Two agreements in a single week will set water policy in eastern Washington that will have a profound affect on the use of Columbia River water.

One agreement last week gave four cities the right to withdraw up to 178,000 cubic feet per second of water over the next 50 years and another settlement this week gave Columbia River irrigators the right to pay for water during the critical summer period.

Discharges from factories along the mainstem Columbia and lower Snake rivers have very little impact on the rivers’ temperature, but the 19 dams on the two rivers do.

The public will get its last chance next week to tell the Bonneville Power Administration face to face what it thinks about the financial choices the agency will need to make to overcome up to a $1.2 billion projected deficit through 2006.

BPA has been meeting with its customers and the public since July to discuss a list of five routes it could take to cut the deficit. All but one includes a rate increase.

Northwest Indians have opened dialogue among tribal members that presents a paradox: Eating salmon, a traditional food with religious significance and many health benefits, in the face of a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency study that says consumption of polluted Columbia River fish likely causes illness.

Six lamprey species were added last week to the Oregon list of endangered species by the state’s Fish and Wildlife Commission, bringing the total number of lamprey species protected by the state to seven.

Five of 12 Columbia Basin “provinces” are coming down the “rolling review” home stretch this summer with the Northwest Power Planning Council again facing tough decisions on which fish and wildlife projects it would like to see funded.

Former Idaho Department of Fish and Game director Rodney W. Sando has accepted the appointment as executive director of the Portland, Ore.,-based Columbia Basin Fish and Wildlife Authority.

Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton announced Tuesday that senior
Interior Department officials will meet soon with the Klamath Tribes to
work on long-term solutions to an entire range of water, land and
wildlife issues facing the people of the Klamath Basin.

Fisheries managers chose this week to alter April flood control
operations in the Columbia River Basin to benefit juvenile salmon
migrants. The decision increases river flow in the lower Snake River in
April but it removes the same amount of water from flows at Priest
Rapids Dam during a time when chinook fry are beginning to emerge
throughout Hanford Reach.

So far, the Enron Corp. bankruptcy has not affected either the
Bonneville Power Administration’s short-term finances or its
long-term contracts with the company, according to BPA officials.

Legislation introduced Jan. 18 in the Washington House of
Representatives would transfer all powers, duties and functions of the
state Fish and Wildlife Commission to a proposed legislative Fish and
Wildlife Committee.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is proposing to open new dumpsites for
the sediment it collects when dredging the shipping channel each summer
at the Columbia River mouth.

Of the eight sites proposed, one new site would put dredge spoils
directly onto a Washington beach to counteract erosion, while another is
a shallow water site west of the North Jetty that the agency proposes to
use under a special provision of federal law.

As many as 200 domesticated elk and 200 cattle on a farm between
Monument and Kimberly in Eastern Oregon may have to be slaughtered
following the confirmation of one dead elk that tested positive for
tuberculosis.

Further, some wild elk likely will have to be killed and tested.

Oregon’s Fish and Wildlife commissioners named Lindsay Ball the new
director of the Oregon Fish and Wildlife department July 20 in La Grande
at its monthly meeting. Ball, on loan from Oregon State Police, took
over the helm at ODFW temporarily Feb. 16 after the Oregon Legislature
forced James Greer to resign.

The Bonneville Power Administration today credited the “stunning
success” of the past few months’ power load reduction effort with
allowing the agency to hold a planned Oct. 1 wholesale power rate
increase to an unpleasant, but palatable, 46 percent.

Acting administrator Steve Wright said Wednesday that the Bonneville
Power Administration’s wholesale customers have 16 days to make
commitments to reduce their power purchases if they want to dodge an
Oct. 1 price increase of more than 100 percent.

The federal power marketing agency has calculated that it needs about
3,700 average megawatts of additional supply to meet all of its
customers’ loads in the six months starting Oct. 1.

The Vernita Bar Policy Group decided this week to begin ramping down
flows at Priest Rapids Dam beginning Monday, May 7. Columbia River flows
at the dam have been held at a fairly steady 65,000 cubic feet per
second in accordance with the Vernita Bar agreement to prevent emerging
Hanford Reach fall chinook fry from being stranded in pools at the
river’s edge.

