Showing it knows how to read a judge’s memo, NOAA says it will spend the next three months reworking the Obama plan for salmon and steelhead in the Columbia Basin.
Friday’s announcement was a response to federal district court Judge Redden, who strongly suggested this action nearly two weeks ago.
For nearly a year, Judge Redden has been guiding and advising the Obama Administration on what it needs to do to produce a salmon recovery plan that he’ll accept. The strategy appears to be working.
The Obama team spent about four months last year writing something called the Adaptive Management Implementation Plan, or AMIP. The AMIP was presented to Redden last fall as a kind of add-on to the 2008 salmon recovery plan.
Redden obviously liked what he saw, telling lawyers at a November court hearing that the AMIP, “is a good piece of work.” But he also worried that the AMIP wasn’t properly before him – that even if he approved the plan an appeals court would overrule him for reasons of procedure instead of substance.
Which takes us to his most recent letter. Redden says NOAA should take another three months and rework the AMIP into the salmon plan and come back to him with a final decision. This is what NOAA has agreed to do.
Redden also says the feds just can’t insert the AMIP into the salmon plan by using some kind of bureaucratic voodoo. He says they don’t have to start over from scratch, but they do have to consider the “best available science”. As an example, Redden mentions new information on climate change. If this requires the feds to do some additional analysis or mitigation, then Redden seems to be saying “deal with it”.
What’s not clear is whether this will produce a salmon plan that’s substantially different from the current version. The opponents of the salmon recovery plan are hoping for big improvements, such as doing a better job of managing the flow of water over dams to help salmon migrate up and down the Columbia River system. As Earthjustice Attorney Todd True said when I last interviewed him, the feds don’t appear to want to seriously change direction.
