Feds Accept Local Salmon Recovery Plan (Columbian Article 4 19 05)

ERIK ROBINSON, Columbian staff writer April 19, 2005; Page a1
WASHOUGAL -- Ty Fugate carefully scooped out a squirming net full of finger-size salmon smolts on Monday, displaying the catch to the group of onlookers wearing business suits.
Fugate, a college student working for the Lower Columbia Fish Enhancement Group, showed off the immediate benefits of a stream restoration project on a small creek draining into the Little Washougal River. In one month, Fugate has scooped 250 of the tiny coho salmon, steelhead and cutthroat trout at the base of a new fish-friendly culvert running beneath Stauffer Road. The culvert, along with a nearby fish ladder and berm, allows salmon to spawn and rear in an area that had been totally cut off.
This is the future of salmon recovery in the Pacific Northwest, according the federal government's top salmon administrator.
"It's the small pieces adding up to a big success," said Bob Lohn, regional administrator of the National Marine Fisheries Service. "This is the cure with a thousand healings. That's what's really going on here."
Earlier in the day, Lohn accepted a locally generated recovery plan as the federal government's official blueprint to recover salmon and steelhead listed under the Endangered Species Act. The five-county Lower Columbia Fish Recovery Board, established by the state Legislature in 1998, devised the plan and had then-Gov. Gary Locke hand it over to Lohn during a ceremony in Vancouver on Dec. 15.
On Monday, Lohn officially signed off on it.
The plan lays out a series of more than 600 actions that, collectively, are supposed to reverse the proverbial death by a thousand cuts.
Three years and $2.5 million in the making, the plan identifies specific threats to listed steelhead, chum and chinook salmon in each of the 18 watersheds from Bonneville Dam to the ocean on the Washington side of the Columbia River. It prioritizes every population in every stream, and for the first time establishes numerical recovery goals.
"It is not a piece of shelf art," said Jeff Breckel, executive director of the fish recovery board.
Hundreds of millions of dollars in fish-recovery funds now will be doled out based on this blueprint, replacing the current scattershot nature of stream-restoration projects.
"That changes everything," said Tony Meyer, director of the nonprofit enhancement group. "We can now plan projects far out into the future, whereas before we couldn't do it."
The plan will be published in the Federal Register in the coming days, followed by a 60-day public comment period before it's officially adopted. It marks the first time the fisheries service has adopted a salmon recovery plan primarily authored by local people. Lohn said he expects it to be a model for other imperiled West Coast salmon stocks.
It makes sense to merge local people's willingness to improve salmon habitat with federal resources, Lohn said.
"Salmon recovery ultimately cannot happen top-down," he said. "And, bottom-up, the resources may not be there."
The plan lays out a six-year schedule for re-evaluating targets for fish abundance in each stream, interspersed every two years by checks to make sure actions are being carried out.
The plan's authors say it also will provide a powerful tool in shaping development, especially where it identifies critical habitat areas. Breckel cited fast-growing Clark County as an example of a local government updating its land-use rules to better protect salmon habitat, a move he anticipates will be followed by local officials wary of the threat of lawsuits challenging local ordinances that don't measure up.
Update
Previously: Then-Gov. Gary Locke in December handed over to the federal government a salmon and steelhead recovery plan devised by the five-county Lower Columbia Fish Recovery Board.
What's new: The National Marine Fisheries Service announced Monday it will adopt the plan as the blueprint for recovering imperiled chum and chinook salmon and steelhead on the Washington side of the lower Columbia River. It's the first locally generated recovery plan adopted by the federal government under the Endangered Species Act.
What's next: The plan will be published in the Federal Register in the coming days, followed by a 60-day public comment period before it's officially adopted.
Cutline: Ty Fugate scoops a net full of salmon smolts from a trap near a new culvert running under Stauffer Road, allowing fish to spawn in this small tributary of the Little Washougal River. * Hundreds of fish, such as this one, are using stream habitat that had been inaccessible before the nonprofit Lower Columbia Fish Enhancement Group began working here in 1999. * Manmade log jams on the Little Washougal River are designed to enhance salmon habitat. The structures were engineered by Tony Meyer, director of the nonprofit Lower Columbia Fish Enhancement Group, with the agreement of landowner Gary Stauffer, a local dairyman.
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