Suit Seeks to Protect Spring Salmon Run

SACRAMENTO —  State Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica) announced Monday that he is suing the state Fish and Game Commission, charging that the agency is allowing the spring run of Chinook salmon to approach the brink of extinction.

For the sake of lesser interests, Hayden said, water is being sucked out of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta for farms and cities to the south, killing off thousands of the dwindling fish.

“The fundamental issue is, water is being wasted for export for ski lakes in the Mojave Desert while salmon die in the delta,” said Hayden, who has been joined in his lawsuit by several environmental groups.

The suit, filed in San Francisco Superior Court last week, seeks to force the commission to list as a candidate for protection the Chinook that each spring swim up the Sacramento River to spawn.

Salmon return to spawning grounds on tributaries of the river in three seasonal waves--spring, fall and winter. Each group is biologically distinct.

Because of dam construction on the major streams and disturbing influences such as logging around the spawning beds on the smaller streams, populations of the fish have declined.

Hayden is seeking protections similar to those already in place for the winter run. After dying out to less than 200 fish in 1991 from tens of thousands in years past, the winter run has received protective status as an endangered and threatened species.

The fall run remains healthy, with fish in the hundreds of thousands swimming upriver to spawn and their offspring returning to sea by the same route.

The spring run is estimated at 9,000 to 10,000 fish--down from as many as 1 million before the dams were built 40 or 50 years ago, state officials and environmentalists said.

If the spring run were to receive protection with a threatened or endangered listing, more of the young fish returning to the sea would survive, environmentalists said.

The huge pumps that draw water from the delta, near Tracy, for shipment to farms and cities, including Los Angeles, are used less at critical times to prevent winter-run salmon from being sucked in and killed.

The same could be done for the spring run, said Cynthia Koehler, a lawyer for the Natural Heritage Institute and a party to the suit against the Fish and Game Commission.

That could be accomplished, she said, without stopping the pumping entirely during the key period from November through April when the young salmon journey downriver to the sea.

But Andy McCleod, a deputy secretary of the state Resources Agency, said an official listing for the spring-run salmon would be unnecessary and counterproductive.

A Bay Delta agreement among state and federal agencies, along with water users such as the Metropolitan Water District, already has protective policies in place to prevent further serious depletion of spring-run salmon.

Giving a formal protective listing to the fish would only provide “less of an incentive for organizations like MWD to continue to support the Bay Delta agreement,” he said.

And MWD, he added, contributed $30 million to help restore the river so that fish can survive.

Hayden pointed out, however, that state Fish and Game Department biologists agree that spring-run salmon should receive official protection.