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Bush wants $500,000 to spend at Elk Creek The money will let the Corps carry out its plan, notch or no notch By MARK FREEMAN Mail Tribune The Bush administration now is seeking $500,000 for fish-passage plans at Elk Creek Dam once the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers next fall revisits its plans to notch the half-built dam to help salmon migration. President Bush's budget proposal to Congress now calls for $1 million for Elk Creek Dam, which the Corps wanted to notch this summer so wild salmon can swim from the upper Rogue River to Elk Creek's mountain spawning grounds. But lobbying by Jackson County officials, including Commissioner Ric Holt, persuaded the Bush administration to halt the planned notching, pending a review this fall by the Corps' assistant secretary for civil works. When that review is done, the $500,000 will allow Corps engineers to press forward with whatever plan that comes out of the review - from notching to some other long-term solution for getting wild salmon past the dam effectively. "We think that's an appropriate amount of money, given we don't know what the outcome of the review will be," said Doug Clarke, the Corps' Elk Creek project manager. The Elk Creek Dam money is part of a $137 million package for Oregon and southwest Washington that the Bush administration has asked Congress to fund for the upcoming fiscal year. In recent years, the Corps has received about $500,000 annually for "caretaker activities" at the dam, which has sat half-completed since a court injunction halted construction in 1988, Clarke said. Those caretaking duties include a trap-and-haul program to carry migrating adult salmon past the dam to upstream spawning grounds. Done since 1992, this fish-hauling was begun because studies in the early 1990s showed that a hole at the dam's base did not allow enough adult salmon past the dam at the high-flow periods when upstream migration is at its peak. Other caretaking duties include security and maintenance, and monitoring of water quality. The Corps considers the trap-and-haul program a short-term solution and has propsed to notch the dam so fish can swim past it unimpeded. But Holt and others here believe notching the dam will forever preclude the Corps from providing the flood control and potential water storage by finishing the dam. In the early 1990s, the Corps concluded that notching the dam or building a permanent trap-and-haul facility were the only viable long-term solutions, and the agency chose the notching because it was deemed cheaper and better. Clarke said Tuesday his agency still believes that a beefed-up trapping and hauling program is the only viable alternative to notching. The Elk Creek project is managed through the Corps' Portland District, which oversees dam projects on the Rogue, Willamette and Columbia rivers in Oregon, as well as the Cowlitz River in southwest Washington. The most expensive proposed project within the district is the Columbia River Fish Mitigation Project, which seeks to improve the survival of migrating salmon and steelhead past eight federal dams along the Columbia and Snake rivers. Of the district's proposed $137 million, $98 million is proposed to go toward that project. The budget also contains a $5.8 million proposal for the Corps to design and build last of 31 special fishing sites for Native American tribes with treaty rights to salmon along the Columbia River. The so-called treaty-fishing sites are proposed at Bonneville, The Dalles and John Day dam pools. Twenty-three such sites should be finished by early summer, the Corps said, and construction of five more will continue next year if this money is allocated. Reach reporter Mark Freeman at 776-4470, or e-mail [email protected] Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2001 Mail Tribune, Inc.