BOISE Idaho Boise, ID — The White House has reached what it calls an historic deal over how to restore salmon populations within the Pacific Northwest, a deal that could put an end to an era of legal dispute with tribes.
Amid legal challenges facing lawsuits, and facing legal challenges, Biden administration is able to contribute $300 million into restoration of salmon in the Northwest which includes upgrades to hatcheries already in place that have helped to keep salmon populations alive in certain areas in the Columbia River basin.
The agreement also offers the possibility of a five-year stay on the litigation, and a commitment to create more tribally-run hydropower projects as well as study alternative options that would benefit farmers and recreationists in the event that Congress take action to break four dams that are large on the Snake River, a Columbia river tributary that tribes believe are for decades the most significant obstruction to fish.
“Many from those along the Snake River runs are on the edge of disappearance. The possibility of extinction is not an option,” says Corrine Sams Chair on the committee for wildlife of Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation.
The agreement isn’t insisting on the breach of the four dams that lie along the Lower Snake in Washington state. Biden administration officials told journalists in a phone call on Thursday that Biden is not planning to act in the dams via executive order, but declared that the decision rests with Congress.
A conservation bill proposed by Idaho Republican Congressman Mike Simpson to authorize the breaching of dams is in the process of being rescinded for a full year, despite a fierce resistance by Northwest wheat farmers as well as utility groups.
The details of Thursday’s deal were released earlier this month, the organizations claimed that it was conducted in secret, and that breaching the dams could ruin the region’s clean energy and agricultural economies, which depend on a barge river system that is built around dams.
“The agreement signed in the Biden Administration will obligate to the U.S. Government to spending hundreds of millions of dollars which will eventually be paid by electric consumers across all of the West,” said Heather Stebbings the acting executive director for Northwest RiverPartners in a statement.
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