Even if you don’t consider any positive results in salmon recovery by removing the dams, just maintaining them for navigation and power generation makes no economic sense. I don’t understand the economics or politics driving their preservation.

From the LSRD Study


“ In English, this means that for every dollar spent on the dams to maintain the possibility of navigation on the LSR, farmers and businesses in the region only see a benefit of 43 cents.

Put another way, if rather than pouring the same amount of money into the dams, the COE would pay the entire extra cost for the various farmers and businesses to ship by rail instead of barge, the COE would have $10.2 million left over to refund to American taxpayers.

Put still another way, if a banker looked at a proposal for a new business with a BCR of .43:1, that banker would not fund it. Alternately, if this were a private business whose BCR had declined to .43 the business owner would shut it down.”

And this doesn’t include the hundreds of millions spent on salmon mitigation.