Carcassman,

To the best of my knowledge, restoring salmon and steelhead above the Cowlitz dams originated in the late 1980s with the group "Friends of the Cowlitz (FOC)." They got a local state legislator to require that then WDF and WDG study the feasibility of restoring anadromous fish to the upper Cowlitz basin. This appears to have been partly in response to the Lewis County PUD proposal to construct the Cowlitz Falls Dam. FOC also sued Bonneville Power - who provided the $$ for Lewis PUD - and obtained BPA's commitment to financially support this upriver restoration. FOC had in mind a combination of both hatchery and natural fish production for the upper basin in addition to the existing hatchery production downstream of the dams. At that time, FOC, like many others did, and some still do, thought that a fish is a fish, and that hatchery and wild fish are the same.

So after Cowlitz Falls Dam had already been designed, downstream passage fishways were appended as an afterthought. It didn't work very well.

Then came ESA listings in 1997-1998, during the relicensing of Tacoma's Cowlitz dams. It's an understatement to say that has complicated things a bit. Legally Tacoma had limited ESA obligations, so all the stakeholders tried to cobble together a license that included full mitigation of project impacts to fishery resources and still passed ESA muster, which remained vague at the time.

The license terms & conditions were written such that hatchery production could be reduced by one fish for each wild fish that returned to barrier dam. (I know because I wrote it.) I read some years ago now that the FTC modified that requirement so that each wild fish would account for 4 or 5 hatchery fish since wild fish are more productive than hatchery fish. More significantly, the mitigation obligation was modified from the metric of 5-year moving averages to mitigation benchmark values (measured as recruits) to set tonnages of smolt production, more like the old license, only lower. Whether this tilts mitigation requirements out of balance remains to be seen.

One might say that WDFW's major success in the Cowlitz license is that they still have the FTEs.

Sg