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'Outsider' Fishes for Cooperation to Save Salmon Jim Tankersley, The Oregonian, September 20, 1999

Ignoring those who criticize his East Coast roots,
Will Stelle thrives in a seemingly impossible job

The leader of the federal effort to save Northwest salmon is a native New Yorker, a lawyer who came to Seattle in 1994 with just two years of experience living west of the Appalachians.

But Will Stelle is not your typical fish-out-of-water story.

In the highest ranks of Northwest salmon recovery -- in a debate dominated by longtime residents and scientists -- Stelle is an anomaly. He's an outsider. A bureaucrat. A man who loves his seemingly impossible job.

Five years ago, Stelle took over the Northwest office of the National Marine Fisheries Service, an agency thrust into salmon recovery with all the preparation of a 19-year-old drafted for war. He assumed a daunting task: save the region's signature fish without damming its economy.

Stelle was a political appointee, fresh from the White House, whose only connection with the Northwest was a stint as a University of Washington law student in the early 1980s. Key players in the salmon recovery debate were calling him a carpetbagger before he stepped off the plane from Washington, D.C.

His work in Seattle has been no kinder. Stelle has toiled to build his agency, to persuade federal officials to speak with one voice and to find a regional solution to the great salmon decline.

Still, fish populations dwindle, the price of saving them swells to $1 billion a year, and the threat of extinction grows. Already, Stelle has postponed until the spring his biggest decision as regional director: whether to recommend breaching the four Snake River dams in Washington state to help restore threatened salmon runs.

But Stelle thrives on the challenge.

"The salmon issue is a wonderful issue," he said in a recent interview. "It's so rich in so many ways, technically and scientifically. From a policy perspective, trying to fashion a successful salmon recovery program is just a wonderful way to spend your days."

In Stelle's first days at the fisheries service, Northwest newspapers tagged him the salmon czar, a savior sent from Capitol Hill.

Stelle is neither czar nor savior. He is many things to salmon recovery: trendsetter, negotiator, point man in creating a "federal family" of agencies that speak with one voice. But he is not its ultimate authority.

Salmon recovery is a true exercise in American federalism, involving several layers of government with no single head to make final decisions. Still, people on all sides of the issue count on Stelle for leadership.

"He has the force of law to recover the species," said Bill Bakke, director of the Native Fish Society, a Portland-based conservation group. "Everybody I think in the region looks to NMFS and to Will Stelle to give them clearance to carry on their management plans."

Stelle and the fisheries service have the legal authority to enforce the federal Endangered Species Act as it relates to 24 salmon and steelhead trout runs in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana. With the tacit blessing of federal officials in the Northwest and Washington, D.C., Stelle has used that power to two main ends: unifying federal agencies and pushing for regional solutions.

The two are interrelated, Stelle said.

"In my view, it would be an utter mistake for the feds to come into this hothouse of creativity and douse it with cold water and say to everybody, we're not well-organized, and we're going to organize you all into companies and platoons, and march out there," he said. "That to me would be a serious strategic error.

"Why? Because we're right now seeing the seeds of home-grown solutions germinate across the landscape."

Slow to extend welcome
Some in the region wish Stelle would leave their landscape alone.

"The last thing we need is a non-Northwesterner brought in to manage a regional issue," Bruce Lovelin, executive director of the Columbia River Alliance, said when Stelle was named fisheries service regional director in 1994. Five years later, Lovelin said he respects Stelle but hasn't changed that assessment.

With a welcome like that, you might wonder why Stelle wanted the job.

On a summer afternoon in Seattle, when the sun plays off Lake Washington and reflects through the picture window in Stelle's office, it's a little easier to understand.

As the bright white canvases of a dozen sailboats flutter on the lake behind him, Stelle -- an avid sailor -- weaves a love story of region and family. A father of four, a man who spent more than a decade in Washington, D.C., Stelle tells of his desire to escape the Beltway and move his family to Seattle. The fisheries service job was his best available ticket out.

"He cares very much about natural resources," said Donna Darm, second-in-command on salmon recovery at the agency's Northwest office. "Of all the jobs he might have been able to get in Seattle at the time, that's why he took this one."

Born in the small New York farming hamlet of Bedford Hills, Stelle grew up within 30 miles of about 60 reservoirs that attract anglers. He fished as a boy but didn't catch his first salmon until he was nearly 30, while he was a law student at Washington. By then, he was hooked on the Northwest.

