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FINAL PUBLICATION VERSION
2003 Mainstem Amendments to the
Columbia River Basin Fish and Wildlife Program
April 2003 | document 2003-11
This document replaces the pre-publication
version, document 2003-4.
Read the publication in parts:
Introduction
The Columbia River Basin Fish and Wildlife Program
The states of the Columbia River Basin, Idaho, Montana, Oregon
and Washington, formed the Northwest Power Planning Council, an
interstate compact agency, under the authority of the Pacific
Northwest Electric Power Planning and Conservation Act of 1980. The
Power Act directs the Council to develop a program to protect,
mitigate and enhance fish and wildlife of the Columbia River Basin
affected by the development and operation of the basin’s
hydroelectric facilities, while also assuring the Pacific Northwest
an adequate, efficient, economical and reliable power supply. The
Act also directs the Council to inform the public about fish,
wildlife and energy issues and to involve the public in its
decisionmaking.
The Council’s Columbia River Basin Fish and Wildlife Program,
first adopted in 1982 and periodically revised, is the nation’s
largest regional effort to recover, rebuild, and mitigate impacts on
fish and wildlife. As a planning, policy-making and reviewing body,
the Council develops and then monitors implementation of the fish
and wildlife program, which is implemented by the federal agencies
that manage, operate and regulate the basin’s hydroelectric
facilities. These include the Bonneville Power Administration, the
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Bureau of Reclamation and the
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and its licensees.
The 2000 Fish and Wildlife Program and the Mainstem Plan
In 2000, the Council adopted a set of amendments to the fish and
wildlife program to begin a complete revision of the program. In the
first phase of the amendment process, the Council reorganized the
program around a comprehensive framework of scientific and policy
principles. The fundamental elements of the revised program are the
vision, which describes what the program is trying to accomplish
with regard to fish and wildlife and other desired benefits from the
river; basinwide biological performance objectives, which describe
in general the fish and wildlife population characteristics needed
to achieve the vision; implementation strategies, which will guide
or describe the actions needed to achieve the desired ecological
conditions; and a scientific foundation, which links these elements
and explains why the Council believes certain kinds of actions
should result in desired habitat conditions and why these conditions
should improve fish and wildlife populations in the desired way.
The program amendments in 2000 set the stage for subsequent
phases of the program revision process, in which the Council is to
adopt specific objectives and action measures for the river’s
mainstem and tributary subbasins, consistent with the basinwide
vision, objectives and strategies in the program and its underlying
scientific foundation. The Council intends to incorporate the
specific objectives and measures for tributaries into the program in
locally developed subbasin plans for the more than sixty subbasins
of the Columbia River.
This document comprises a coordinated plan of operations for the
mainstem Columbia and Snake rivers. The Council adopted the mainstem
plan in April 2003.
In preparing the mainstem plan, the Council solicited
recommendations from the region’s state and federal fish and
wildlife agencies, Indian tribes and others, as required by the
Northwest Power Act. Various agencies and tribes responded, and the
Council also received recommendations from other interested parties.
The Council prepared a draft after reviewing the recommendations,
supporting information submitted with the recommendations, and
comments received on the recommendations. The Council conducted an
extensive public comment period on the draft mainstem plan before
finalizing these program amendments.
Expectations for the Elements of the Mainstem Plan
The role of the mainstem plan and the Council’s expectations
for it were described in the 2000 Fish and Wildlife Program in the
section on Basinwide Hydrosystem Strategies and in the section
entitled Schedule for Further Rulemakings. The mainstem plan is to
contain specific objectives and action measures for the federal
operating agencies and others to implement in the mainstem Columbia
and Snake rivers to protect, mitigate and enhance fish and wildlife
affected by the development and operation of hydroelectric
facilities while assuring the region an adequate, efficient,
economical and reliable power supply. The mainstem plan includes
objectives and measures relating to, among other matters:
- the protection and enhancement of mainstem habitat, including
spawning, rearing, resting and migration areas for salmon and
steelhead and resident salmonids and other fish;
- system water management;
- passage spill at mainstem dams;
- adult and juvenile passage modifications at mainstem dams;
- juvenile fish transportation;
- adult survival during upstream migration through the mainstem;
- reservoir elevations and operational requirements to protect
resident fish and wildlife;
- water quality conditions; and
- research, monitoring and evaluation.
The Council evaluated the mainstem plan recommendations and these
program amendments for consistency with the program framework
elements adopted in 2000, including the vision, biological
objectives, habitat and hydrosystem strategies, and underlying
scientific principles.
A Different Mainstem Plan for a Different Context
In the past, the Council’s fish and wildlife program included
detailed hydrosystem operations for fish and wildlife. In December
2000, NOAA Fisheries (formerly the National Marine Fisheries
Service) and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issued biological
opinions for the operation of the Federal Columbia River Power
System to benefit populations of salmon, steelhead, bull trout and
white sturgeon listed as threatened or endangered under the federal
Endangered Species Act (ESA). The hydrosystem measures in these
opinions run to hundreds of pages of detail and hundreds of measures
on system configuration, river flows, reservoir management, passage
improvements, spill, juvenile transportation, predator management
and more. These measures are built on foundations developed in the
Council’s program over the last 20 years.
