Military Intelligence given a bad name at USACE Walla Walla District

Officials from USACE Walla Walla District look past a chance to continue with a job well done.

Fish Counting Gets Weird

Rod Sando is a retired state Fish and Game Agency  Administrator. His thirty year career was spent serving the states of Minnesota, Idaho and Oregon. As this is Larry’s first guest opinion piece, we thought about issuing the standard disclaimers about the opinions expressed being solely the author’s. But after reading it, we pretty much agree with everything Mr. Sando is saying here.

The US Army Corps of Engineers seems to be lending new life to the old joke about military intelligence being an oxymoron. For many years the Corps has contracted to count fish at all of the major dams on the main stem of the Columbia and Snake Rivers.  This had been done using the services of a state agency, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, for twenty eight years.

In 2013, the contract was awarded to a private contractor–even though the performance of the Agency had been more than satisfactory and reliable. This is important. The information gathered at the dams is an vital component of the data needed to manage the salmon runs found in the river.

Regional fisheries managers objected to this change. WDFW challenged the decision to no avail. The Corps is notorious for defending decisions once they are done no matter how faulty they are. This case is no exception. Except that it should be: A basic tenet of an agreement between state, tribal and federal fisheries agencies that emerged out of the last epic round of court battles was that each of these parties would continue to collaborate with one another as they plot the way forward. Unilaterally deciding to privatize a key component of the salmon data base doesn’t count as collaboration. Or even decent adult-to-adult communication.

Agencies outside the Corps raised objections based on the desire to continue to have access to high quality data. The uncertainty of a new contractor raised the specter of risk to the data base.  The fish only cross the dams once.  Errors are not easily corrected. Fisheries managers rightly saw it as an unnecessary risk to the reliability of this critical source of information.

The Corps’ rationale for pulling the rug out from under the WDFW stems from a rule that encourages contract awards to small businesses–if a competing small business can do the job just as well for a smaller price. This is where the Corps decision-making really goes awry.  WDFW did the fish-counting deed for $2 million per year, and according to reviews, did it well. The fish were counted accurately and the project stayed within its budget.

So get this: the new contract for fish counting was steered to a private consulting firm, Normandeau and Associates, for $3.2 million. This is a thirty three percent increase in costs–$ 1.2 million.  The new contractor has never done this work before, and in spite of established cooperative procedures, consultation with regional fish managers has not been done. In other words, even though the deliverables for the new contract are the same as the previous contract, the additional cost of over $1 million did not raise the eyebrows of anyone at the Corps. Apparently this was approved with full knowledge that it would provide the same information at a much higher cost.  A larger contract cost with no additional or new information being provided: this is not what the the federal government intended when it encouraged agencies to support small businesses.  It looks like the Corps was hell bent on doing this no matter what the fish managers had to say.
Meanwhile, the framework for cooperation between fisheries management agencies rests on shaky ground. The salmon plan federal agencies came up with for the Columbia Basin was declared illegal for a third time in 2011. It must be re-written and submitted to the court by January of 2014. That’s just eight months away. Further surprises from the Corps, one of the key federal players in any new and improved salmon plan, makes the prospects for success all the more unlikely.
Are the lights on at the Corps in Walla Walla?  Alienating the fisheries management cooperators seems foolish. And it feeds public cynicism. Based on the Corps example in this matter, citizens will be justified in the belief that government can’t get it right while taxpayers lose again.

Meanwhile,  a million dollar cost overrun is nothing to worry about at the USCOE.

Welcome to Larry

Dear Readers,

Meet Larry, the monthly online journal for people about salmon.  Larry aims to interest the public in the public interest, and provide a forum for discussing the best available information about Pacific salmon – the causes and effects of their precipitous decline, and the prospects for their return to a transformative abundance.  Larry will focus on stories instead of polemics, and Larry will strive to keep those stories as riveting as any good fish tale. To wit: Larry: The Online Journal of Pacific Salmon Recovery was so named  in honor of Lonesome Larry–not the erstwhile Idaho Senator with an infamously wide stance, but an historic sockeye salmon whose species he tried to help flush down the toilet bowl of extinction.

