Editorial: Pact offers path to sustain salmon, clean energy

By The Herald Editorial Board

Few are looking with satisfaction at a settlement agreement announced earlier this month — among the federal government, four Northwest Native American tribes and Washington state and Oregon — regarding the fate of Columbia Basin salmon and hydropower. But a longer view — and the investments from a promise of more than $1 billion over the next decade — could help ensure the survival of endangered salmon runs on the basin’s Snake River tributary while providing an expansion of clean energy for the Pacific Northwest.

The agreement — announced Dec. 14, but leaked at the end of November — suspends a lawsuit for five to 10 years by the Nez Perce, Yakama, Warm Springs and Umatilla tribes and environmental groups against the federal government that sought to breach the four dams on the lower Snake River in Washington state.

The four Snake River dams — built in the 1960s and ’70s — are valued for the hydropower they produce, as well as for agricultural irrigation, barge transportation and flood control, but are also blamed as the most significant factor in the decline of salmon and steelhead runs on the Columbia’s largest tributary.

The agreement, in negotiation for two years, suspends decades of litigation in exchange for a promise of at least $1 billion in funding and efforts, including a $300 million investment in salmon habitat restoration by the Bonneville Power Administration, which administers the Snake River and other Columbia basin dams. Significantly, much of the money will go toward the expansion of 1 to 3 gigawatts of electricity from tribally managed clean-energy projects, including solar, wind and energy storage.

The agreement also adjusts a schedule of releases of water — past dams’ turbines, called “spills” — that improve river conditions for salmon. The agreement reduces the amount of water required for spill in the summer and fall, allowing more power to be generated and sold on the larger electrical grid, but requires increased spills in the spring to help runs of spring chinook salmon migrating to the ocean.

As is common with settlements, it appears few of the major stakeholders are fully satisfied with the deal’s compromises.

Kurt Miller, executive director of the Northwest Public Power Association, told The Seattle Times, that the agreement could increase utility rates for power customers and that the pact could be terminated by the lawsuit’s plaintiffs if unsatisfied with how well the federal government upholds its promises.

And, representing the Nez Perce, tribal Chairman Shannon Wheeler told the Times that the agreement further pushes eventual removal of the four dams to an indefinite schedule, favoring the river’s other users at the risk of losing salmon runs to extinction.

What the agreement provides, however, is a series of steps — a fish ladder, if you will — that can replace much if not more than what the four dams provide, allowing the case to be made to Congress, which ultimately has authority for the dams regarding their potential removal.

Although disputed among the dams’ supporters, the removal of the four dams has been determined by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in a 2022 report as necessary among numerous actions for restoring salmon and steelhead runs to abundance.

Making the case to Congress will take significant progress if not completion toward replacement of resources by the dams in terms of power, transportation and irrigation. Investments will be necessary to expand road and rail transportation to replace what barges now offer, as will be necessary for replacement of irrigation infrastructure. The agreement provides promises of funding to begin that planning work.

And the pact’s agreement to assist tribes in building out 1 to 3 gigawatts of clean-energy production — enough to power 876,000 to 2.6 million homes — more than replaces the average of less than 1 gigawatt produced by the run-of-the-river lower Snake dams. That energy production would be on top of what already is being planned for production, which groups, such as the Northwest Energy Coalition, say in a 2018 study exceeds what would be needed to replace power from the four dams.

Importantly, what the four tribes and other sovereign nations secure — through their patience with the agreement’s compromises and their participation in its solutions — is considerable leverage to assure the survival of salmon and steelhead through the fishing rights secured by the treaties those tribes signed more than 160 years ago.

State and federal courts have honored those treaties and their rights, significantly with 1974’s Boldt Decision, by U.S. District Court Judge George Boldt, which affirmed tribal sovereignty and the rights established in treaties, allocating 50 percent of the annual catch to the tribes.

In more recent years, the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld lower court decisions, again based on those treaty rights to assure salmon survival,requiring the state of Washington and others to make significant investments — currently as much as $7.8 billion — to replace salmon-blocking culverts beneath roads and highways.

This editorial board has noted before that the Columbia Basin’s dams remain necessary to the Northwest, indeed vital as the state, region and nation transition from fossil fuel-dependent energy sources that are causing our current climate crisis. But as those dams — some of which are approaching a century of service — age and require maintenance and replacement of turbines and other infrastructure, decisions will have to be made as for which dams those investments can provide the greatest benefits in energy generation, transportation and irrigation while assuring the survival of fish species necessary to deliver tribal fishing rights and provide for commercial and recreational fishing and to sustain other wild species, not the least of which include the Northwest’s orca whales.

Especially in the face of change in the frequency and intensity of climate change in the Northwest affecting snowpack and river conditions, progress on the agreement’s provisions cannot be delayed and the health of salmon and steelhead on the Snake and in the Columbia basin must be closely watched.

The agreement negotiated by the Biden administration, the four tribal nations and the two states — even if not fully satisfying all sides of the struggle between dams and salmon — provides a ladder for resolution that can sustain both.