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NMFS to review salmon listingsThis story was published Feb. 12, 2002
Federal protections for several Northwest salmon and steelhead stocks moved closer to annulment Monday when the National Marine Fisheries Service officially accepted five petitions seeking to roll back effects of the Endangered Species Act. The declaration in the Federal Register commits NMFS to analyze the need for ESA protection on 24 fish stocks based on "substantial" information that "delisting" may be warranted. NMFS also said it would issue options for a new hatchery policy this spring and set "objective and measurable" fish recovery targets for Northwest stocks in the next few months. The announcements - foreshadowed by NMFS late last year - heartened legions of water users on the Snake and Columbia rivers. "It's the first hurdle on the way to delisting," said James Buchal, Portland attorney for the Columbia-Snake River Irrigators Association, one of the groups to petition NMFS. "There were a lot of groups which were saying the delisting petitions did not have the scientific or commercial evidence necessary" to prompt a federal review, said Dean Boyer, spokesman for the Washington State Farm Bureau, which also petitioned the government. "NMFS gave credibility to the petitions." Predictably, environmentalists were irked. "NMFS is doing a disservice to the very species it is charged with protecting by spending limited resources on these petitions, especially when they have to turn their backs on their own standards to do so," said Kaitlin Lovell, salmon policy coordinator for Trout Unlimited. The furor over any rollbacks started in September when U.S. District Court Judge Michael Hogan invalidated NMFS' protection of Oregon's coastal coho salmon. Essentially, he said NMFS made improper distinctions between hatchery and wild coho in levying ESA measures. The Alsea Valley Alliance v. Evans decision was stayed by the 9th Circuit Court in December pending an appeal by conservation groups, but not before several water users tried to convince NMFS that the ruling called into question the entire federal policy on hatchery salmon. Many challengers hope that with hatchery fish included in species reviews, ESA protections such as tight limits on water withdrawals no longer will be warranted. After getting 1,800 calls and e-mails, NMFS informally agreed in November that its hatchery program was badly flawed and promised to generate a new program. Monday's publication solidified the top-down evaluation of the program over the next year and started a 60-day public comment period. NMFS is asking for information about population numbers, reproductive success, migration patterns and other technical matters concerning hatchery and wild stocks in the Columbia Basin. For more information, go to NMFS' Web site at www.nwr.noaa.gov/. If the agency proposes delisting any stocks, it will take an additional year of review before any final determination. While Monday's announcement bolstered water rights groups, it was not a complete victory. For starters, NMFS denied a request to review Snake River sockeye because hatchery sockeye were included in the original listing in 1991 and continue to warrant protection based on their "precarious state." That means that even if other Snake and Columbia river fish stocks eventually were delisted, at least some federal demands on habitat restoration and the hydropower system likely would remain from Portland to Lewiston. The other issue that haunts those who want the ESA removed is that state and local governments already are making rules based on the federal law and may have many of them in place before such protections are gone. Streamside buffers and limited water allocations both are driven by the ESA. "If, in fact, the listings are specious, then there is no need for so-called recovery and no reason for new regulations that deny irrigators water and would take away productive land from farmers and ranchers," said Boyer at the Farm Bureau. |