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Frank L. Cassidy, Chairman
Northwest Power Planning Council
851 S.W. Sixth Ave., Suite 1100
Portland, Oregon 97204-1348
May 12, 2000
Dear Mr. Cassidy,
It is with great pleasure that I respectfully submit the Yakama Nation’s recommendations to the Northwest Power Planning Council for your consideration in the Phase I amendment process of the Council’s Fish and Wildlife Program. I have asked Mr. Randy Settler, Chairman of our Fish and Wildlife Committee, to provide you with his specific comments and recommendations and his contribution is included in the attached package.
We believe that the Pacific Northwest is at a critical junction in its resolve and ability to restore the salmon runs to our watersheds. I cannot emphasize strongly enough the importance of the Council’s program in providing a clear path and direction to this end. I hope that both you and your staff feel the weight of this awesome responsibility and rise to the challenge of the amendment process by producing a visionary document that will lead to the successful restoration of the salmon.
Due to the quasi-federal status of the Council, your final plan must also represent the federal trust responsibility to the Treaty Tribes and incorporate and uphold those inherent rights detailed in the Treaty. This unique situation mandates that the Council respect and practice the government-to-government form of consultation with the Yakama Nation as we meet in the future to work towards our common goals.
You have a big job to do and we wish you well in your effort. We look forward to working with you further during the comment period.
Sincerely,
Lonnie Selam, Sr., Chairman
Yakama Nation Tribal Council
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Frank L. Cassidy, Chairman
Northwest Power Planning Council
851 S.W. Sixth Ave., Suite 1100
Portland, Oregon 97204-1348
May 12, 2000
Dear Mr. Cassidy,
We would like to thank you for the opportunity to provide comments on the Northwest Power Planning Council’s (NPPC) amendment process for its Fish and Wildlife program. We know that you are keenly aware of this program’s importance to the people of the Yakama Nation (YN), as it promises the best hope we have of recovering our anadromous fish resources and their habitats that have been so severely impacted by hydropower development in the Columbia Basin.
WE believe this amendment cycle will be critically important to the restoration of the fishery resource and the ability of our region to control this effort. It is clear that the NPPC’s Fish and Wildlife program will be completely revamped and changed during this amendment cycle. It is equally clear that these changes will occur and be influenced by the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and its growing prevalence in the Columbia Basin. The degree to which we can integrate and balance these two processes to benefit the fish and wildlife resources at risk will determine either the success or the failure of our efforts over the next 5 years. It is our impression that we must succeed during this time period or society at large will lose faith in our ability as managers and abandon the effort in future years.
Our requested amendment revisions to the NPPC’s Fish and Wildlife program are located in three areas of this document. We have included my comments on process and concept in the body of this letter. The first attachment contains nine sub-basin plans that have been updated from the originals published in Wy-Kan-Ush-Mi Wa-Kish-Wit (the Tribal Restoration Plan or TRP). These sub-basin plans are for watersheds located in the YN’s Ceded Area. They contain the context for the specific measures, which we are requesting, be added to the Fish and Wildlife Program. A second attachment contains a summary list of the measures located in attachment one.
The nine sub-basin plans are specific to the fisheries resource. However, we have also included preliminary language for two wildlife plans that have been developed for the Yakima and Klickitat watersheds. These will serve as an example of the truly integrated interdisciplinary plans we look forward to developing in Phase II of the amendment process.
The amendment recommendations contained in this letter are specific to the YN’s perspectives but will hopefully be shared and endorsed by the basin community at large. Several of our recommendations are more conceptual at this stage and are aimed at steering the final product to a desired end, rather than providing specific language at this time. We also feel it is necessary to provide a few brief comments on the process and current bio-political setting as these events have "set the stage" and provide us with a unique opportunity that may not be repeated in history any time soon.
Comments on the Process
Frankly, the amendment process has not moved forward like a well-greased machine. The BPA rate case required to fund the new fish and wildlife program proceeded ahead of the process without any idea of what sort of rate increases will be required to sustain the new effort. The multi species framework project, which was supposed to be the guiding analytical tool for the new program amendments, is still unfinished with no sure end in sight. ESA requirements and the corresponding decision making process has not been completed in a timely fashion and hence will not be adequately represented in the new program.