Back in 1992, “Larry” was the lone male sockeye salmon that returned to Redfish Lake, high in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho. Biologists quickly determined that Larry was likely to be the last of his kind. In the 6 years following Larry’s demise, limping individual sockeye returns confirmed the sense that these iconic fish would join the menagerie of interesting creatures consigned to eternal oblivion.

But a funny thing happened on the way to extinction: Larry’s cousins refused to go.

Beginning in 1999, fish hatcheries in Oregon and Idaho began a desperate campaign to raise Redfish Lake sockeye. But sockeye returns continued to read like the box score from some epic, extra-innings baseball game between two teams that couldn’t score a run.

In 2006, after only three sockeye returned to Redfish Lake, a scientific panel nicknamed the “God Squad” recommended pulling the plug on the captive breeding program. The science panel’s report essentially declared the rescue effort for Idaho sockeye was too little, too late, and too expensive.

But in 2005, a federal judge, James Redden, ordered more water dedicated to salmon in the Columbia and Snake Rivers. For a few months during each of the following summers, the system was managed to resemble a river. Water, and juvenile fish migrating to the ocean, actually moved downstream.

Turns out salmon liked the idea, and responded accordingly. Numbers on returns bounced upward. Like high schoolers who hear someone’s parents are away, the sockeye kept pouring into the mouth of the Redfish Lake. 650 fish in 2008. 833 in 2009. 1,355 in 2010. 1,118 in 2011.  Data gathered overwhelmingly suggested it was the flowing water, released from its internment behind the eight main stem dams on the Columbia and Snake Rivers, that powered the ray of light for endangered sockeye and other strains of Columbia River salmon.

Yet in the weeks and months that followed, not much of the good news about the rediscovered relationship between fish and water made its way into the press. On salmonrecovery.gov, a website maintained by federal agencies working on salmon recovery, the  credit goes only to “milestones in the use of captive broodstock technology” in the years 1999-2001 for saving Idaho sockeye.  Federal agencies responsible for salmon recovery kept insisting that a hatchery program jumpstarted in 1999, and whose negligible return on investment had secured it a death sentence by 2006, was solely responsible for the increase in sockeye returns that commenced in 2008.

But the latest science affirms that dedicated flows of water for salmon are also a good thing–and that more water would be more of a good thing. Since 2005, steelhead, sockeye and chinook salmon have benefitted tremendously from mandated water releases from the eight dams on the Columbia and Snake Rivers. So what gives? Why can’t federal agencies give credit where credit is due? What undue influences might convince these same agencies to steer clear of the numbers that prove salmon need water?  It seems there’s something tawdry going on in the bathroom where fish politics in the Pacific Northwest take place. The doors need to come off the toilet stalls.

The ecological lessons Lonesome Larry and his progeny offer are easy. The political lessons are a little bit tougher.  Science lessons first: fish need water. No matter how finely-honed the hatchery program or hallowed the habitat, it’s the quality and quantity of the water from headwaters to tidewater to the sea that matter most. All of it, including the majority portions stagnating behind dams, make up freshwater habitat. The ocean matters, but as Mark Twain said of the weather, everyone talks about the ocean, but nobody does anything about it. Because they can’t: what happens out there in the Pacific is largely beyond human control. But the river is the nursery, and the migratory corridor for salmon at the beginning and end of their lives. Furthermore, the unique conditions of each of these specific watersheds bestows the collective, riotous diversity that has enabled salmon to colonize and transform nearly every freshet and backwater from deep alpine lakes to shallow desert streams. And, for better or worse, the fate of the river these days is now largely controlled by us. And this conflicted, contradictory, complex, expectant “us” that deserves at least as much scrutiny as we’ve applied to salmon.

Given the good river, the fish will do their part. But these days, it takes the good care of people to restore and maintain a healthy river. Larry’s role in this matter is to provide solid, accurate information, the stuff of which good decisions in an enlightened democratic community are made. But getting at the truth often requires taking a stand. Having an opinion.  The staff at Larry believes objective understanding should inspire activist engagement–in the same way a doctor ought to advocate for the health of his patients or an audiophile should protest the reunion of the Bare Naked Ladies.

Idaho salmon still face a long road to recovery. In the meantime, there is cause for cautious optimism in salmon nation: Larry’s children aren’t as lonesome as Larry once was. If you care about salmon, you shouldn’t be either. Larry is dedicated to you.