Letters to the editor can be submitted to news@chronline.com.
The Office of the Chehalis Basin has for review their Aquatic Species Restoration Plan (ASRP). They are inviting public comment until January 14. This plan was put together by the Department of Ecology, the Quinault and Chehalis Tribes, and the Department of Fish and Wildlife. It is 451 pages. I did not read every word. But I stayed up way too long reading and skimming a good portion of it. The main areas of concern for me:
1) The ASRP proposes billions, with a “B,” of dollars in taxpayer spending over the coming decades. The summaries make it look like only hundreds of millions, since they don’t have a grand total anywhere in the document. It’s billions.
2) The ASRP would “reconnect” 15,000 acres of land to the river. This would involve removing most agriculture and many homes from those 15,000 acres.
3) Even with full implementation of their plan to spend billions and disrupt local communities, the ASRP’s own projections show only a modest increase in most salmon runs and a continued decline in fall chinook.
4) “Actions undertaken as part of the ASRP are not mitigation for the effects of flood damage reduction actions such as construction of a flood retention facility.” I no longer support the dam which now has no hydro, no recreation, no increased summer flows, and will only knock the tops off floods to save I-5. But if you do, this passage states the ASRP is not a step on the way to the dam, but a separate scheme entirely.
5) The entire document is based on modeling and projections 40 and 80 years out. Predictions of climate change. Predictions of development rates. How accurate is NOAA a week out?
My take away: Giving the tribes and government agencies billions of tax dollars to acquire land and easements all along the Chehalis River and its tributaries for the purpose of reshaping it into their vision of pre-Euro-American settler times, will be detrimental to our area. It will fragment communities, remove even more land from the tax rolls, and most tragically; cannot prove that it will enhance our salmon runs.
Katherine Humphrey
Curtis
