CSPA NEWS

Statement by John Beuttler, Conservation Director for the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance to the Senate Natural Resources & Wildlife Committee

June 24, 2008. Sacramento - I appreciate the opportunity you've provided to help us address the fishery collapse of the Bay-Delta estuary and its tributaries by taking a critical step to begin to turn this disaster around.

The closure of the salmon fishing season this year is in part a direct consequence of the long term decline in the productivity of our Central Valley salmon that used to provide 2/3rds of all the salmon harvested in the state. The Delta's ecological crisis is also mirrored by the collapse in many other fishery resources that depend on it. Several runs of salmon, all of the steelhead, Delta smelt and longfin smelt have been listed under the state and federal Endangered Species Acts in an effort to prevent their extinction. What we are experiencing is much more that a salmon crisis, it's a fishery crisis of epic proportions that is becoming progressively worse!

While the impact of the operations of the state and federal water projects are not the only significant factor involved in the decline of these fisheries, they do play a very significant role. Project operations cause both direct and indirect impacts to these fisheries. While some of these impacts are currently being mitigated by both projects, the simple fact is that most of them are not. The result is millions of fish perish annually. This number soars when viewed from a vantage point of decades. AB 1806 calls for these impacts to be addressed by the State Water Board in consultation with the state and federal fishery agencies and with the oversight of the CalFed Independent Science Panel.

To the extent some of this mitigation is currently taking place, that will be taken into consideration in a transparent process open to the public. All interested parties will have an opportunity to participate and advocate their interests. Such a process is absolutely indispensable in resolving the best way to for the projects to mitigate all for all of their significant impacts.

Failure to take this positive step will continue to result in local, regional, state and national economies suffering significant economic loss in excess of hundreds of millions of dollars annually to our state's economy. It will also result in more litigation compelling our courts to take additional steps to manage the Delta flows to better project its fisheries further tying the hands of fishery and regulatory agencies to play their management roles. We believe it is far more rationale to take action now to deal with these declines before the situation becomes more desperate that would mandate more extreme measures to bring sustainability back our fishery resources and the Delta's ecology.