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BPA Spent $3.5 Billion for Wildlife by Dan Hansen, Staff Writer The Spokesman Review, January 18, 2001

First accounting shows most used in effort to save salmon, steelhead

VANCOUVER, Wash. _ Northwest electric customers have spent more than $3.5 billion since 1978 building fish hatcheries, buying land, conducting studies and taking other steps to help wildlife, a first-ever accounting shows.

The vast majority of the money was spent on salmon and steelhead, but other wildlife also benefited, according to the study unveiled Wednesday by the Northwest Power Planning Council. It showed a $3.48 billion cost by 1999, and the spending has continued since.

The money comes from the Bonneville Power Administration, which markets electricity from the region's federal hydropower dams.

Despite the tremendous cost, wild fish continue to dwindle. Twelve runs of salmon and steelhead in the Columbia River and its tributaries have been declared endangered or threatened since 1991. Bull trout and Kootenai River sturgeon also are protected under the Endangered Species Act.

The council's report includes actual spending as well as potential income lost because the dams must spill or retain water at inopportune times, for the benefit of wildlife.

It does not include the hundreds of millions of dollars Congress has appropriated for salmon. Nor does it include money from Northwest states, private organizations or utilities that generally don't buy power from the BPA, including Spokane's Avista Corp.

Avista recently agreed to spend $220 million over the next 45 years to help bull trout in the Clark Fork River, where the utility operates two dams. Public utility districts with five dams on Eastern Washington's portion of the Columbia have spent money building hatcheries and making other investments.

The report was spearheaded by Tom Karier, a Spokane resident and one of two Washington representatives on the council, which advises BPA on ways to spend its wildlife money. Karier said he asked to see an annual report of wildlife spending in 1998, when he first joined the eight-member council.

"There wasn't one," he said.

In 1999, the governors of Washington, Idaho, Montana and Oregon requested a full accounting, including money spent and the results achieved. Karier and council staff have been working on it ever since.

"It turned out to be a much larger project than we anticipated," Karier said. "We were struck by the poor condition of the data."

Until now, for instance, there was no single list of the land that has been purchased and managed for wildlife. The report found that 19 organizations spent $63 million of BPA's money to buy or lease 225,403 acres or obtain easements to that land. That land is supposed to make up for losses caused by the federal dams.

More than $300 million has gone toward scientific studies and monitoring of wildlife, primarily salmon. Yet the report's authors found that study results often were unpublished and unavailable to other researchers, raising the possibility that work is being duplicated.

"We've never had a sense that anybody was trying to hide anything," said John Harrison, council spokesman and one of the report's authors.

In fact, Harrison said, there was widespread dissatisfaction with the lack of thorough reporting. But no one had tackled the time-consuming task of fixing the problem.

The council in recent years has placed an increased emphasis on requiring accountability for the projects it funds. Council members during the meeting this week said they will expect better results from a database designed to give scientists access to the results of past studies -- a database many scientists say is incomplete and difficult to use.

Among the report's findings:

• To protect salmon, the BPA passed up $698 million in potential electricity sales during the 21 years reviewed. That's expected to increase as energy prices skyrocket and because the federal government has a new plan for saving salmon.

  In years past, for instance, the BPA greatly reduced Columbia River flows at night. Water was held behind the dams until daylight hours, when demand for electricity was greatest and the power's value was highest.

  Now, more water must go through the dams at night to reduce the risk that salmon spawning beds will dry out below Bonneville Dam. That means lost profits.

• The BPA spent $668 million buying electricity it could have produced itself if not for the need to protect salmon. As with the lost sales, annual purchases probably will increase with the new salmon restrictions.

• Of $961 million set aside for wildlife, about $733 million went toward anadromous fish -- salmon and steelhead. The BPA spent $112 million on resident fish, such as trout and sturgeon, and $116 million on other wildlife. The council has mandated that a greater share go toward resident fish, although salmon still will get far more than half the money.

• Although exact figures weren't available Wednesday, a big share of the money for resident fish was spent rearing and releasing rainbow trout and kokanee for Lake Roosevelt, the reservoir behind Grand Coulee Dam.

  That investment netted a return of $10 million a year in angler spending during the 1990s.

• Law enforcement and other costs associated with commercial and sport fishing cost about $33 million.

• The agency spent $312 million on salmon hatcheries, or about one-third of the money available to spend on fish and wildlife. A growing number of scientists worry that hatcheries have harmed wild runs. That happens when hatchery fish compete for food and spawning beds, or breed with wild salmon, weakening the genetics that equip specific runs of salmon to survive in specific streams.