In my post at the beginning of this discussion I stated that the lower Columbia River harvest is essentially 100% funded by electric rate payers. After reading a great amount of this thread I should amend that to above the confluence of the Snake and Columbia essentially 100% of the anadromous fish harvest is paid for by electric rate payers and federal dollars. In the lower river I would guess that it is closer to 85%. In any case I still believe that harvest allocation, particularly in the lower river is a political question to be determined by all the voters of the three fish producing states.

It would be a good graduate student thesis to determine exactly where all of the funding for Columbia Basin anadromous fish hatcheries comes from. A quick look at state agency web sites is a good indicator. In Idaho no sports license fee money is used to fund anadromous fish hatcheries. Idaho Power and other sources provide all funding. ODFW reports spending 22.9 million dollars on hatchery operations with 16.2 million being from federal sources. That is for all of their state hatcheries, not just Columbia Basin anadromous fish hatcheries. Washington operates 87 hatchery facilities on a budget of about 32 million per year. Less than 80% produce anadromous fish and without a bit of work it is hard to say how many of those are in the Columbia Basin. There are also 51 Tribal and 12 federal hatcheries in Washington, again not all are in the Columbia Basin but they receive no money from state sports license fees. It is not straight forward to determine WDFW funding sources but they list 31% is federal and 46% is from the state general fund and wildlife account. Finally for someone with an inclination to be an auditor look at cbfish.org, the BPA fish web site. Their budget for FY2012 is $285.9 million with $24.7 million for supplementation and $48.1 million for anadromous artificial propagation. Without including Mitchell Act money, USFWS, USACE, and USCGS funding the total non license fee Columbia Basin hatchery funding is near $100 million annually. The cost of work to produce quality smolts, research and monitoring, and conservation hatcheries all contribute to future harvest and are legitimate operation costs for all hatchery programs. The metric that best evaluates a hatchery program is adult returns. In the Columbia Basin the total biomass of smolts released from hatcheries often exceed that of the returning adults. No for profit operation could justify continuing operation with such results. Without the ESA and required mitigation for the Columbia River dams hatcheries and all harvest would probably not exist.