Making Hatcheries More Accountable

Summary Comment

By Bill Bakke

For the Senate Environment and Natural Resource Committee

Oregon Legislature

January 18, 2012

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The accumulated evidence from both scientific and economic analysis over the last 130 years shows that salmon and steelhead are declining and that management investments have failed to mitigate for the loss and have been unable to recover the diversity, productivity, and abundance of wild salmonids in Oregon and the Northwest ecosystems that support them.  This evidence suggests that our response and our investments to curb this decline are not working.  They are not working because we are more concerned about hatchery production than with restoring the productivity and resilience of salmonid populations adapted to individual watersheds. 

The solution appears to be deceptively simple, but it isn’t because the institutions we fund with public money and rely upon to solve complex problems of salmon and steelhead recovery and watershed productivity have not been held accountable for their performance. 

The Legislature can help solve this problem by directing the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife to enlist the aid of the Department of Administrative Services to contract for a risk and benefit assessment of the fish propagation program by an independent outside source with the necessary expertise to do the work.  Funding for this assessment is currently available in surpluses to ODFW’s Commercial Fish Fund and Other Fund accounts.  It is appropriate that fishing interests, who are the direct beneficiaries of the hatchery program, be the ones to pay for the cost of assessing the benefits and risks of the hatchery program.

The Legislature should also add a performance measure for the agency that would establish a process to assure the Legislature that ODFW is complying with the recommendations that come out of this assessment of the hatchery program.

These actions are needed because the evidence points out these facts:

1. Salmon and steelhead are 3 to 5 percent of their historic abundance
2. Many populations are threatened with extinction and under federal protection
3. Hatchery fish survival is only about 10% of that for wild salmonids with a range of 6-45 percent
4. Hatchery fish contribute to the decline of wild salmonids
5. Many if not most hatchery programs are deficit spending programs
6. Hatchery productivity and cost effectiveness rely on having access to wild stocks
7. As hatchery costs increase and benefits decline funding will become a more critical problem
8. Continuing the conflict between hatchery performance and cost with wild salmonid productivity and recovery will continue to have a substantial impact on Oregon’s fishing economy