Public meetings on the subject have revealed that the NPPC council members and their staff have not always been on the same page relative to the amendment process and a similar reality is mirrored in the Columbia Basin Fish and Wildlife Authorities (CBFWA) meetings on the subject. Within the tribal community, there is much disagreement between the upriver and downriver tribes over the amendment process, its time scheduling, and its desired direction. In short, confusion seems to reign supreme and the effort has, at times, resembled a ship off course without a captain or crew.
Having said that, I can also say that we are very comfortable that this effort will be a success and yield an excellent working document that will effectively guide our efforts over the next 5 years. How can I say that given the above disclaimers? The answer lies in the new found sense of trust, communication, and shared sense of urgency to solve the problem that I see developing between the basin’s stakeholders. We have long felt that our lack of success in bringing back the fish had more to do with a lack of political and process resolve to fix the problem than it did with any organizational deficiencies in the way we approached the effort. We see that scenario changing now and believe that no matter how convoluted the amendment process has been up to this point, if the NPPC wants a viable document that will solve the salmon crisis, they will create one. We are all looking to the NPPC for the leadership required turning this necessary course of action into a reality.
I have every confidence that this will be the case and the resultant NPPC Fish and Wildlife Program will be an exemplary document. The timing and the strategy developed in the new program are also crucial given the bio-political situation developing in the basin. Because of its relevance to the amended program, we will comment briefly on our perceptions of the current opportunity presented to the basin’s managers to control their own destiny through the NPPC’s amended program by capitalizing on the failed Federal salmon restoration effort.
Comments on the Current Setting and Necessary Strategies
In my opinion, the Federal Caucus’s All-H strategy has failed miserably. The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) and the rest of the Federal family concentrated most of their effort on the hydropower H. Recent and upcoming events (elections, public opinion, etc.) have all but taken this H off the table as far as resolving the dam breaching question within the next 5 year NPPC amendment period. Even if the political decisions were made to breach the dams, nothing of consequence towards this end would happen within the next 5 years. As such, the breaching of dams and the entire NMFS All-H effort may still be a viable long-term option for salmon recovery, but it leaves a complete void for the short term.
Recognizing this obvious fact, one would think NMFS would have provided considerable effort in crafting a short term ESA plan based on the remaining 3 H’s; habitat, harvest, and hatcheries. To the extent that the success of both harvest and hatcheries will ultimately depend on quality and quantity of habitat, one could have suspected that the main emphasis of such a plan would have been habitat directed. NMFS presented no such short-term plan and their discussions on the remaining 3-H’s were pitifully inept and only displayed their ignorance. Given this fact and that NMFS’s bi-op will surely be sued for its inadequacies, the basin is left without any short-term implementation plan capable of recovering salmon. Society will not suffer through another 5-year period of directionless planning with no accomplishment.
Enter the NPPC amendment process; the stage couldn’t be set any better for the NPPC to capture the entire recovery effort and finally live up to its original promise as an effective regional planning body with the ability to make hard decisions in an open public forum. I strongly believe that our greatest short term opportunities for immediate success are in the habitat and hatchery arenas and the current amendment process gives us the means to craft such a plan. The amended program must reflect bold and creative habitat directed measures to capitalize on the open door that NMFS has provided by failing to come up with short-term ESA solutions.
A well-crafted amended program also solves a major funding problem. Additional funds will be a necessity if we are to finally turn around the salmon decline, however they must be allocated and dispersed with more accountability to the task at hand. Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) has already indicated they will expend additional funds on salmon recovery if a suitable NPPC plan is developed and identifies the need. If the phase I amended plan can be developed on schedule, i.e. by the end of August, 2000, additional BPA funds could be made available in the 2001 fiscal year to address immediate action items identified in the plan. Timing will be crucial if we hope to access additional BPA funds and I urge the NPPC not to deviate from your planned completion schedule.
Specific amendment comments and suggestions
The following comments and recommendations are specific to the amendment process. As I mentioned earlier, they are conceptual in nature, but I feel strongly that the implied changes need to be incorporated in the final document. I should note that the following suggestions are predicated on the premise that the amended program will meet BPA’s needs and additional funding will be available in 2001.
