Wendi Weber, regional director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's (USFWS) Northeast Region in Hadley, Mass., and Bill Archambault, deputy assistant regional director of fisheries, want a boatload of pork for the failed salmon program of the Connecticut River Atlantic Salmon Commission (CRASC). Now!
Through an act of Congress, Weber and Archambault are seeking $10 to $14 million in emergency funding to rebuild the White River National Fish Hatchery (WRNFH) in Bethel, wiped out by Tropical Storm Irene in August.
The primary product of WRNFH is salmon eggs - six million of them annually for our river's longest running failure, the 44-year attempt to recreate an extinct salmon strain. One hundred and seven fish returned this season.
What will senators Kerry, Brown, Leahy, and Sanders do with this request in a time of paper-thin budgets and collapsing native herring and shad runs?
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Last year, when the WRNFH got $723,000 in federal stimulus funds for a makeover, more than $421,000 went to a refrigeration manufacturer in Missouri for an egg chiller.
Ironically, a $100,000 egg chiller has sat useless at the Richard Cronin National Salmon Station in Sunderland, Mass., for years. Upon delivery, it simply never worked.
Four years ago, WRNFH spent millions in taxpayer dollars to build a well system to supply its hatchery salmon. Upstream, the White River had become infected with the invasive, bottom-smothering algae didymo, which could be transported via eggs and fry that they disperse to tributaries and sent to school programs.
They want to start again.
Meanwhile, state/federal CRASC commissioners seem willing to play fast and loose with the potentially disastrous dispersal of didymo to Connecticut River tributaries through hatchery fry.
Right now, they are devising a rush plan to parcel the surviving 900 broodstock hatchery salmon at White River to hatcheries in Massachusetts, Vermont, and Connecticut - though they admit they can't be “100 percent certain didymo won't be taken out of the [White River] facility.” They'd jeopardize an ecosystem for their program.
All this information was revealed at an emergency CRASC Tech Committee meeting on Sept. 23. This capital-intensive, million-dollar system of four federal and two state hatcheries floats a small number of well-benefitted government jobs, while ignoring native migrant fish and the lessons of a river ecosystem.
It's a public relations machine, reaching into public schools and assisted via a few hundred, spawned-out hatchery salmon dumped into lakes and streams to mollify anglers duped into believing it will work.
With $14 million you could do a lot of good for the Connecticut.
With just a fraction of that money, independent scientists could conduct investigations and get real answers about why millions of migratory American shad have remained blocked from getting upstream to Vermont and New Hampshire on the main stem Connecticut at Turners Falls for decades, abandoned to a treacherous power canal literally behind the federal Silvio Conte Anadromous Fish Laboratory.
A tiny share of those dollars could begin getting real answers to why a flood of 630,000 blueback herring passing Holyoke dam in 1985 collapsed like the September Red Sox to a “run” of 138 fish here in 2011.
Less than half of $14 million could easily build an independent, Five College–based, river ecology lab that would advance our understanding of native fish, the food web, and the mix of seasonal life cycles critical to sustaining a healthy ecosystem.
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Massachusetts is the crossroads of the Connecticut, where migratory fish have remained blocked from Vermont and New Hampshire waters since 1798. Once built, a sustaining endowment could surely be found for such a facility. “New England's River” would finally have a think tank worthy of its critical importance.
Today, just a few hundred thousand could easily get an answer to the simple question that's left New Englanders in the dark for generations: Why hundreds of millions of dollars spent on an extinct, cold-water fish is never going to sustain anything but pork production for the 44-year-old Connecticut River Atlantic Salmon Commission, on a warming river in the era of climate change.
In 1967, New Englanders from Enfield, Conn. to Walpole, N.H., and Bellows Falls, Vt. were promised great fishing and a bounty of seafood by the New England Cooperative Fisheries Restoration Program, the organization that became today's CRASC.
The chief objective of this federal/state amalgam: “provide the public with high-quality sport fishing opportunities in a highly urbanized area as well as to provide for the long-term needs of the population for seafood.”
Runs of a million American shad, commercially harvestable blueback herring returns, and a hypothetical run of fishable (though centuries extinct) salmon were promised. Instead, we're left with an endless conveyor of salmon pork, no seafood, and damned poor fishing.
It's time to stop this recklessness and waste on the Connecticut. It's time for accountability from the USFWS.
Jettison the Age of Aquarius salmon scheme; refocus the program on still-living native runs.
A new name - the “Connecticut River Migratory Fisheries Commission” - would help; all-new commissioners and an ecosystem focus would be a real start.