"I was planning, as I was growing up, to settle in Maine. I like the coast, and I love the ocean." But, he said, "I came out here to law school, and that was it."

Along with sailing, Stelle spends much of his free time on carpentry projects. The farm boy in him loves to work with his hands. But after earning an advanced law degree in Seattle, Stelle returned to the East to work for the Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs. For years, he bounced around the Capitol, advising several government agencies on natural resource issues.

His crowning achievement came in the White House Environmental Policy Office. Stelle helped craft President Clinton's Northwest Forest Plan, designed to resolve the northern spotted owl crisis that had nearly halted logging in the region's Federal forests. A few months later, he took the fisheries service job.

Endangered species role
"He inherited an agency that went from cruise control to the number one endangered species agency in the region," said Curt Smitch, a special assistant for natural resources in Washington Gov. Gary Locke's office. "The National Marine Fisheries Service was never set up to handle an ESA problem like they have on the coast. They were a research institution."

In the past five years, Stelle has worked to make the fisheries service the kind of agency that can handle the problem. How he's fared depends on whom you talk to.

Many critics say his agency has erred on several key scientific decisions. Some think he still wears the outsider label.

But many colleagues and other federal officials say he's hired a crack team and has learned the lay of the Northwest's political landscape. He might not be a biologist, but he's learned enough to know a good scientific opinion when he sees it, they contend.

"He probably is in the group of a few dozen people who know the most about the Endangered Species Act in the United States," said George Frampton, director of the White House Council for Environmental Quality.

Someday, Stelle could shed the outsider image. But he might never lose his reputation as a D.C. deal-maker, which hurts him with government and industry critics across the region.

Some colleagues in other state and federal agencies say Stelle's actions don't always match his words. Many think the fisheries service is shortsighted in working to save fish. Almost all wish the agency would articulate a clear plan for species recovery.

Conservationists complain that Stelle negotiates too much behind the scenes. They, too, want more action. Most of all, they want science, not politics, to drive the salmon debate.

That can't happen, Stelle said. "There is a convenient fiction that science is going to give us the answers and make the decisions. Science isn't going to convince you of anything. It's not trying to convince you. Convincing is a policy exercise."

Snake River dams
Nonetheless, the agency delayed its decision on breaching the Snake River dams so it can gather additional scientific information. Its recommendation to Congress now is scheduled to be made next spring, though some agency scientists have said recently that further study might take years to complete.

If Stelle knows what the agency's recommendation will be, he isn't saying. Whatever the salmon recovery plan is, he said, it will cost more than the $1 billion a year being spent now. The big question is how to spend the money.

Conservationists call the proposal to breach Ice Harbor, Lower Monumental, Little Goose and Lower Granite dams critical to salmon recovery. Farmers and industrial users say it would kill the area's economy.

The final decision about whether the dams will come out isn't Stelle's to make -- only Congress can do that. But the agency's recommendation could throw a lot of weight to either side.

Stelle said the recommendation must include a multifaceted recovery plan, "life by a thousand stitches," that will require changes in land and water use and a renewed emphasis on restoring fish habitat.

Dam removal would hinge on convincing the region that such a step is necessary for fish restoration and worth the economic costs, he said. He conceded that those two conditions would be difficult to meet, making the sounds of a man prepared to carry on the recovery effort without breaching dams.

Regardless of how prepared he is, Stelle might not head the fish recovery effort much longer: As a political appointee, he stands a good chance of losing his job if a Republican takes the White House in 2000.

Looking back on Stelle's five-year tenure, it's tough to assess his impact on the salmon debate, to find clear evidence that he has helped the region bring the fish back.

And if he succeeds, the region and the fish won't need him at all, said Frampton, the Council for Environmental Quality director. "He is one of the few people in this job at this time that can help us find that strategy, one that will survive past his being there or my being here. Getting to that strategy is the hard part, and that's why I'm glad he's there."

Stelle clearly feels that his optimism and energy and his belief that he is doing what's best for the fish overwhelm any job-security worries. So do those who know him best.

"He is encapsulated by the job," said Bill Ross, a Seattle consultant and Stelle's longtime friend. "Will does seem to have a real good sense of personal rhythm and balance. He told me once, 'I sleep well at night.' "