1. Simplify and clarify the Fish and Wildlife Program document
The amended Fish and Wildlife program will provide the basic working plan for the next 5 years of activity. The Columbia Basin is a highly degraded and modified watershed and the new program must clearly state that it is primarily a watershed restoration effort. A watershed has clearly identifiable components (ocean, estuary, mainstem, tributaries, etc.) that can be isolated and put into an understandable and proper planning context. Similarly, the components and their attendant problems can be hierarchically organized by decreasing size at a regional scale, a landscape scale, a stream corridor scale, a stream scale, and finally even down to the stream reach scale. The goal here is to produce an understandable document that clearly outlines the problem, how the problems are being addressed within the component parts of the watershed, prioritizes and allocates resources in a responsible fashion, and emphasizes scientifically defensible ecological restoration practices.
This document should be easily understandable to the laymen. Our scientists tend to overwrite and turn a simple concept into unintelligible jargon, which is then misconstrued by the general, public. Our goal should be to produce a document understandable to anyone with a minor learning disability, or at least to a U.S. Congressman.
2. Specify Needed Infrastructure Changes
The old program recognized the CBFWA caucus approach to managing and allocating available resources. The 3 caucuses (anadromous fish, resident fish, and wildlife) were each allocated a proportionate share of the available budget to plan their annual work effort. While this approach may have been necessary in the earlier phases of the program, it has resulted in 3 different disciplines and thought processes all going in different directions at the same time. We need to make some drastic changes in this approach to insure success over the next five years.
a. Recognize that upriver needs are different from downriver needs
We need to recognize that the upriver (areas blocked from salmon) needs are different than the downriver (areas with salmon present) needs. We need to develop two separate but parallel processes for these vastly different approaches. Currently, the upriver entities must compete for funds in the same caucus structure as the downriver groups. Given the emphasis on salmon recovery, this provides an extreme disadvantage to upriver projects and they have been chronically underfunded as a result. This trend will accelerate when we get into ESA implementation. Upriver mitigation activities must have a dedicated funding base with sufficient resources provided to achieve meaningful results.
Similarly, upriver mitigation should be allowed to proceed with a greater degree of latitude for individual planning efforts specific to the unique characteristics of their hydropower losses than downriver groups. They should be allowed to follow the mitigation path of their choice and not necessarily be constrained to a strict watershed restoration philosophy. Salmon recovery demands a community based watershed restoration process, but upriver groups, with no salmon present, should be allowed greater freedom in their mitigation planning and projects.
b. Reorganize the downriver caucuses into a watershed restoration team
We strongly believe we need to reorganize the downriver effort into one watershed restoration group. Sub-groups, similar to the old caucus structure, will be a natural outgrowth of this process, however they will be ecologically and/or functionally oriented rather than by discipline. Some logical examples of sub-groups would be evaluation and monitoring, restoration methodology, hatchery technology, riparian and wetland management, habitat acquisition, research, mainstem flow operations, etc.
To be successful, the watershed restoration approach demands an integrated interdisciplinary team to address the problem. The expertise of the resident fisheries and wildlife ecologists must be married with that of the anadromous fisheries scientists and other disciplines in the new program. This approach is entirely consistent with the NPPC’s new sub-basin planning emphasis and will lend a great deal of cost efficiency, accountability, and integrated thought process to the salmon recovery effort over the next 5 years.
c. Constrain the downriver effort to focus on ecosystem restoration
This recommendation comes under the old saying "dance with the woman that brought you to the party" and emphasizes the fact that we need to produce fish over this amendment cycle. In short, we strongly recommend that the downriver watershed groups be constrained from activities that do not bear directly on the restoration of healthy ecosystems that promote salmon and related indigenous species (e.g. lamprey, sturgeon, etc.) recovery.
What this means is that the wildlife contingent will focus their considerable skills in acquiring and managing terrestrial habitats not on the tops of mountains, but on the uplands, riparian corridors, and related wetlands adjacent to salmon bearing streams. Resident fisheries scientists will answer the questions of impact to salmonids from introduced exotics such as smallmouth bass, walleyed pike, and shad. No project should be funded over the next 5 years that does not directly relate to a watershed function that leads to a restored ecosystem.
This may seem harsh, as the Act clearly allows for other mitigation strategies. However, if you recall my earlier comments on the failed ESA recovery effort of the Federal family and the open door this provides the NPPC program to capture an effective 3-H recovery program, the measure makes sense. We simply must devote all of our collective energies over the next 5 years to produce fish in the rivers or the program will wither and die and the salmon resource will be a thing of the past.
