“The development would remove part of the cost of waterborne shipping from the shipper and place it on the taxpayer, jeopardizing more than one-half of the Columbia River salmon production in exchange for 148 miles of subsidized barge route. This policy of water development, the department maintains, is not in the best interest of the over-all economy of the state. Salmon must be protected from the type of unilateral thinking that would harm one industry to benefit another. Loss of the Snake River fish production would be so serious that the department has consistently opposed the four phase lower dam program that would begin with Ice Harbor dam near Pasco.”
From the state of Washington Department of Fisheries Annual Report for 1949, opposing development of four then proposed Snake River dams.
Over the next several years and after nearly 30 years of litigation gridlock as once-abundant Columbia Basin salmon runs continue to decline, the West Coast now has a very exciting chance for a serious Columbia River salmon recovery plan, and the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations (PCFFA) is committed to taking advantage of this golden opportunity.
More than $15 billion has been spent by the federal government trying to fix a broken Columbia River ecosystem devastated by too many impassable dams. Yet today the region is no closer to rescuing its valuable salmon runs than 30 years ago.
Nearly everyone acknowledges that the region needs to take a new direction toward something that will finally work and make a difference for harvestable salmon.
The chance for this new direction came in December 2023, after litigants in the main lawsuit (National Wildlife Federation, et al. vs. National Marine Fisheries Service, et al., Case No. 3:01-cv-640 {Dist. of Oregon})—including the PCFFA and its sister organization the Institute for Fisheries Resources (IFR)—had been meeting with the Biden administration for more than a year. The new administration was continuing to try and resolve our case against the Trump-era Salmon Biological Opinion (2020 Salmon Plan).
Out of those White House-level meetings arose the Columbia Basin Restoration Agreement (CBRI), which on Dec. 14, 2023 was signed and submitted for approval as a court-supervised multi-year settlement of litigation.
The CBRI represents a new and exciting opportunity to engage and make real progress toward increasing salmon seafood production from the Columbia River. This case has been “stayed” (suspended) until Dec. 31, 2028, though it remains under court supervision to help us assure implementation.
If at the end of that time insufficient progress has been made, or at any time federal commitments are not delivered, we could go back to court to force the issue. But so far, the CBRI is moving forward and we’re hopeful that we can make the progress needed without more litigation. Here is why it matters.
Background on the Snake River Dams
After decades of dam building, four final dams—Ice Harbor, Lower Monumental, Little Goose and Lower Granite—were built on the Snake River, the Columbia River’s largest tributary, from the 1960s to ‘70s. Once built, the four lower Snake River dams proved to be simply four dams too many, and the once-abundant salmon runs on the Snake River started their slide to extinction.
The relatively minor economic benefits the four Lower Snake River dams provided were never justified, as compared to the enormous economic and cultural toll taken by lost fishing economies.
Historically, even the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers advised that these dams would never make economic sense—but was ordered to build them anyway by Congress. There were no environmental laws in those days, so impacts on salmon were never considered.
However, the Columbia River was once the largest salmon-producing river system in the world. Prior to the dams, the Columbia produced salmon escapements estimated at between 10 and 16 million adults annually.
Today, of course, the Columbia produces less than 2.5 million adult fish, most of hatchery origin, and wild Chinook in the river are down to less than 2% of their historic numbers. Snake River Sockeye, Snake River fall Chinook, Snake River spring/summer Chinook and now Upper Columbia steelhead are so near extinction that they are listed as protected under the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA).
Wild Coho runs, once an estimated 1.2 million average annually, are now officially extinct throughout the basin except for a remnant of about 34,000 still spawning at its very mouth.
A recent study by the Institute for IFR documented what these losses have meant to salmon fishermen. This has cost the region’s fishery economy as much as 25,000 family wage jobs and $978 million a year (in 2023 dollars) in lost economic opportunities for each and every year these declines are allowed to continue. (Statement on the Value of Columbia Basin Salmon (June 2022) at https://ifrfish.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Col-River-Salmon-Values-2022wApp.pdf).
The obvious solution to restoring more than half of the basin’s salmon productivity is to remove the four aging and now largely obsolete Lower Snake River dams. Four prior salmon Biological Opinions have been thrown out of court as illegal and “arbitrary and capricious” for failing to even consider that obvious dam removal option, but now is the time to push for their removal.
Removing the Worst Salmon-Killing Columbia Dams
Wild salmon in the Columbia are forced to run the gauntlet of 27 huge dams in the Columbia and Snake River mainstems. Several were built without any fish passage, up or downstream. These dams are the end of the line for salmon and together they have already extinguished salmon in more than one-third of their historic range within the basin.
What people forget, however, is that these dams were never intended to be permanent fixtures. All were designed for a specific lifespan and to serve specific purposes. The Army Corps of Engineers estimates the average operational lifespan of American dams at about 57 years.
Many of the Columbia River dams are now nearing or have passed their intended retirement age.
The facts show that the four lower Snake River dams are good candidates for retirement and that their removal will help greatly to restore a number of valuable salmon runs. This is where we need to focus our efforts.
What Services Do Dams Provide?
