| |
Upper Columbia Salmon Recovery Board "Salmon Summit"
Thanks for inviting me to kick off the Upper Columbia Salmon Summit.
It's a pleasure to have an opportunity to talk with all of you, the ones toiling at ground zero in our salmon recovery efforts.
I greatly appreciate the hard work of both the Upper Columbia Salmon Recorery Board and Upper Columbia Regional Fisheries Enhancement Group and your enthusiasm for the job, and am impressed by your accomplishments.
We've come a long way in a few short years in putting in place the people and infrastructure to make salmon recovery a reality. Your efforts have been - and will continue to be - instrumental to our successes.
I would like to especially commend you for your ongoing efforts to help build public partnerships and support for recovery planning processes now underway in the six subbasins in your region - a Herculean task if there ever was one.
But I suspect your task will made easier by your efforts - also to be commended - to form a working coalition of tribes and counties and to develop a Community Strategy that includes meaningful public involvement.
Without broad citizen understanding and commitment, our ability to implement a biological as well as a political strategy for salmon recovery will surely be limited.
I think all of us here today are aware of the high ecological stakes involved in salmon recovery.
But as we've become immersed in the scientific and technical processes necessary for salmon recovery, we often talk about how important it is from a biological - and cultural - perspective to maintain healthy wild salmon populations. And that's certainly true.
However, we don't very often talk about how important salmon recovery is to the economic vitality of the communities we all live and work in.
We forget to mention that many, many people across our state directly or indirectly depend not only on healthy salmon populations, but on healthy fish and wildlife populations of all kinds, to make a living.
We forget that for some small business owners in some small communities, a single, successful fishery, or hunting opportunity, can mean the difference between a good year or a bad year.
Sometimes, it can mean the difference between staying in business - or going out of business.
Consider the case of the Pateros Country Store, a small business located not that far from here.
A combination grocery and dry goods establishment, the store opened for business a little over a year ago. Pateros had been without a decent-sized store of its kind for a couple of years before entrepreneur Patrick Dooley, Jr. and a partner decided to open their business across the street from Pateros Lake.
Dooley recently told my Department that on an average day his store, which stocks everything from motor oil to marshmallows, had been ringing up about 300 dollars in sales.
But that changed in October when an Upper Columbia selective steelhead fishery opened. Dooley says business jumped by 40 percent, and fishing gear that had been gathering dust on a display case disappeared in no time as anglers flocked to his store.
To quote Mr. Dooley: "We had people in here just buying and buying and buying."
Dooley emphatically believes that predictable fishing and hunting opportunities in the Pateros and surrounding areas are essential if he is to maintain a profitable business and keep several people employed.
And he's not alone.
All across the state, small merchants in rural communities say the revenues generated by fishers and hunters and wildlife viewers are an indispensable part of their businesses and the larger economic fabric of their communities.
This has become even truer in recent years, they say, as traditional rural economic mainstays such as timber, mining and agriculture have suffered in importance.
The testimonials of these merchants of the economic importance of fishers, hunters and wildlife viewers are borne out by a nationwide survey recently completed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) - a survey done with statistical significance down to the state level.
According to the survey results, recreational fishers spent $854 million in 2001 in our state pursuing species ranging from salmon and trout, to crab and clams. Overall, Washington ranked number one among Pacific Northwest states in expenditures by anglers. It ranked eight nationally.
The same study estimated that Washington's hunters spent $350 million during the same year pursuing 51 game species, while the state's 2.5 million wildlife viewers spent $980 million on various services and goods ranging from binoculars and bird feeders to guide books and galoshes.
The report ranks Washington, the smallest of the western states, #1 in the Pacific Northwest and seventh nationally in spending for wildlife viewing.
Add all the numbers together, and it's quite impressive.
Recreational fishing, hunting and wildlife viewing contribute about $4.4 billion per biennium in spending to the economy of this state. If you add in the revenue from commercial fishing, the total swells to $5 billion per biennium in economic value.
$5 billion–that's good business and that's big business here in Washington.
I find this to be an amazing story. But what makes it even more amazing is that the spending generated by recreational fishers has been maintained against the backdrop of salmon recovery.
Consider for a moment that the habitat for Endangered Species Act-listed salmonid populations affect 70 percent of the state's area, and this area contains 90 percent of our population.
Yet, we have been able to continue to construct and conduct, to a significant degree, more sustainable fishing opportunities.
So how have we accomplished this? How are we transforming the harvest and hatchery sectors?
Well, speaking for my own Department, we have been able to accomplish this, to play our part in keeping this economic engine revving, because of the investments we've made in our own business.
