Contact:  Brian Gorman             FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
                                   5/16/97

The federal agency charged with safeguarding salmon in the Pacific Northwest says a proposal to build an irrigation intake pipe near Boardman, Ore., along the Columbia River would add to the already unacceptably high volume of water being withdrawn from the river. This would jeopardize several stocks of Snake River salmon protected under the Endangered Species Act, said the National Marine Fisheries Service.

The fisheries service, in a biological opinion it signed today, said the Army Corps of Engineers could not issue a permit to Inland Land Corp. to construct an intake pipe at John Day Reservoir. The pipe is designed to deliver up to 196 million gallons of water a day to irrigate potatoes and other vegetables on about 20,000 acres of land in Oregon owned by the Boeing Co. and leased to Inland Land.

"Inland alone will not overload the system," said William Stelle, head of the fisheries service's Northwest region in Seattle. "The whole system is already overloaded."

"Without fully offsetting new water withdrawals so there is no net loss from the river," Stelle added, "we simply can't allow additional water to be removed from the Columbia River."

Stelle said he was particularly concerned that efforts to obtain water in Idaho could be undone by withdrawals further downstream in Oregon and Washington. "Idaho's Gov. Batt was right in his objections to this proposal," Stelle said. "It makes no sense to toil so hard to provide good flows for fish on the one hand in the Snake and then have a federal agency allow for withdrawals downstream without the necessary offsets."

Stelle observed that significant measures are called for in the fishery agency's 1995 plan for hydropower operations in the Columbia Basin to get water back into the rivers. A federal court last month affirmed the validity of the plan.

The agency's plan calls for specific flow targets in the river system to help speed young salmon downstream in the spring and summer. The plan improves the chances these targets will be met by calling for significant volumes of water to be taken from upstream reservoirs.

Water withdrawals for irrigation throughout the Columbia River Basin have an enormous effect on the flows in the Snake and Columbia rivers, especially during dry years when river volumes are low.

In such years, flows in the Snake during the summer, a critical time for threatened Snake River fall chinook salmon, would be more than twice as high if it weren't for irrigation withdrawals, fishery service biologists said. During low-flow years in the Columbia, irrigation withdrawals account for three-quarters of the shortage between the fisheries service's targets and actual flows.

The fisheries service said it is recommending that the Corps place conditions on its permit to Inland Land to prevent irrigation withdrawals when water-flow targets in the river system are not being met, unless equivalent replacement flows can be provided from another source.

The agency said it will make similar recommendations for other requests for federal permits for any new water withdrawals from the Columbia Basin.

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