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Mark Freeman's Commentary Otto to tackle future of fish farms It�s the best of times and the worst of times for Oregon�s 302 fish-hatchery workers, and no one personifies this Dickensian dichotomy better than Bill Otto. In his past three years managing Cole Rivers Hatchery on the upper Rogue River, Otto has seen hatchery budgets shrivel, watched facilities close and took responsibility for the worst disaster in Cole Rivers� history. Instead of getting down, Otto got promoted. Otto leaves Cole Rivers Hatchery today, bound for his new job as hatchery coordinator in the North Willamette Watershed to oversee a dozen Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife hatcheries from its office in Clackamas. After a year of grappling with problems from the last century of Oregon hatchery life, he�s off to help define how fish-raising facilities are going to operate in Oregon over the next 100 years. As Cole Rivers manager, his job had been rearing and releasing a few million salmon and steelhead each year to be caught, kept and ate. As regional coordinator, Otto now will oversee production in 10 hatcheries. He will help retool Oregon�s old hatchery system to meet demands of a new world where a thousand hatchery fish don�t carry the legal importance of a single wild one. "We�re working out ways to use hatcheries in the 21st century, and the opportunity is exciting," says Otto, 52, a 20-year ODFW veteran. "There have been some hard times," he says. "But I�ve gotten a taste of this new job and it�s all at another level. New roads. New challenges." Change is certainly not new in the state�s fish-growing business, where workers as recently as the 1960s used to grind up unwanted meat products and feed them to young salmon and trout swimming in concrete ponds. Now, biologists are working on new ways not only to raise healthier fish, but also to study and monitor the fish released from hatcheries and to determine the impacts of flooding the waters with millions of human-grown fish. "Hatcheries will do what they�re asked to do, just like they have through history," says Trent Stickell, who heads the state�s fish-propagation programs. "But everything�s under more scrutiny these days. Everybody wants to know what works and what doesn�t work so well. "It�s all new things," Stickell says. "And Bill�s position is a leadership position." Otto�s career at Cole Rivers is a microcosm of the change that has occurred in the way Oregonians look at hatcheries. When Otto first worked at Cole Rivers in the late 1980s, it was the best of times to be a hatchery guy on the upper Rogue. Record spring chinook salmon and summer steelhead runs, fueled by high returns of hatchery-raised fish, made for plenty of happy fishermen who saw the Cole Rivers crew as the good guys. Then Otto left for almost 10 years, but returned as manager in 1997 to find the hatchery�s white-hat image all but history. Spring chinook numbers have yo-yoed since those earlier heydays. The salmon run has shifted to 75 percent or more hatchery chinook, and more and more of those fish bypass grumbling fishermen and enter the hatchery. More telling, these fish now come with a scarlet "H" on them, branded as one of the reasons why wild fish numbers have dropped in some streams to a point where they are protected under the Endangered Species Act. Otto, known as an agency and hatchery loyalist, wears these weighty problems like a yoke. But they never kept him from sticking his neck out. At Cole Rivers, he re-introduced a Free Fishing Day activity that opened hatchery ponds to fishing by some of Southern Oregon�s special-education students. The annual fall coho giveaway, in which excess adult coho are killed and donated to local charities that help feed the hungry, greatly expanded and helped hundreds of local families get bellies-full of free Cole Rivers salmon. And Otto helped the Southern Oregon Fly Fishers develop a new Oregon Outdoor Women weekend seminar that turned the Holy Water section of the Rogue near the hatchery into a sanctuary for women to learn fly-fishing without pressure from men. "Those, I think, are some of the high points," Otto says. "They�re all, basically, outreaching to people. Things our agency wants to do, and are in our business plan." But the events of 2000 are dominated by low points no one planned. Early one morning last January, a water pump in the hatchery�s hatch house and a series of alarms all failed, leading to the suffocation of more than 1.3 million spring chinook fry. It was the worst fish-kill in the facility�s 26-year history. That loss was blamed on technical failures, and the hatch house�s alarm system has since been revamped. More death at the hatchery came in June. This time, human error caused 738 excess adult spring chinook to suffocate and die in a hatchery pen. Both times, Otto stood before the media, the public and his agency superiors and took the fall. "It�s a shock to stand there and see that many fish dead because of mechanical error," Otto says of the January loss. "It was not human error, but you take responsibility for it. It goes with the job." It remains to be seen whether the new job for Otto will be the best of times or the worst. (Staff writer Mark Freeman covers the outdoors for the Mail Tribune. 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