Anybody ever go Salmon Fishing in Nevada? Help Reid make it so!!!

[JoseCuervo]

The Democratic Majourity in the Senate is the best thing to ever happen to Hunters and Fishermen. Maybe we can soon be salmon fishing in Nevada.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada has asked federal regulators to require Idaho Power Co. to provide passage to salmon and steelhead above its Hells Canyon Dams complex on the Snake River as a part of its new license.

Reid wrote to Joseph T. Kelliher, Chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Aug. 27, urging the commission to do what it can to restore salmon runs to Nevada.

Commission officials said in 2005 that Idaho Power would not be required to include fish passage in its application for a new 50-year license for the three dams because water quality above the dams was too poor to support salmon and steelhead.

Adding fish passage would dramatically increase the costs of operating the dams, adding to the price of light bills for the Treasure Valley and most of southern Idaho.

Idaho Power officials previously suggested the costs of fish passage could be so high they might have to walk away from the dams.

Reid’s letter became public Saturday at a forum on salmon recovery organized for the Trout Unlimited national meeting at the Grove Hotel in Boise.

 

[Curly]

The Democratic Majourity in the Senate is the best thing to ever happen to Hunters and Fishermen.

Well, I won't agree with the above statement.......but I do think they should provide for fish passage. Of course I also believe that the lower Snake River dams should be breached.

 

[JoseCuervo]

Well, I won't agree with the above statement.......but I do think they should provide for fish passage. Of course I also believe that the lower Snake River dams should be breached.

If you don't agree with it, why?

Let me guess, you loved backing the GOP majourity and Senator Craig as he worked to eliminated outdoor activities like hunting and fishing?

The Larry Craig who did everything within his considerable power to sell out the West to the heftiest campaign contributors. The Larry Craig who is regarded in my circle as one of the most subservient, accommodating panderers to ever ooze out of Idaho. The Larry Craig who never met a corporate interest he couldn't pimp for.

So I thought we'd review some of the highlights of Larry's career ... if the term "highlights" even applies here. Yes, he's gone now and with any luck, we'll never have him to kick around anymore. But it's important that future generations of Idaho school kids don't get Larry Craig confused with anything that might remotely be labeled "illustrious." What follows is just a sampling of the sort of "up yours" infamy Craig has been pulling over the years.

•

• In the matter of how best to revive the Northwest's salmon runs, who can forget Craig's 2005 maneuver to defund the facility responsible for counting in-bound fish on the Columbia River. His back door rider was thrown out in court, but his intent was obviously in line with the principle ("The less people know, the more we like it") which has guided so many natural resource-based industries in these dark Bush Times. It illustrates well not only Craig's disdain for any data that doesn't serve his masters' interests, but also his general scorn for the entire effort to protect or invigorate what little those masters haven't yet destroyed.

• In the same vein, in 2006, Wyoming Sen. Craig Thomas, a Republican, introduced legislation that would have extended protection to the headwaters of the Snake River. Thomas has since died, but both current Wyoming senators supported the bill. Yet as a powerful member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Craig saw to it that no action was taken on the measure, effectively snuffing the protection.

• The General Mining Act of 1872 has been the miners' manual since before Custer met his Waterloo at the Little Big Horn, yet Craig has consistently fought any meaningful attempt to reform it. Where once the act encouraged gnarly old prospectors to lead their burros forth and dig up something valuable, it now allows huge mining operations, often from other countries, to pick public lands clean with virtually no payback to the owners—being us—and minimal liability for the mess they make. Need I add that Craig has long been a major recipient of contributions from these same operations?

• In 1995, then Interior Secretary Bruce Babbit tried to bring the grazing rental on public lands up to the same levels that private land owners enjoy, which stood at least 80 percent above what the state and federal governments were getting. In Idaho alone, the move would have added millions to the public school coffers. Guess who stomped the reform into oblivion.

 

[Calif. Hunter]

• In the same vein, in 2006, Wyoming Sen. Craig Thomas, a Republican, introduced legislation that would have extended protection to the headwaters of the Snake River. Thomas has since died, but both current Wyoming senators supported the bill. Yet as a powerful member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Craig saw to it that no action was taken on the measure, effectively snuffing the protection.

Wait a minute - I thought it was only Democrats who were enviro-friendly??!!

Another Republican pro-enviro -

Donald Hodel - Reagan's Sec of the Interior - Critics disrupted his efforts to impose a new management policy on a large amount of federal land, and blocked his efforts to create vast new wilderness areas. In spite of these criticisms, the Reagan Administration Secretaries added over two million acres (8,000 km²) to the national wilderness system. The Hodel policy was continued under Manuel Lujan Jr. (1989-93) in the Bush Administration.

While secretary, Hodel proposed to undertake a study on the removal of the O'Shaugnessy Dam in Yosemite National Park, and the restoration of Hetch Hetchy Valley, a smaller, but inundated version of Yosemite Valley. Senator Dianne Feinstein, former mayor of San Francisco, which owns the dam, however, opposed the study and had it quashed. Note that it was Dem Feinstein who quashed the removal of the dam!


I realize that there have also been the abominable appointments of people like Jmes Watt, but my point is that there are good people and idiots in both parties. I don't drink the Koolaid offered by either party, unlike some who post here.

 

[1_pointer]

Wasn't Harry Reid also one of the outspoken folks from Washington placing at least some of the blame for the huge wildfires the last few years on the shoulders of the 'environmentalists'?

Wouldn't the Salmon Creek Dam still keep the salmonids out of NV?

 

[cjcj]

"Dirty" Harry Reid... The crook from Search Light Nevada... he must be getting a kickback somehow.... can't trust that scumbag