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©2007 Cascadia Times

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A secret draft of Bonneville’s new proposal is leaked

Meanwhile, Bonneville and NOAA must present a new plan for protecting the salmon. The current deadline is July, but the plan has already been delayed by a year.

Draft versions of Bonneville’s proposal, marked “not for outside distribution,” have been leaked beyond the inner circle of government agencies that are reviewing it.

Cascadia Times reviewed a draft dated Dec. 20, which shows that Bonneville is prepared to make just a few minor tweaks in the hydropower system, but nothing remotely close to the “complete overhaul” Federal Judge Malcolm March observed in 1995 is needed. It claims that endangered runs will improve by small amounts. Leading scientists with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other fishery agencies say the Snake River runs, at least, need to double their rate of survival to give them a fighting chance of recovery. The proposed plan comes nowhere close to that.

“It's not even as good as the status quo,” said one source, who could not comment on the record because of the document's sensitive nature.

The “behind closed doors” nature of Bonneville’s process for developing the plan appears to conflict with Judge Redden’s instructions in his 2005 order.

“The many failures in the past have taught us that the preparation or revision of NOAA's biological opinion on remand must not be a secret process with a disastrous surprise ending,” he wrote.

Of course, Bonneville could simply comply with the judge's wishes, but many of its utility customers have clamored for electric rate relief and have grown increasingly critical of Bonneville’s salmon costs. They also contend that the salmon runs are in relatively good health.

One group, the Northwest River Partners, representing utilities, farmers and business, claims on its web site that “there are more fish in the Columbia River than at any time since the first dam was built at Bonneville in 1938.”

In fact, as the chart at left shows, the total number of salmon crossing Bonneville Dam has declined by 50 percent since 2001, and each year saw fewer fish than the year before.

Northwest River Partners also says that salmon survival is “higher today than it was before the Snake River dams were built.”

That statement contradicts studies by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service showing that the survival rate today for Snake River wild spring and summer Chinook, from smolt to adult, is about 1 percent. Before the dams were built, scientists say, the smolt-to-adult survival rate ranged from 2 to 6 percent.

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