3. Adopt a Habitat Directed Downriver Approach
A major emphasis of the amended program should be habitat directed. During the first 20 years of the NPPC’s Fish and Wildlife program we have planned, modeled, regulated, and studied the fish almost to death. However, the simple fact remains that fish habitat needs require riverine ecosystems that are connected with their flood plains, hydrologically functional, and have adequate water to produce minimally normative flow responses. We should dedicate the next 5 years to acquiring by lease, purchase, or easement every acre on every salmon stream possible where the opportunity exists to reconnect a river with a missing normative ecosystem function. These acquired lands must be restored by our management agencies with strict attention paid to the needs of the fish.
We would not feel so strongly about this initiative if we did not have first hand experience with its effectiveness. The Yakama Nation staff has been performing habitat directed watershed restoration projects since 1994. The response in salmonid re-occupation of blocked habitats and the colonization of restored habitats has been phenomenal. Additionally, the habitat directed approaches perfectly complement the NPPC’s commitment to properly designed supplementation hatchery facilities.
Clearly, standards and criteria will need to be developed such that the habitat funds available are prioritized to address cost efficiency and accountability concerns. Similarly, within a given drainage some lands will be more desirable than others, and assessment criteria will again have to be developed such that the "biggest bang for the buck" is realized. However none of these obstacles should deter us from expanding our vision in this area. We should be talking about such things as the outright purchase of the entire John Day basin for salmon recovery purposes. If we as salmon managers cannot think big enough to contemplate an ecosystem level of thought and action, then none of our science will help us in the end.
This is clearly an area where BPA must be encouraged to provide additional funds into the direct program. We should be thinking of at least a $50,000,000 per year effort over the next 5 years. Habitat initiatives should be implemented as immediate action items in the 2001 budget and teams should develop the requisite standards, criteria, and evaluation protocols immediately. The habitat time lag required demonstrating a positive salmonid response is generally in the 2-3 year range. If we implement this approach immediately, we will have positive results within the 5-year amendment period.
4. Expedite the BPA Contracting Process
Many of the current programmatic functions would achieve great cost efficiencies and savings if multi-year front-loaded contracting were implemented. The current system of annual project solicitations and monthly cost reimbursable contracting generates excessive administrative costs in terms of both personnel time and paperwork processing requirements. Most importantly, the system’s modification procedure is not flexible enough to accommodate timely changes in management functions that may occur on a normal basis throughout any given year.
The YN’s Wetland and Riparian Restoration project is currently being recognized by BPA as a pilot project to test the project efficiencies and cost savings resulting from front loaded contracting. This project was chosen by BPA because of its existing approved long-term management plan that clearly details annual project activities. As we move forward into amended sub-basin plans that detail every activity over a 5-year time frame, i.e. essentially provide a 5 year work plan, BPA should adopt a multi-year front loaded contracting approach to facilitate this process.
We believe this change in contracting procedure will result in huge cost savings complimented with operational efficiencies over the life of a project and request that specific language be included in the amended program that allows this to occur. The current YN pilot project has demonstrated the positive results that can be realized with this approach.
5. Support for Other Program Amendment Submittals
We would also like to endorse the amendment package submitted by the Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission (CRITFC). These measures address a wide variety of basin-wide and system concerns collaboratively crafted by the four Treaty Tribes and, as such, were not addressed in this individual submittal.
Additionally, we wish to voice our support for the immediate funding of those projects deemed necessary by the NPPC to complete the ongoing assessment and planning process. This would include those elements of the Multi Species Framework project that need to completed, additional EDT validation projects for tributary watersheds, the sub-basin assessment project proposed by Dr. Bob Bilby, the habitat and ecological function project proposed by Tom O’Neal and Dave Johnson of the Northwest Habitat Institute, and any other projects deemed necessary to put the perceived planning needs of this process to bed. Permanently!
This endorsement may not seem consistent with our earlier recommendations. We have previously indicated an increasing intolerance with excessive planning and research camouflaged under the banner of a need for "good science" as opposed to actual on the ground projects that will put fish in the river. However, we feel that the process is so close to achieving a level of planning that truly represents an ecological systems approach that will silence further criticism, that we are willing to support any additional effort that will bring it to a successful conclusion.
We hope that these comments and recommendations are helpful to your amendment process and can be incorporated into the revised Fish and Wildlife Program. As always, if you need further clarification our assistance from either myself or members of my staff, please do not hesitate to call. We will enjoy working with you as we refine the product during the Phase I comment period and look forward to the initiation of the Phase II process.
Sincerely,
Randy Settler, Chairman
YN Fish and Wildlife Committee