One tribe's perspective on 'who runs the reservoirs.'(The Second Annual 'Who Runs the River?' Colloquium)

• Author: Sampson, Don

The question that this Colloquium asks is, "Who runs the river?" If tribal people were asked that question 150 years ago, we would have had a much different answer than today because we knew how the river ran, why it ran, and where it ran to. Now, however, when asked the question, the answer that we have to give is that the river is nm by the same old tired cast of characters. power, politics, and greed. These are the driving forces behind how the river runs today. The result is an salmon are endangered, and last year, a federal district court judge and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals chastised both the federal government and the Northwest Power Planning Council (NPPC) over their rigid adherence to status quo river operations and their failure to involve fisheries scientists from tribal and state entities in their decision-making processes.(1)

What was the response of those who rim the river to these court decisions? This year, they rigidly adhered to status quo river operations and failed to involve tribal and state fisheries scientists in their decision-making processes. At the same time, they created an illusion of constructive change and aggressive action. But this was merely to disguise their continued pandering to those usual suspects. power, politics, and greed. The federal agencies, and particularly the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), have adopted a classic, age-old approach of courageously confronting a problem by forming committees. We now have a lot of committees - I have seen them all and participated on some. In fact, they have not just formed one committee, but a whole parade of committees to implement NMFS's recovery plan. There is the Coordination and Planning Team (CPT),(2) the Reservoir Operations Team (ROT), the System Configuration Team (SCT), the Gas Bubble Technical Working Group (TWIG), the Process for Alternative Testing of Hypotheses (PATH), and the Technical Management Team (TMT). This is just a partial list of those groups whose ostensible purpose is to implement the NMFS recovery plan. There are dozens more devoted to other salmon-related issues and activities. The whole scenario is very confusing and enormously complicated. There are also committees associated with the System Operation Review, the System Configuration Study, the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) and its Business Plan, the BPA Rate Case, the NPPC's Strategy for Salmon, and the Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project.(3)

When we consider the tribes' participation in these committees, I think one of the things we look at is that it takes a lot of money for us to send biologists to Portland or Seattle to participate in all of these meetings. We question whether our participation is meaningful. We wonder how our involvement is affecting decision making. An example of the difficulties confronting us is the Reservoir Operations Team, or ROT, which is composed of a steering committee of approximately seventy people and a technical working group.(4) They have meetings scheduled on October 20, 25, and 30, and November 13, 15, 17, 27, and 29.(5) Now, it is simply not possible for my tribe to participate in all the meetings of just that one committee, let alone the other fifteen or twenty that are out there.

All this is nothing less than slow strangulation by paperwork and process. It is more paralysis by analysis. This is studying the salmon to death. Further, when we are able to participate, when we provide input, it is getting shelved, it is tossed into the round Me. We thus question the worth of participating in all of these committees.

River operations in 1995 clearly illustrate who runs the river. Back in February and March of that year, NMFS made its usual lofty promises in its biological opinion on the mainstem hydroelectric system operations, promising a "spread the risk" policy that would follow a flexible, "adaptive management" approach.(6) More specifically, the NMFS opinion promised that there would be less reflexive reliance on artificial transportation of juvenile salmon, particularly when improved water conditions allowed for more in-river passage. But look back at what actually happened. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps or COE) boasted that in 1995 it collected more juvenile salmon - more than 24.5 million - and transported more of them in trucks and barges - more than 18.5 million ever before in history.(7) This occurred at a time when "[w]ater supply was better than recent years [and] closer to historic normal runoff."(8) So, how flexible, how balanced was NMFS's approach? How could it "spread the risk"? The Fish Passage Center, a technical coordinating body for the tribes and the states, reported that "[p]reliminary estimates of the percentage of the Snake River wild yearling chinook run migrating in river below Lower Monumental Dam in 1995 [was] approximately 22% with the other ... 78% being transported from the three Snake River collector dams."(9)

Although NMFS created various teams and work groups to implement the proposed recovery plan, it would not support implementing measures its own plan called for. For example, although the NMFS biological opinion called for 20,000 cubic feet per second (cfs),(10) NMFS later "[a]greed to limit discharges from Libby Reservoir to 16,000 cfs after the state of Montana threatened to sue the federal government if flows from Libby and Hungry Horse reservoirs exceeded that amount."(11) Neither Grand Coulee, Hungry Horse, nor Libby reservoirs met the targets set in the biological opinion by August 31.(12)

These river operations largely reflect decisions made by the Technical Management Team(TMT), an interagency group established by the biological opinion to implement its provisions.(13) The dominant feature of the TMT is that tribal and state fish and wildlife agency representatives have absolutely no meaningful say in its deliberations or its decision making.(14) At one point, I heard that even a journalist from Lewiston, Idaho was involved in the TMT conference calls. So we wonder why tribal representatives should be involved in these types of decision-making processes. We have limited resources and our ability to become involved in numerous committees that ultimately ignore our advice is questionable at best.(15)

According to one System Configuration Team participant, "NMFS and the Corps have unilaterally prioritized [fiscal year] 1996 general construction activities under protest from the tribes and states."(16) Specifically, tribal and state fisheries scientists have expressed their "joint concern" to NMFS and the Corps, stating that the federal agencies ... [were] not providing the state agencies and the treaty tribes meaningful opportunity to influence the expenditure of general construction and mitigation funds and development of mitigation programs at COE projects, as is called for by the 1995 Biological Opinion for the [Federal Columbia River Power System]."(17) Yet "NMFS and the COE [have] finalized the majority of the projects for 1996 and [have] already let contracts with little or no consultation and agreement by the state and tribal fishery management entities."(18) Tribal and state fisheries experts believe that "the NMFS/COE program lacks a long-term rational strategy for investment of limited mitigation funds."(19) The System Configuration Team's basic premise seems to be that the...