In developing this mainstem plan, the Council asked for
recommendations addressing, in part, how the plan should relate to
the biological opinions on hydrosystem operations. The relevant
recommendations received can be loosely grouped into four
categories:
- recommendations that the Council adopt a mainstem plan
consistent with the objectives and measures in the biological
opinions;
- recommendations that concluded the biological opinions do not
prescribe sufficient flow, spill and passage operations to
benefit listed fish, and so the Council should adopt additional
measures to that end;
- recommendations that concluded the biological opinions
exceeded what was necessary to benefit listed fish, to the
detriment of the power supply and other uses of the river, and
so the Council should adopt a mainstem plan with scaled back
flow and spill operations that are, in the view of those making
the recommendations, more biologically and economically
efficient in how the limited resources of the region are
applied; and
- recommendations that concluded the operations specified in the
biological opinions are not sufficient to protect, enhance or
mitigate for the adverse effects of the hydrosystem on fish and
wildlife not listed for protection under the Endangered Species
Act, and may be especially adverse to resident fish (listed and
non-listed), and so the Council should adopt objectives and
measures for that purpose that would be either supplemental to,
or in some cases in conflict with, current implementation
approaches to biological opinion operations.
The Council considered and drew from recommendations in all four
categories in developing this mainstem plan. In general, however,
two overriding concerns motivated the Council in deciding what
objectives and measures to include in the plan:
- The mainstem plan includes a set of habitat considerations,
objectives, principles and measures intended to protect,
mitigate and enhance all the fish and wildlife of the Columbia
River Basin affected by the development, operation and
management of the hydrosystem, whether listed or not, as
required of the Council by the Power Act. Objectives, actions
and operations intended to protect, enhance and mitigate for the
effects of the hydrosystem on species other than those listed as
threatened or endangered may require federal agency flexibility
or changes in the implementation of the biological opinions, as
described below.
- Scientific and policy uncertainty continues to plague a number
of mainstem actions intended to benefit anadromous fish, leading
to an inability to measure the extent of the benefits gained,
and to great differences of opinion as to the value of
continuing these actions. Moreover, some of these actions have
adverse impacts on resident fish and high costs to the power
system. The mainstem plan includes provisions for how to improve
the way the region engages in fish and wildlife research, power
system operations, monitoring and evaluation for the mainstem,
and how and what decisions are made on the basis of that
information. This includes:
- describing an approach and a set of factors for prioritizing
research;
- recommending specific priorities for mainstem research; and
- suggesting how to better integrate research, monitoring and
evaluation results into decisions about mainstem actions and
power system operations in the context of the Columbia basin
as a whole.
The Council’s goal is to provide recommendations to the
federal hydrosystem operating agencies and fish and wildlife
agencies for more biologically effective spill, flow and other
mainstem operations and actions at the minimum economic cost. The
Council understands the biological opinions have sufficient
flexibility in implementation to accommodate recommendations of
this type; that is, the biological opinions were adopted with the
recognition that as new scientific information is developed,
actions called for in the opinions could and, where found
appropriate, would be changed.
The Council reviewed comments on the proposed vision, objectives,
and strategies in the draft mainstem plan and then decided,
consistent with the review procedures and standards in the Power
Act, on the most appropriate mainstem vision, objectives, and
strategies for both listed and non-listed species.
Another difference between this and past Council mainstem
programs concerns the region’s power supply requirements. The
Power Act requires the Council to adopt a fish and wildlife program
that not only protects, mitigates and enhances fish and wildlife but
also assures that the region will continue to enjoy an adequate,
efficient, economical and reliable power supply. The Council
evaluated 1) current hydrosystem operations; 2) the recommendations
for mainstem amendments; and 3) the October 2002 draft mainstem
amendments to ensure that the adopted objectives and measures for
mainstem hydrosystem operations meet the fish and wildlife
requirements of the Power Act and are consistent with its power
supply obligations. The Council also reviewed the latest scientific
information and comments on the effectiveness of fish and wildlife
strategies to increase survival of specific populations.
Energy systems, markets and policy have changed radically since
the last revision of the fish and wildlife program in the mid-1990s.
Federal hydrosystem operations in 2001 brought a concrete example of
a problem that the Council had seen developing over the last
half-decade - the electricity demands placed on the federal
hydrosystem were increasingly greater than what the federal system
could produce in a year of historically low runoff and river levels.
Yet the dynamics of regional and west coast energy developments
prevented the Bonneville Power Administration from acquiring new,
long-term resources that could have closed the gap. Problems with
West Coast power markets in 2000 and 2001 prevented Bonneville from
being able to make up the energy deficit in those markets, leading
to a situation in 2001 in which the federal agencies were forced to
curtail regional load and reduce system operations intended to
benefit fish and wildlife in order to maintain the reliability of
the region’s power system. Even with significant changes to the
hydropower operations specified for fish, the system still produced
inadequate energy to meet the demands of the region. This forced
many of the region’s utilities to curtail loads while also
spending large sums to purchase power.
For these reasons, the analysis of the adequacy, efficiency,
economics and reliability of the region’s power supply that
accompanies this mainstem plan includes consideration of the current
status of the region’s power system. The Council’s conclusion is
that the region’s power system should be adequate and reliable for
the next few years, due to the development of new power supplies,
reductions in demand, and loss of loads that have occurred since
early 2001. The objectives and measures to protect, mitigate and
enhance fish and wildlife included in this mainstem plan do not
affect that conclusion. The analysis also concludes, however, that
the region faces the possibility in later years of spiraling back
into the power supply problems seen in 2001 unless measures are
taken to ensure that new resources are added to the regional power
supply in a more certain fashion. The analysis suggests possible
actions by the federal agencies and others in the region to ensure
that the federal system provides the specified operations for fish
and wildlife and meets the electricity demands in most, if not all,
low-water years. The Council is reviewing and revising its 20-year
power plan as called for by the Northwest Power Act. The power plan
will address the region’s power supply and reliability issues in
more detail.
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