Clinton May Delay Coho Decision Judge Ordered Fishing Agency To Rule On Endangered Status By Friday

Already two years late, the Clinton administration’s politically-charged decision on whether to declare another West Coast salmon species endangered may be put off again until after the November election.

Adding the coastal coho salmon to the U.S. list of threatened and endangered species would mean new restrictions on logging and farming along stream habitat in Oregon and California, where the dwindling population of the oceangoing coho once supported a $100 million sport fishing industry.

A federal judge critical of the administration’s delays has ordered the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service to decide by Friday whether to protect the coastal coho under the Endangered Species Act.

Administration officials say it’s possible they’ll take advantage of a provision in the law allowing for a special six-month extension when the scientific evidence on the status of a species isn’t clear.

“We are all wondering what in the world they are going to do,” said Ward Armstrong, executive director of the Oregon Forest Industries Council in Salem, Ore.

Ward and others want the federal decision postponed to give Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber’s less rigid, state-backed plan a chance to work.

“We really, honestly, haven’t decided what to do,” NMFS spokesman Brian Gorman said last week.

Environmentalists say further delay would be driven more by the lure of California’s electoral votes and Clinton’s relationship with the popular Democrat Kitzhaber than any dispute over the collapse of the coho runs.

“There is no doubt at this point it is politics rather than discrepancies over data that has postponed the decision to list,” said Geoff Pampush, executive director of Oregon Trout in Portland.

“It’s long, long overdue. The data has been available to NMFS for nearly two years. They have it all. There is no new data,” he said.

Although he didn’t specifically mention salmon, Sen. John Chafee, R-R.I., wrote to Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt this month to express his “strong concern about what appear to be politically motivated administrative delays in the listing of species under the Endangered Species Act.

“Several members of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works are of the opinion that election-year politics may be delaying the process,” said Chafee, chairman of the committee.

Like the coho, he noted that many of the species are awaiting listing decisions under court orders.

The fisheries service first announced in October 1993 that the decline of the West Coast coho warranted a listing review.

Over-fishing, drought and habitat destruction from logging, agriculture and urban development all “have taken a heavy toll on coho salmon,” said Gary Smith, acting regional director of the fisheries service Northwest office in Seattle at the time.

A formal ruling was supposed to come in October 1994. But by last summer, the government still had not acted so a coalition of 24 conservation and fishing groups filed a lawsuit to force a coho listing.

They cited dramatic drops in coho numbers: From 1.4 million in Oregon during the early 1900s to fewer than 50,000 today.

In California, the coho numbered 500,000 in the 1940s, but only a few thousand remain. The Columbia Basin also once hosted coho runs of 1.2 million, but those fish are nearly extinct, they said.

“I think it is quite clear this is politically driven, not biologically driven, this desire to postpone for six months,” said Mike Sherwood, a staff attorney for the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund in San Francisco.

“It is a ploy to postpone the inevitable listing of this very imperilled species for as long as possible,” he said last week.

Rollie Schmitten, head of NMFS, told a congressional panel this summer that a temporary moratorium on new listings approved by Congress had caused further delay and he didn’t expect a final decision on coho until early 1997.

But citing earlier foot-dragging, U.S. District Judge Susan Illston in San Francisco ordered the administration to decide by Oct. 25.

“We are trying very hard to meet that deadline,” Nancy Chu, deputy regional administrator for NMFS in Long Beach, Calif., said last week.

“Legally, we are not overdue at all,” said Gorman, noting the judge had approved the extension through this week.

Gorman, the NMFS spokesman in Seattle, dismissed the allegations that politics are involved.

“The Endangered Species Act is pretty clear about the circumstances under which you can make a deferral. We are more than aware of the real possibility that if we were to play fast and loose with the law, we’d get sued,” he said.

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