NOAA expects no big change in salmon runs under draft policy

By Craig Welch
Seattle Times staff reporter

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This morning, NOAA officials will release their response to a 2001 court ruling that said the government had wrongly excluded fish reared in hatcheries when deciding whether salmon should be listed under the Endangered Species Act (ESA).

While environmentalists said earlier this spring that they suspected the new draft policy would gut federal protections for 27 runs of West Coast salmon, Lautenbacher and other NOAA leaders said it will merely alter protection for a few runs.

The government proposes moving Upper Columbia River steelhead and Sacramento River chinook from "endangered" to "threatened" on the endangered-species list, prompting slightly less protection, while California's central-coast coho would move from threatened to endangered.

Primarily, the new hatchery policy will require for the first time that the government at least consider the benefits some hatcheries have on some wild runs.

Bob Lohn, regional director for NOAA Fisheries in Seattle, acknowledged that overall, hatcheries in the Northwest were probably contributing more to the decline of wild salmon runs than helping them, a factor the government has long considered when protecting fish under the ESA.

Hatchery fish can compete with wild fish, often don't reproduce successfully and can introduce disease and genetic problems to wild runs. But in some cases, such as White River chinook, where numbers of fish in the 1970s dropped to about 50 — or Snake River sockeye, which in the mid-1990s had fallen to a single fish — hatcheries kept the runs from being wiped out. Those factors should be included in ESA listing decisions, Lohn said.

Lautenbacher and Lohn said the new draft policy will not detract from the main goal: improve naturally spawning salmon and their habitat.

Meanwhile, most confusion will likely be over how the policy affects commercial fishermen.

Because the government will now include salmon raised in the concrete raceways of hatcheries in its definition of fish protected under ESA, fishermen who rely on hatchery fish will technically be killing a federally protected species. NOAA officials maintain the issue can simply be resolved by requiring fishermen to get special permits.

While environmentalists worry that the change could make it easier for the government to remove protections, members of the building and development community said the policy should have already removed ESA protections for all West Coast salmon runs. Both sides expect to wind up back in court.
 
"Based on what we've heard, it sounds like they (the government) are continuing to flaunt federal law," said Russ Brooks, with Pacific Legal Foundation, a conservative legal firm trying to remove salmon from federal protection.

Craig Welch: 206-464-2093