Biden-Harris administration to help tribes fix ailing hatcheries

Tribally owned or operated salmon and steelhead hatcheries in the Pacific Northwest will receive an infusion of federal money to address needed maintenance and upgrades to the aging facilities.

The Biden-Harris administration said Thursday that $240 million will be made available for the work. Federally recognized tribes with treaty fishing rights will each have access to $2 million for hatchery improvement and the remainder of the money will be available to the tribes through competitive grants.

“Since time immemorial, Tribes in the Pacific Northwest have relied on Pacific salmon, steelhead and other native fish species for sustenance and their cultural and spiritual ways of life,” said Interior Secretary Deb Haaland in a news release. “This funding will help us deliver historic investments from the President’s Investing in America agenda that will empower Indigenous communities and safeguard resources they have stewarded since time immemorial.”

The Nez Perce Tribe has several hatchery facilities eligible for the funding. It owns the Nez Perce Tribal Hatchery at Cherrylane, runs the Dworshak and Kooskia national fish hatcheries and a hatchery along the Lostine River. The tribe also maintains several satellite hatchery facilities connected to its successful fall chinook and coho programs and has space at hatcheries in the lower Columbia River basin. The tribe recently broke ground on a kelt rehabilitation center at its Cherrylane site.

Together, the hatcheries operated by the tribe produce 13 million spring chinook, steelhead, coho and fall chinook smolts each year representing 30% of the hatchery-produced smolts in the Snake River basin.

“Due to the drastic decline of salmon and steelhead in Nez Perce homelands, the Tribe is reliant on salmon and steelhead produced from these hatcheries to support treaty fishing opportunities to feed our people,” said Shannon F. Wheeler, chairperson for the Nez Perce Tribal Executive Committee, in a news release. “These infrastructure improvements will provide benefits beyond just fixing 60-year-old concrete, plumbing, and electrical systems — they will help us grow healthier fish, have improved work conditions, support local economies, and continue to provide salmon and steelhead for tribal and non-tribal fisheries from the Pacific Ocean, up the Columbia and Snake rivers, back to our local communities.”

Becky Johnson, production director of the Nez Perce Tribe’s Department of Fisheries Resources Management, said the tribe hopes to tap the funding to make critical fixes. For example, she said the Kooskia Hatchery, fed by Clear Creek, is inundated with sediment that threatens fish during spring runoff each spring. The tribe has long sought to develop a backup water source.

“We haven’t been able to find a funding source, so we are optimistic this is going to get us what we need,” she said.

There is a $1 billion backlog of maintenance needs at hatcheries in the Columbia Basin alone. They exist largely to mitigate for wild salmon and steelhead declines caused by Snake and Columbia River dams. But Jennifer Quan, Regional Administrator, NOAA Fisheries at Seattle said they are increasingly being used to stem declines caused by climate change and to fulfill promises made by the federal government to the tribes in treaties signed in the 1850s.

“Those promises remain in force today as the superman law of the land as established in Article 6 of the Constitution,” she said.

A news release from the Nez Perce Tribe noted while the dams “are regularly fixed and repaired, the hatcheries have essentially been neglected for decades.”

Hatcheries in the basin and the greater Pacific Northwest are funded from a mishmass of sources. Federal agencies like the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and the Bonneville Power Administration fund and run some hatcheries or programs within hatcheries. Some hatcheries are funded by the Mitchell Act and others fall under the Snake River Compensation Program.

In June, the administration released a report acknowledging federal dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers have harmed and continue to harm tribes and diminished their treaty-reserved rights to harvest salmon and steelhead. Last winter, the Biden administration reached an agreement with the Nez Perce, Yakama, Umatilla and Warm Springs tribes that paused decades-old litigation over salmon and dams. Under the terms of the agreement, known as the Columbia River Restoration Initiative, the Bonneville Power Administration committed to spending $300 million to improve salmon habitat and upgrade aging hatcheries and the tribes will have access to up to $1 billion to develop renewable energy that will count as replacement power if four lower Snake River dams are ever breached.