Babbitt calls for river debate

The Northwest is quickly approaching two options on salmon in the Snake River, former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt said Thursday. Take down the four dams in the lower stretch of the Snake, or let the salmon on that river disappear.

The region can either debate those options and make a choice, or have the choice made for it in the next decade.

“A crisis is coming,” he said during a stop in Spokane. “Everyone is getting restless about the amount of money being spent on the salmon.”

Salmon restoration programs have cost about $8 billion over the past 20 years and are currently running at $700 million a year, he said.

Last summer, three sockeye returned to Red Fish Lake, which once held thriving salmon spawning grounds in the upper reaches of the Snake.

“Rather than solve the problem, we spend more money,” said Babbitt, who was Interior secretary in the Clinton administration. “I was a party to eight years of that. I accept my share of the blame.”

In an interview and during a later speech Thursday night sponsored by the Columbia Institute for Water Policy and Save Our Wild Salmon, Babbitt laid out a course he thought could allow the region to make an informed choice.

Congress should order an “honest, comprehensive economic analysis,” different from the many studies done so far, he said.

It should consider the possibility of spending that $700 million in other ways. To protect wheat farmers who rely on the current river system for barging their grain, short line railroads could be improved and rail prices guaranteed so they’d never exceed the barging costs. To make up for the electricity the dams provide the Bonneville Power Administration, power could be purchased from other systems and windmill farms built. To keep irrigators in business, water could be taken from other parts of the river and piped to those farms.

Even with the cost of removing the dams, which he estimated at about $1 billion, Babbitt thinks the total amount spent would be less and the improvements to the salmon runs far greater. Maybe people would decide it makes sense to tear down the dams to restore the last great salmon runs in the interior mountain West, he said.

Maybe they would decide in the end that it’s not worth the price.

But at least people would decide.

“The path of least resistance is to just spend more money,” he warned.

If that continues, Babbitt believes, the decision will be made anyway, because money isn’t bringing the salmon back and time is running out: “We don’t have 10 years. We’ve got more than two.”