Dams are built to provide some combination of only four benefits: (1) hydropower; (2) flood control; (3) irrigation or drinking water, and/or (4) river navigation for commerce. We know the four lower Snake River federal dams kill a disproportionate number of fish. But how do they stack up in providing offsetting social and economic benefits?
(1) Hydropower. Surprise! These four dams combined provide only about 4.13% of the Pacific Northwest’s total hydropower supply. Their retirement would thus make very little difference to BPA or to electricity rates. The Northwest Power Planning Council already concluded that BPA could economically survive if these four dams were retired.
And as more renewable energy comes online every year, the hydropower the Snake River dams produce is less valuable and sometimes even becomes “surplus power”—which means BPA then has to pay others to take that extra power, at a net loss.
(2) Flood Control. Surprise again! None of these dams provide any flood control benefits. Human safety, therefore, is simply not going to be an issue if these four dams are retired.
(3) Irrigation. Of the four, only Ice Harbor supplies any significant irrigation water, for a mere 36,000 acres of land. Modern pumps would easily supply this same water for a fraction of the cost of maintaining that dam.
(4) Navigation. These four dams do indeed provide a significant stretch of navigable water from Lewiston, Idaho, mostly for grain transport. But this transport system is heavily subsidized by taxpayers and ratepayers—and if you count in those subsidies, its cost is actually far more than its net economic benefit.
Transport of grain entirely by road and rail, as was done in the basin until the 1960s, using the former barging terminal at Richland, Wash., would today only be slightly more expensive than just the current face-value of barge fees. It would be a lot cheaper than barging as a whole, if you calculate in all the never-ending billions in salmon mitigation and maintenance costs necessary to keep the aging dams in order to support a handful of river grain barges.
Lower Snake River dam removal also has strong scientific and economic support. NOAA published an official scientific report, Rebuilding Interior Columbia Basin Salmon and Steelhead (Sept. 2022), which concluded:
“For Snake River stocks, the centerpiece action is restoring the lower Snake River via dam breaching. Restoring more normalized reach-scale hydrology and hydraulics, and thus river conditions and function in the lower Snake River, requires dam breaching.”
The best place to find the dozens of reports, studies and analyses showing that lower Snake River dam removals are not only scientifically necessary for Snake River salmon recovery, but also economically beneficial to the regional economy, is the Save Our Wild Salmon page, www.wildsalmon.org/factsheets-and-reports.
PCFFA and IFR both have been fishing industry members of this coalition for more than 25 years.
What the CBRI Would Do
To its credit, the Biden administration issued a Presidential Memorandum on Sept. 27, 2023 declaring that it “is time for a sustained national effort to restore healthy and abundant native fish populations in the (Columbia River) Basin,” and that “it is the policy of [the] Administration to work with the Congress and with Tribal Nations, states, local governments and stakeholders to pursue effective, creative, and durable solutions…”
What the CBRI is intended to do over the next 10 years is to identify all the economic benefits and services that the current Snake River dams actually do provide to the region, but then to find valuable (but non-dam) replacements or alternatives for these resources so that keeping these aging dams in place is less and less economically necessary or useful.
This would include upgrading the existing railway grain transport systems, which are still largely in place, as a viable economic alternative to barge transport; creating new renewable energy sources to meet growing electricity demand, some of it Tribally owned, to replace the limited amount of hydropower energy generated by the Snake River dams; keeping the agricultural sector whole as to current river-dependent irrigation needs, and generally supporting a more resilient and reliable Northwest power grid in which the Snake River dams are no longer necessary.
In addition to multiple benefits working toward salmon recovery in the basin, a primary objective of the CBRI is also to maintain a sound regional economy, including agriculture, that’s more resilient to future climate change.
For more information about the CBRI, see: https://www.wildsalmon.org/factsheets-and-reports/#CBRI
The next 10 years will be challenging, and both the CBRI and the Columbia Basin Partnership’s salmon restoration plan charting a salmon recovery path must be fast-tracked, or several remaining salmon runs in the Columbia Basin will go extinct. We are committed to this process and will continue to advocate for the importance of this work, including opposing misguided efforts in Congress to defund this whole program.
We are committed to continuing the fight, including working towards the possibility of removing the four Lower Snake River dams within 10 years to provide a more salmon-abundant future.
One important feature of the CBRI is that each and every one of its salmon mitigation measures also makes good economic sense in terms of supporting regional resiliency in the face of accelerating climate change, including transitioning to a carbon-neutral Northwest economy.
But, as always, our top priorities at PCFFA are thriving commercial fishing communities and abundant and healthy fish populations in the ocean for harvest, so that we can ensure that U.S. families have access to sustainable, domestic wild seafood.
That is also the top priority of the CBRI.
Glen Spain is the Northwest Regional Director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations (PCFFA) and its sister organization, the Institute for Fisheries Resources (IFR). He is also the Pacific Fishery Management Council-appointed Commercial Fisheries Representative to the PFMC’s Habitat Committee. He can be reached by email at fish1ifr@aol.com or at the PCFFA/IFR Northwest Regional Office, (541) 689-2000. PCFFA’s website is www.pcffa.org. IFR’s website is www.ifrfish.org.