PORTLAND, Ore. -- In a surgical strike from Capitol Hill, Sen. Larry E.
Craig (R-Idaho) has eliminated a little-known agency that counts endangered fish
in the Columbia River.
The Fish Passage Center, with just 12 employees and a budget of $1.3
million, has been killed because it did not count fish in a way that suited
Craig.
"Data cloaked in advocacy create confusion," Craig said on the Senate
floor this month, after successfully inserting language in an energy and water
appropriations bill that bans all future funding for the Fish Passage Center.
"False science leads people to false choices."
Here in Portland, Michele DeHart, a fish biologist who is the longtime
manager of the center, said she is not mad at Craig.
"What's the point?" asked DeHart, 55, who for nearly 20 years has run
the agency that keeps score on the survival of endangered salmon as they
negotiate federal dams in the Columbia and Snake rivers.
"I have never met the man," she said. "Never talked to him. No one from
his office ever contacted us. I guess I am flabbergasted. We are biologists and
computer scientists, and what we do is just math. Math can't hurt
you."
But the mathematics of protecting salmon swimming in the nation's
largest hydroelectric system can hurt your pocketbook -- particularly in the
Northwest, where dams supply power to four out of five homes, more than anywhere
in the country.
Salmon math has clearly riled up Craig, who in his last election
campaign in 2002 received more money from electric utilities than from any other
industry and who has been named "legislator of the year" by the National
Hydropower Association.
The Fish Passage Center has documented, in excruciating statistical
detail, how the Columbia-Snake hydroelectric system kills salmon. Its analyses
of fish survival data also suggest that one way to increase salmon survival is
to spill more water over dams, rather than feed it through electrical
turbines.
This suggestion, though, is anathema to utilities -- and to Craig --
because water poured over dams means millions of dollars in lost electricity
generation.
Last summer, a federal judge in Portland, using data and analysis from
the Fish Passage Center, infuriated the utilities. He ordered that water be
spilled over federal dams in the Snake River to increase salmon survival.
Shortly after Judge James A. Redden issued his order, Craig began pushing to cut
all funding for the Fish Passage Center.
"Idaho's water should not be flushed away on experimental policies
based on cloudy, inexact assumption," Craig said in a news
release.
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