The Vernita Bar Policy Group decided this week to begin ramping down
flows at Priest Rapids Dam beginning Monday, May 7. Columbia River flows
at the dam have been held at a fairly steady 65,000 cubic feet per
second in accordance with the Vernita Bar agreement to prevent emerging
Hanford Reach fall chinook fry from being stranded in pools at the
river’s edge.

Despite growing political demand for federal price caps on Western
electricity to alleviate economic and environmental damage, Bush
administration officials this week continued to strongly oppose such
action by federal regulators or Congress.

Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham restated the administration’s
opposition on Thursday at a Senate committee hearing on proposed
legislation to ease the region’s California-spawned energy crisis.

The Bonneville Power Administration is on a path to wholesale power rate
increases averaging 60 percent over the next five years unless the
region can identify and take actions to reduce power costs, BPA Acting
Administrator Steve Wright said Thursday.

The third worst water year of the past 11 years has Technical Management
Team members worried there won’t be enough water available to augment
flows for endangered salmon this coming summer, let alone enough to keep
all chum salmon redds watered below Bonneville Dam or to keep the power
system from falling into another power emergency.

Idaho Gov. Dirk Kempthorne recently named Idaho State Rep. Jim Kempton
(R-Albion) to the Northwest Power Planning Council. Kempton replaces
Todd Maddock of Lewiston, who is retiring.

More than five times as many fall chinook salmon and more than three
times as many coho salmon have returned to the Umatilla River this year
than in any other previous year by this time.

Furthermore, more steelhead have returned to the river than ever before,
as of a mid-October benchmark.

Blue Heron paper mill representatives and owner/workers said their
facility has been unfairly put into the spotlight of an effort to clean
up, and cool down Oregon’s Willamette River.

And, during a packed Tuesday public hearing, they said the plant’s
hot-water effluent has little overall effect on river conditions
encountered by threatened salmon and steelhead passing up and down
stream.

Conservation and fishing groups have taken aim at an Oregon state
industrial wastewater permit proposal they say would violate state and
federal water quality laws and worsen Willamette River conditions for
listed salmon and steelhead populations.

Two environmental groups have notified the U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency that they intend to sue the agency for failure to protect from
pesticides salmon and steelhead listed under the Endangered Species Act.

The Northwest Coalition for Alternatives to Pesticides and the
Washington Toxics Coalition sent a 60-day notice to the EPA last week,
saying they will file a lawsuit against the EPA at the end of the notice
period …

A decision by the Clinton Administration not to proceed with breaching
the four lower Snake River dams ignores scientific research that
supports a free-flowing river as the best way to restore dwindling
salmon runs, Donald Sampson, executive director of the Columbia River
Inter-Tribal Fish Commission said Thursday.

Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt indicated Tuesday he would recommend
the Hanford Reach, the last free-flowing stretch of the Columbia River,
as a national monument.

The Spokane Tribe has been denied a request to refill Lake Roosevelt
behind Grand Coulee Dam two weeks earlier than projected.

Northwest politicians, speaking from pulpits at home and in Washington,
D.C., said this week that their constituents deserve to hear Democratic
presidential hopeful Al Gore’s opinion on a divisive regional issue —
whether four Lower Snake River dams should be breached as part of the
effort to restore depleted salmon stocks.

Nine months of legalistic jousting over how much Bonneville Power
Administration should charge its electricity customers, and whether
those rates are high enough to cover the agency’s fish and wildlife
mitigation responsibilities, ends Monday with the release of final
“record of decision” signed this week by BPA Administrator Judi
Johansen.

A U.S. Army Corps of Engineers study of what to do with four lower Snake
River dams does not adequately address the water quality impacts of the
study’s four alternatives, nor does it offer a strategy to comply with
water quality standards.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency asked Oregon Gov. John
Kitzhaber this week for his concurrence to list the Portland harbor as a Superfund site. The state missed its deadline last week to
get a state deferral and avoid the listing. More to follow.

Those who support removing the four lower Snake River Dams to recover
threatened and endangered fish made a surprisingly strong showing at
public meetings in Clarkston, Wash., on salmon and steelhead recovery
Thursday.