White River Restoration Project (Sumner)

Not sure if this info has been posted.
https://connects.sumnerwa.gov/white-river-restoration-project

Over one billion dollars. It will improve fish habitat slightly, probably not enough to be measured in an increase in adult recruits. It looks like the project will do more to reduce flood damage in Sumner, also a good thing, than it does to benefit fish. And the cost is more than one billion dollars. Just for the heck of it, I'll mention that it costs so much less to just not destroy fish habitat in the first place.

That would make sense in most cases...but when the resource extractors get to privatize the profits and socialize the costs, it sure makes economic sense to them. Taxpayers pay a billion dollars so that they can extract a few hundred million dollars.

Fish on...

Todd

Pretty cool history. Not many if any river systems naturally changed drainages and mixed fish stocks. One could argue that mixing stocks in different drainages is not necessarily a bad thing based on the past success the Green and Puyallup had in fish production. Wonder how far a billion dollars in fish production would go?

"Wonder how far a billion dollars in fish production would go?"

If spent in the White and Puyallup River systems, it would primarily benefit salmon fishing in Canada and the treaty fishing terminal area. I might return a handful of salmon to non-treaty sport fishing in Marine Areas 9 and 10. The benefit to the southern resident killer whales would be about the same as for the non-treaty sport fishery.

A billion dollars in hatchery fish production doesn't buy as much as sport fishermen seem to expect. The money WDFW spends on hatchery salmon production is a bigger waste than the millions Seattle and King Country spend to not improve the homelessness situation in King. Co.

Perhaps.

Blackmouth,

I likely mischaracterized the respective waste of WDFW and Seattle-King County yesterday. I know that WDFW spends $93.7 million on hatchery salmon and steelhead in the 2017-2019 biennium, and that provides only a token return on investment to the recreational angling creel, with most of it accruing to Canada, some to Alaska, and most of the rest to treaty fishing and non-treaty commercial fishing. How much of that is wasted spending is likely in the eye of the beholder.

I hear on the radio that Seattle spends $150 million per year on homelessness. I don't know if that amount is correct or not since I relied on radio reporting which might be hearsay. Most would agree however that homelessness has gotten worse instead of better, despite the high level of spending. I don't know if that's waste, but it sure appears to be badly spent public funding.

Back to the issue at hand. As we get less and less return on hatchery investment, shouldn't the public and taxpayers be asking why we are advocating for increased spending on hatchery salmon production? BTW, those various millions appropriated in the last Legislative session to "save" orcas won't. Unfortunately, it's feel good legislation so that the public will feel like we're at least trying to save the poor starving southern resident killer whales. Which opens a whole 'nuther can o' beans.

Salmo g.


I agree that our Government and Administrators are poor Stuarts of our resources both natural and monetary, yet what do the voters do? they put the same bums back in control, so perhaps the majority of voters are getting what they want.


"It's a sad sad situation and it's getting more and more absurd." Bernie Taupin