Revised Approach No. 5: 

 Appropriate Management by Fish and Wildlife Managers 



Summary : State, tribal, and federal fish and wildlife managers would coordinate their 

 activities with a goal of reestablishing sustainable populations of fish and wildlife for harvest. 

 The fish and wildlife managers would manage implementation of a significant portion of the fish 

 and wildlife mitigation measures and funds, and make recommendations to the sovereign entities 

 concerning the other measures. Courts or other adjudicative processes would be asked to 

 oversee and resolve disputes among the fish and wildlife managers and among the sovereigns. 



Analysis : The central focus of fish and wildlife planning and implementation would 

 become reestablishing populations of fish (and wildlife) that can be harvested in sustainable but 

 significant numbers. This focus would reach all aspects of fish and wildlife management, 

 including watershed habitat activities, harvest, river management and operations, artificial and 

 natural production, etc. 



At all the relevant levels of fish and wildlife management -- local, subregional and 

 regional -- the different management entities with authority over the resource or area at issue 

 would coordinate their activities and reconcile the different programs, plans and activities into 

 appropriate action plans, and manage the implementation of the plans. No particular fish and 

 wildlife agency or manager would claim primacy or act unilaterally, including NMFS and 

 USFWS under the Endangered Species Act. Instead, decisions would be made by coordination 

 and reconciliation among all managers with authority, referring disputes to dispute resolution 

 processes. 



Certain aspects of fish and wildlife management primarily or wholly affect only fish and 

 wildlife resources. In these situations, existing decision and implementation processes would be 

 altered or eliminated so that most of the management decisions to achieve this goal would be 

 made by the state, tribal and federal fish and wildlife management entities that have statutory or 

 other legal authority to manage particular regions and the fish or wildlife in those regions. This 

 is particularly true of decisions made in the context of a stable Bonneville budget for fish and 

 wildlife. For example, when to call for spill for fish becomes an issue for the fish managers to 

 decide based on the needs of fish, the availability of funds within the budget and decisions on 

 how best to prioritize those funds for fish. The same is true of a number of other issues, such as 

 the identification of and allocation of the fish and wildlife budget to the appropriate fish passage 

 measures for anadromous fish, or determining the appropriate production and habitat measures 

 to benefit anadromous fish, resident fish or wildlife. In these areas, the fish and wildlife 

 managers should make and directly implement the basic decisions, in open public processes and 

 employing dispute resolution processes to resolve disagreements. 



Many of these types of decisions can be made and implemented in local watershed 

 forums, especially decisions concerning habitat planning and implementation, or in subregional 

 forums, especially including the development of production and habitat goals and objectives. 

 Not all fish and wildlife managers would participate in these forums and processes -- only the 

 fish and wildlife managers with management authority in the relevant watershed or subregion 



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