Max,

I’m not sure you’ve “got it,” at all.

The Cowlitz salmon hatchery is planned for renovation because it is over 30 years old. The remodeled hatchery will have a planned capacity of 650,000 - 800,000 pounds. That doesn’t make it physically smaller than the existing facility because the existing hatchery produces over 900,000 pounds by over-loading ponds. The low-end 650,000 pound facility is considered large enough by anadromous fish hatchery experts at WDFW, NMFS, USFWS, and private consultants to produce enough hatchery smolts to fully replace all the spring chinook, fall chinook, coho salmon steelhead, and cutthroat trout that migrated upstream of the Mayfield Dam site prior to construction of any of the Cowlitz River dams, even if the reintroduction program in the upper Cowlitz River basin is a total failure. Tacoma in under no legal obligation to provide hatchery mitigation fish in numbers exceeding the impacts of their hydroelectric project. They are obligated only to mitigate for losses attributable to their project.

Tacoma’s mitigation responsibilities are spelled out in the July 2000 technical report by Cramer and Associates. The age 3 ocean recruit benchmark value for spring chinook is 106,134; for fall chinook is 71,735; for coho is 124,277. CFM asked about the 12,000 steelhead I referred to in my post above, and it isn’t in either the Cramer report or the Settlement Agreement as near as I can tell. I thought it was and am apparently wrong. I only recall that Tacoma was agreeable to leaving steelhead at the previous value around 12,000.

The Fisheries Technical Committee meetings are limited to parties that signed the Settlement Agreement at Tacoma’s request mainly to limit meetings to two hours instead of taking all day, which is what was estimated if participation was unlimited and allowed opponents of the agreement. The FTC exists for the sole purpose of implementing the Settlement Agreement. If the court rules that illegal, then things will change. Mainly the FTC meets to plan and evaluate fisheries studies associated with the project’s FERC license. Most of the studies are about fish passage or hatchery production.

The FTC plans to collect smolts produced in the upper Cowlitz basin at Cowlitz Falls Dam, Riffe Lake, and Mossyrock Dam and pass them to the lower Cowlitz River at Barrier Dam. There are smolt collection facilities at Cowlitz Falls Dam presently, but they only capture about half the coho and steelhead smolts, and even fewer chinook smolts. Improvements are being made at Cowlitz Falls, but I think additional facilities are required at Riffe in the near term. I no longer work on that project, so I may have no influence on what happens there. The license requires that Mayfield Dam achieve a 95% smolt passage survival, and studies there indicate that about 82% of coho smolts use the louver bypass, and 97% of the coho and steelhead actually survive passage through the OLD Mayfield turbines and 87% in the NEW turbine. The combination of louver and turbine passage satisfies the fish passage requirement. Your tour of Mayfield must have been incomplete or you weren’t paying attention. The result is that wild coho are not “non-existant” in the Cowlitz River. Wild coho smolts numbering over a quarter million have been collected at Cowlitz Falls, and as many as 75,000 wild coho smolts have passed through the Mayfield counting house. I haven’t heard the count on the number of wild coho that have returned to the barrier dam, but anglers have complained about catching unmarked adult coho that they were required to release, so there are some. There are also wild chinook and steelhead, altho much lower in number. However, those numbers will increase in response to improved juvenile fish passage facilities. Therefore, it’s not true that juvenile fish cannot migrate downstream past the dams.

What you may not like is that as the returns of wild fish increase, Tacoma is allowed to cut back on hatchery production proportionally, but not before. This is because Tacoma is not required to manufacture as many fish as possible. Tacoma is required to mitigate losses caused by its project.

I don’t see how you could call the Cowlitz “toast” after consecutive years of record coho runs, and improved spring and fall chinook returns the last couple years. It’s only toast, if toast means whiners don’t get what they want. The Cowlitz continues to, and will continue to, be one of the most prolific salmon and steelhead rivers on the lower Columbia. How can that be “toast”?

You are correct, however, that the Cowlitz is a victim of greed. People, in the form of our society, have decided to sacrifice salmon and steelhead for energy. Fortunately, society passed some laws requiring “mitigation proportionate to project impacts.” Otherwise, there’d be no fish on dammed rivers. Mis-management? According to whom? Some people want the dams removed. Some want the dams only without regard to fish and other impacts. Some want all wild fish. Some want all hatchery fish. Guess what? This ain’t Burger King. You can’t have it your way.

It looks like you think agencies that implement the laws that your representatives pass on your behalf are “gutless.” The agencies’ jobs do not include satisfying whiners. You get the law passed, and the agencies will implement it. That’s how it works. Oh, and you’re right that the government does get paid off. Only it’s not the agencies that get paid off. It’s your representatives. The United States has the best “government” that campaign and lobbying money can buy. You don’t like it? Buy yourself a Senator. That’s how it works.

The Cowlitz dams are inherently destructive of that part of the river ecology the dams and reservoirs occupy. There is no way around that. They also damage to some extent, the river reach downstream of the dams. Mitigating that defeats the purpose of the dams, and the law generally does not require it.

Now, perhaps you've "got it!"

Sincerely,

Salmo g.