And that business is science-based fishery management.
First, one important area where we have invested heavily in - and will continue to invest heavily in - is our hatchery system, which today provides about 70 percent of the fish caught in Puget Sound and about 90 percent of those caught on the Columbia River.
The Department of Fish and Wildlife, for the past several years, has been working closely with an independent group of scientists, the Hatchery Scientific Review Group. Their job is to review current federal, state and tribal hatchery management practices and draft a blueprint for future operations in Puget Sound and along the coast. A similar review is just beginning along the Columbia River.
Our goal is to insure our hatchery system provides sustainable fisheries in an environmentally sound way and, at the same time, continues to serve as an important and indispensable tool in wild stock recovery.
Second, my Department has invested heavily in mark selective fisheries, which allow the perennial - and predictable - harvest of a renewable resource - hatchery origin fish - without impacting wild stock recovery efforts.
A good example of a selective fishery is the Upper Columbia steelhead fishery that I mentioned a moment ago - a fishery structured by state fish managers that compliments wild steelhead recovery efforts underway in the region.
Indeed, over the past four years, my Department has been able to create more than 50 selective salmon fisheries which have generated tremendous economic benefits for small businesses and communities along the Columbia River as well as the coast.
While we have been investing improving both in our hatcheries and selective fisheries, the Department has also been investing in other ways in our wild salmon populations.
For example, as part of our management responsibilities, the Department annually surveys 7,000 to 8,000 miles of streams, creeks and rivers to access the adequacy of salmon spawning statewide.
Also, as a key player in the crafting and carrying out of the recent Forest and Fish agreement, my agency has worked with public and private entities to protect eight million acres of private forest land containing 60,000 miles of streams.
As a result, riparian buffers are now in place to produce properly functioning conditions for salmon in their fresh water spawning and rearing habitats.
Moreover, in the two short years since the Legislature passed the Forest and Fish agreement, 400 barrier culverts have been replaced at a cost of $14,000 each, removing fish migration barriers and opening up new spawning habitat.
These are just a few of the ways that my Department, through sound scientific management, has been able to work cooperatively with both private industry and volunteer groups like the UCSRB to protect and rebuild weak wild stocks while fulfilling its legal mandate to provide sustainable fisheries.
And, as I mentioned at the outset of my remarks, we have now put in place the infrastructure to implement salmon recovery projects and planning in our state.
We have the right processes and the right groups in the right places - in the watersheds and regions - to do the job of restoring sick habitats to healthy habitats.
We also have the federal and state dollars coming from both the Salmon Recovery Funding Board and NWPPC to help fund recovery planning and implementation of recovery projects.
And, right now, we appear to have Mother Nature on our side.
The "decadal oscillation" in ocean currents and weather patterns produces peaks and valleys in the survival of young salmonids at sea in a cycle of about every 20 years. Right now our populations of fish are heading from a valley of low marine survival up to a peak of higher marine survival.
That means right now we have a unique opportunity to benefit from better marine survivals to "jump start" salmon recovery.
We, as part of local watershed efforts, need to provide the freshwater homes for spawning salmon over the next 10 to 15 years or this opportunity will be lost. After that we will enter into the start of another valley of lower marine survival–one that many populations may not survive.
Mother Nature, then, appears to have brought us to a pivotal point with regard to salmon recovery.
There is no denying that taking advantage of this opportunity will be tough as competition for funding, both federal and state, escalates.
Indeed, as all of you know, the state faces a multi-billion dollar deficit this coming biennium, with no immediate relief from the current economic downturn is in sight.
But to retreat from the progress we've already made in these few short years and to fail to find creative solutions to keep all of us moving ahead, would be a grave mistake.
I can tell you from my own experience in dealing with the various programs we have put in place that continued investment in science-based solutions will be necessary and it pays off.
Many will question whether these investments are worth it!
My answer is yes–every penny and more. Shy or how can I make that statement?
Remember, it has been my experience that for every $1 spent on science-based fish and wildlife management programs, between $17 and $60 returns to the state in fish and wildlife related spending.
And that, I think, is a huge statement about the value of our renewable fish and wildlife resources, and the need to invest in keeping the resources healthy.
Our combined efforts are on the forefront of building on this very real value. There is the economic value, but there is also the incredible value of knowing that salmon, as part of the mosaic of fish and wildlife in healthy watersheds, will persist. For that to happen, we need to be persistent in our efforts so that society can continue to benefit in many diverse ways from our investment in our incredible natural resources.
Remarks by Jeffrey Koenings, Ph.D., WDFW Director
November 21, 2002
Back to index