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Better Ways by Phillip Krause Opinion, Lewiston Tribune, March 21, 2004

There is a large problem facing the people near the Snake River these days. The problem: Extremist environmental groups and a general trend in the country are threatening the four lower Snake River dams' existence and thus the existence of Lewiston as a harbor. ...

For some time now there has been much evidence of lowering returns of salmon in the Columbia River Basin, and thus I am not denying that, nor am I denying the fact that the dams and the reservoirs do take some salmon's lives, but instead I wish to point out some other less drastic measures that we can take to solve this problem and get the salmon runs back up to acceptable numbers.

First thing that I would recommend doing is making the sport salmon fishery a draw tag, in which only a select number of tags are allotted annually for different stretches of river, and then [have] people put in for the tags ... as they would for moose and many other species that are having population problems. Next I would further limit the number of salmon our local commercial fisherman can take, while at the same time push our sovereign water territory further out to sea, thus limiting the number of salmon caught by foreign fishermen. Then finally I would look to the fish ladders and find a way of improving those before looking to breaching the dams.