Game to truck young salmon from upstream of the delta to San Francisco Bay where they can acclimate in pens was effectively shut down in 2005 and 2006. The salmon were instead dumped into the river unprotected, where they were preyed on by birds and striped bass, Bitts said.

The fish released in 2005 would have returned this year, and those from 2006 would have returned next year -- which is also expected to see a poor run. Some have voiced concern that while the previously successful net pen program may have led to a major boom in ocean salmon populations, that it may also have masked the delta's problems by repeatedly turning out abundant runs.

The fishermen visiting Capitol Hill said it's likely there is no one smoking gun behind the fishery collapse, but that the problems need to be examined if people want to preserve an icon of the Northwest.

Rep. Mike Thompson was among those the group met with this week. The St. Helena Democrat said he'd see if the House Resources Committee was interested in addressing the issue, or might hold field hearings in the area. Mainly, he said, it's important that people who aren't tied to the industry be made aware of what is happening to the valuable salmon resource.

”It's pretty evident -- you don't have to look very deep -- to see that there are major problems,” Thompson said.

John Driscoll can be reached at 441-0504 or jdriscoll@times-standard.com.

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