Originally Posted By: rojoband
Originally Posted By: AnglersRental

BPA partially supports 40% of the programs, BPA doesn't supply 40% of the overall hatchery funding. The Mitchell Act is only ~$17M in funding, and only ~$10M is directed towards hatcheries. The rest is habitat and fish screens, its a relativly small piece of the overall funding, something like 8%. I have a complete breakdown of Columbia hatchery programs and funding somewhere (it's like 50 pages long). I will see if i can upload a PDF of it somewhere and provide a link.


That would be great. Because I found your reference to BPA ~ %40 here: BPA FUNDING

But Mitchell Act funding supports about 47% of the ENTIRE smolt production in the columbia basin links here: ECONOMIC EFFECTS FROM MITCHELL ACT HATCHERIES & IEAB 2005 STUDY ON COLUMBIA RIVER TOTAL SALMON PRODUCTION

So I am beginning to doubt your handle on some of these 'facts'. No offense, but when you try to spin the Mitchell Act as a small portion of the overall hatchery funding for Columbia River salmon production, I know something is off. If you want to PM me that's fine, as I see I'm probably getting too far off topic here and don't want to hijack this thread.


Dig a little deeper, even the analysis you provided shows that the Mitchell Act only provides ~$10M in funding for for fish producion, (which is distributed by NOAA to 68 seperate programs) while the 17 or 18 'Mitchell Act' Hatcheries alone have fish production costs of over $30M, and probably more now as that number is 5 years old. Just like with BPA, the program funding is only partial. So be careful when the headlines use words like 'supports' because it is typically spin. If you donated $1 to each of the 208 hatchery programs that feed into the Columbia River, I guess you could say you 'support' 100% of the smolt production on the Columbia River.

And even when you get to overall hatchery funding, you have to break down further to get to funding for fish production... the $$$ actually spent on producing smolts. 'Hatchery funding' can mean anything and typically does include lots of things that have nothing to do with producing smolts. For example, super expensive genetic research and pedegree studies on hatchery fish in general are considered 'hatchery funding' by BPA, even though they have nothing to do with producing smolts in any particular year.

And even then, if you want to get deeper into the weeds about who pays for the fish we catch out on the river, you have to look at the purpose of the various hatchery programs and sort out the conservation programs from the supplemental programs. For example, would you include the Redfish Lake captive broodstock hatchery program? It contributes statistically zero to Columbia River sport or commercial harvest, but that program alone has, at times, been almost 9% of what BPA spends on hatcheries.

I looked at a lot of this data several years ago as part of a consulting contract in related to the Columbia Basin Fish Accords. The cost of producing salmon and steelhead for supplementation programs that provide fish for harvest can largely be traced back to funding that originated through state agencies from sport fishing in the form of direct sales of licenses and tags, and from federal money given to the state agencies that orignated from excise taxes from sport fishing.