FILE - In this Dec. 18, 2013 file photo, Senate Budget Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray, D-Wash., speaks during a television news interview on Capitol Hill in Washington.
When President Trump’s budget cut funding to a little-known federal grant program with a mouthful of a name, a cohort of advocates in Washington state sprang to its defense.
“I think that they, like many administrations before them, look at it as — they don’t understand it, so they zero it out,” Sen. Patty Murray said in an interview. “It is my job and our delegation’s job to educate them and then go to work with other members of Congress.”
Murray was talking about the Pacific Coastal Salmon Recovery Fund, which since 2000 has provided funding to five states — with Washington getting the largest amount — to promote projects that restore salmon habitat. Murray took a victory lap last week when the Senate Appropriations Committee passed a funding bill that included $70 million for PCSRF, and regional supporters say the program’s likely survival is crucial to protecting the 28 salmon species that call the West Coast home.
“That federal funding is still pretty critical,” said Kaleen Cottingham, the director of the Washington State Recreation and Conservation Office. This year, the fund is slated to provide $18.8 million of the approximately $50 million RCO will put toward salmon restoration efforts.
Washington has received nearly half a billion dollars since the fund’s inception in 2000, part of the almost $1.4 billion disbursed in total. Oregon, California, Alaska and Idaho — as well as tribes in those states — also receive funding.
In Lewis County, the RCO has allocated millions of the federal grant dollars to projects backed by the county’s Public Works Department, the Lewis County Conservation District, Cowlitz Indian Tribe and the Quinault Indian Nation. A PCSRF database search for Lewis County turns up 34 projects totaling nearly $7 million. Some of that that funding was also provided by state and local sources.
“[The fund] is pretty key for Lewis County to be able to open up any fish habitat barriers, because the county itself only has the money to do maintenance [on culverts],” said Ann Weckback, an environment planner with the county’s Public Works Department.
That, Murray said, is why PCSRF exists — to achieve projects local communities identify as critical, but don’t have the resources to support on their own.
“The funds are really used to help local projects that are oftentimes hard to fund from a local level,” she said. “You’ve got a number of them in Lewis County there that the cities don’t have the funds for, but they’re an important part of our local infrastructure to make sure our salmon runs are strong.”
Murray pointed to fish passage expansion at Bunker Creek as an example of the work the fund is enabling. A total of six projects, starting in 2003, have worked toward restoring salmon habitat, including the replacement of several culverts.
“All the mainstem barriers on Bunker Creek are now open,” Weckback said.
In March, the Seattle Times ran an opinion piece saying the Trump budget would “devastate” efforts to restore Washington’s salmon runs.
“This federal funding is the backbone of recovery efforts in Washington along with millions of dollars of state and local matching funds,” the authors wrote.
The state’s congressional delegation largely sees it that way as well.
“Maintaining robust funding for the Pacific Coastal Salmon Recovery Fund is essential to improving Southwest Washington’s salmon and steelhead runs and sustaining our local economy that relies on vibrant fisheries,” Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, R-Battle Ground, said in a statement provided to The Chronicle.
Herrera Beutler said she’s used her seat on the House Appropriations Committee to fight proposed cuts to the program for the past five years. That panel approved $65 million in May to fund PCSRF. The House and Senate will eventually settle on a final figure — assuming the bill is approved by each body — before it is sent to the White House.
Murray said the congressional support gives her confidence the grant program will remain funded, despite Trump’s objections.
“[The White House] would have to veto the entire spending bill if they didn’t like the [PCSRF] funding here,” she said. “I’m confident we will have sufficient funds.”
PCSRF Director Rob Markle said the grant program has helped fund 410 projects — including some still underway — in the 3rd Congressional District. The fund has provided $67.3 million toward those projects, more than half of the overall $121.8 million in total project costs.
In Washington, projects backed by the fund largely fall into three categories: fish passage, in-stream restoration and riparian. Fish passage includes work like expanded culverts that had previously bottlenecked or blocked salmon runs. The restoration aspect can include connecting floodplains and creating off-channel habitats. Riparian projects benefit land areas near channels.
“[The fund] demonstrates that the federal government has skin in the game in this recovery,” Markle said. “We’re not sitting on the sidelines saying, ‘These fish are in trouble. You’ve got to do something for them.’ … We’re putting $65 million a year into this. Come join us. And people are.”
Building that state and local support becomes more difficult when the funding is uncertain, however. Despite the current optimism in Congress, Cottingham wondered how much Trump’s proposed cuts this spring may have set back restoration efforts.
“It provides a bit of anxiety to the groups and organizations in the watershed that are doing the work,” she said. “How much should they invest in recruiting projects if there’s no certainty? ... If you lose that momentum, how long does it take to get that momentum back?”
Cottingham’s agency is tasked with administering most of the dollars PCSRF provides to the state, and it’s been praised for a bottom-up approach in which local stakeholders and state leaders identify and pursue projects, which are then bolstered by the federal funds.
Over the program’s history, PCSRF has opened more than 10,000 miles of stream by removing more than 3,300 barriers, according to a 2017 report to Congress. About 1,000 of those miles and 159 of those barriers took place in fiscal year 2017. The fund has also treated more than 2,700 miles in instream habitat projects. It has treated more than 11,000 miles in riparian habitat projects and acquired or protected 270,000 acres.
Even amid those efforts, Cottingham said conservationists are getting only about 12 to 15 percent of the money they need for salmon restoration work, making it that much more important to protect the funding that is in place.
“There’s salmon funding fatigue — ‘Are you done yet?’ she said. “It took us 100 years to get where we are now. ... It’s going to take us longer than 15 or 20 years to fix it. We’re in this for the long haul. We’re seeing incremental improvements. We’re not there yet.”
Markle added that even diminishing the fund’s payout could have consequences, as stakeholders are gradually moving to big-budget items.
“Over time we’ve seen a lot of the easier projects completed,” he said. “The data we’re looking at suggests we’re seeing increasing costs per project.”
