The Bonneville Power administration has proposed a reduced summer spill at several dams on the lower Snake and Columbia rivers this summer, ostensibly to generate an additional 1,000 megawatts of power and save consumers money, while saving the significant number of migrating juvenile salmon.

The problem with this plan is that it does not have either Northwest electricity consumers or salmon as its prime concern. The bottom line is BPA stands to make somewhere between $20 and $30 million if the proposal goes through – after salmon offset mitigation costs – and individual rate payers would see only a miniscule reduction in electricity bills.

If there are somewhere in the neighborhood of four million electricity consumers – both household and corporate – in the Northwest, that means that, for two months, savings could amount to an entire $3.75 a month. You can’t get a decent hamburger and fries for that. Several Native American tribal fisheries departments have estimated savings of less than a dollar per customer. And that assumes that the additional power will be made available to the region and not sold to utilities elsewhere.

Then there are the fish.

BPA claims that its added salmon protection measures will offset the negative impact on migrating fish to the levels of the previous plan. That plan calls for a spill of 55 percent less water than initially recommended by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries agency’s 2000 study of the basin. Now they want to further reduce the spill.

While BPA and the U.S. Corps of Engineers figure that their mitigation techniques will reduce the juvenile fall chinook – an ESA-listed fish – mortality numbers to around 1,000 fish in the Snake River, that doesn’t even begin to take into account the unlisted species that will be impacted. Numbers of fish ranging from 130,000 to 700,000 unlisted salmon have been bandied about. BPA and the Corps say those numbers will be offset by their mitigation plans, called dubious by some environmental and fishing groups.

But what are those plans? Increasing the bounty on pikeminnow, a predator fish, is at the forefront of BPA’s proposal, along with paying Idaho Power $4 million to release water in July from Brownlee Reservoir that it traditionally releases anyway. Also, rearing subyearling fall chinook to a larger size at the Lyons Fish Hatchery and making improvements at other hatcheries.

Still, at a cost of $9 to $10 million for all mitigation measures combined, BPA still stands to put a huge chunk of change into its pocket through increased energy sales of $30 to $40 million if this amended proposal goes through.

We’re not saying that making money is a bad thing; it seems to bethe primary pursuit of American society. But in this case, the cost to our natural and cultural resources is too great to justify allowing BPA to pad its coffers. To us, this plan appears to be a winner for the BPA, but not much of anyone else. The increased spill is worth a couple of bucks a month.