Judge rules Bush hydro plan violates Endangered Species Act

GRANTS PASS, Ore. — The Bush administration plan for balancing the needs of salmon against hydroelectric dams in the Columbia Basin violates the Endangered Species Act, a federal judge ruled today.

U.S. District Judge James Redden in Portland ruled in favor of a challenge by environmentalists, Indian tribes and fishermen of a FOAA Fisheries opinion that making $6 billion in improvements to the dams would result in no jeopardy to the survival of threatened and endangered salmon.

Redden rejected the Bush administration's new approach to the issue, which considered the dams part of the landscape. That approach would make the government responsible only for improving operations, not for damages caused by the dams themselves.

Under the Endangered Species Act, NOAA Fisheries must decide whether the federally operated dams jeopardize the survival of 12 threatened and endangered runs of salmon, and if they do, propose ways to overcome the harm. The review is known as a biological opinion.

In May 2003, Redden ruled that a biological opinion issued by the Bush administration in 2000 was illegal because the federal government could not guarantee that habitat enhancements and upgrades to hatchery and dam operations would be done.

The administration then issued a new biological opinion, which set a new course for salmon recovery by doing away with the idea of restoring the rivers to a more natural condition, and taking the new stance that the dams are part of the ecosystem and cannot be removed.

It proposed spending $6 billion on improvements over the next 10 years, particularly the installation of removable spillway weirs that NOAA Fisheries contends will increase survival of young fish migrating downstream to the ocean by easing them over the dams while requiring less water to be spilled rather than run through turbines.

The dams are operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation. The power is sold by the Bonneville Power Administration. NOAA Fisheries collaborated with them to come up with the operations plan.

A coalition of environmentalists, sports fishermen and American Indian tribes argued in U.S. District Court in Portland last month that the latest plan fails to take responsibility for irreparable harm to the fish.

The U.S. Justice Department countered that the federal agencies which control the dams dissecting the Columbia and Snake Rivers cannot be held responsible for the existence of the dams, which predate the passage of the Endangered Species Act.