Time for EWEB to flip-flop back to fish ladder.

Byline: GUEST VIEWPOINT By Josh Laughlin and Bob Bumstead

The McKenzie River is our lifeblood. It provides Eugene with some of the best drinking water in the country and much of the electricity that powers our homes and our economy.

The McKenzie has been supplying us with electricity since the 1920s, when the Leaburg and Walterville projects came online. In 1963, the Eugene Water & Electric Board also built the Carmen-Smith project just below the river's headwaters to increase electrical production.

That project, though, has caused serious problems for the river's endangered fish populations, problems that we now have an opportunity to alleviate.

The project's dams - Trailbridge, Carmen and Smith, all upstream of McKenzie Bridge - are up for relicensing, a process that ultimately will give EWEB a permit to continue operating these dams for 30 to 50 years. During this relicensing process we have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to restore some of the natural functions to the heavily plumbed headwaters. Such restoration will benefit not just the human users, but also species that continue to be pushed closer to extinction: Chinook salmon and bull trout.

Unfortunately, on Sept. 20, EWEB startled conservationists and government natural resource agencies by removing plans to build a fish ladder over Trailbridge Dam.

Throughout the draft license agreement process, which took place over the past six months, EWEB led the public to believe that it was ready to invest in a fish ladder at Trailbridge Dam, the first impassible fish barrier above Leaburg Dam. This investment would have allowed endangered fish to efficiently reach upstream spawning habitat.

Instead, the utility opted for the `trap and haul' alternative: Endangered fish would be scooped up at the base of the dam, deposited into a tank in the back of a truck, hauled to the other side of the dam and sluiced into the upriver reservoir.

This was not a popular move. Prominent fish biologists working for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife have all advocated for a fish ladder over trap and haul as a more scientifically sound way to restore ailing fish populations.

On Nov. 2, the National Marine Fisheries Service, one of the federal agencies charged with ensuring fish species' persistence, wrote a scathing letter to EWEB: `NMFS is concerned with the process by which EWEB changed its proposal to construct a fish ladder at Trailbridge Dam and substituted a trap and haul proposal instead. We strongly recommend that EWEB reconsider the trap and haul proposal and readopt its previous commitment to construct a fish ladder at Trailbridge Dam.'

While additional spawning areas upstream provided by a fish ladder would greatly assist endangered Chinook salmon, endangered bull trout would be the real winners. This species can successfully spawn only in the very cold, pristine streams that feed the upper river, many of which are located above Trailbridge Dam. After spawning in those streams, bull trout need to navigate downstream to forage for food. They have been found as far down as the McKenzie's confluence with the Willamette River near Eugene. Come spawning time, they migrate back to their natal streams high in the river system.

Any interruption of this migratory pattern severely limits the ability of bull trout to recover to their former populations. A trap and haul system has been proven to have much more potential to interrupt the fish's journey than does a ladder that fish could use on their own natural time- tables. Moreover, a ladder would reconnect and enrich the gene flow between two isolated populations of bull trout on each side of the dam.

Yet on Nov. 30, EWEB confirmed its decision not to proceed with a fish ladder when it submitted its final license agreement to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. FERC will initiate an environmental assessment on the relicensing of the Carmen-Smith project this spring.

EWEB's own environmental policy states `that environmental protection and enhancement are sound business practices that benefit the ecological and economic health of the community, support a sustainable future and enhance EWEB's success as a publicly owned utility.'

Based on this statement, we think EWEB can do much better than trapping and hauling endangered fish to get them above the dam. A green light for the next 30 to 50 years without a fish ladder could be a costly mistake, especially considering what the last 40 years have done to the McKenzie's Chinook and bull trout populations.

Josh Laughlin is executive director of the Cascadia Wildlands Project. Bob Bumstead is the conservation chairman of the McKenzie Flyfishers.