River Rat,

The time has not come and gone! Yes there was a settlement agreement between Tacoma and the agencies but that does not mean that FERC has accepted the agreement yet. Until FERC accepts and applies the settlement agreement to Tacoma's new license there is still some time to make changes. If enough people make enough noise, before it happens, FERC will have to listen. FERC can make whatever changes it chooses to the settlement agreement. Will that happen …maybe not, but time will tell! There will be NO "new hatcheries", only remodeled ones. But at some point in time there may be 3 small rearing sites constructed above the dams, but they really won't be "hatcheries". These sites will probably be more like rearing ponds to imprint fish to the upper Cowlitz. Ask Salmo G about them. To seat back and except this agreement as written is dead wrong! Its not over tell the fat lady has song. Right now she is only humming.

If this deal was so great, why do you thing that the Lower Columbia Fish Recovery Board (LCFRB) decided not to sign onto Tacoma's agreement?

The LCFRB publicly stated that they felt that they were being blackmailed into signing the settlement agreement. To dam bad our agencies didn't have the guts to take the same stand that the LCFRB did and refusing to sign the agreement!

It's not to late to force FERC into making or adding changes into the settlement agreement, but if we sit back in the shadows and do nothing it will never happen. Tacoma Power is banking on that to happen. The settlement has some good things in it, but it also has some real bad things that need to be corrected (like the FTC). Ask Salmo G what the production numbers in the new settlement agreement are projected to produce in the form of returning adults of summer and winter run steelhead. Ask him what numbers of historic early run coho adults will be expect back. Ask what the projected number of retuning sea-run cutthroat will be. Ask what mitigation Tacoma is doing to offset the fish production that was lost in the lower river do Tacoma's project operations. Ask what the settlement agreement does for the mitigating of the 14,000 fall-chinook that used to spawn above the project. These are now listed stocks, so why aren't they fully addressed in the settlement agreement?

I have a lot more question you can ask, but lets see what the answers are to these first. I think you will not be as so optimistic about the future of the Cowlitz River fishery when you see what the returning adult number are projected to be even after all the remolding. They have pretty much been kept a secret though-out the entire settlement agreement because they knew that people would get pretty *****-off.


Cowlitzfisherman

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Is the taste of the bait worth the string of the hook????