Three months of notice, and a program that has run since 1993 loses its main funder. The Bonneville Power Administration told Oregon in June that it will stop paying for the lower Columbia River's Select Area Fishery Enhancement program on September 30, putting roughly 7 million hatchery spring Chinook and coho now in production into limbo.
BPA's reasoning, set out in a June 18 letter from Jason Sweet, executive manager of its Fish and Wildlife Program, is unusual. The agency is not claiming SAFE does not work. It is claiming SAFE works at the wrong thing.
"Although the off-channel fisheries supported by the SAFE program have clearly increased commercial and recreational harvest opportunities in those areas, there is no direct evidence that such increased off-channel harvest has resulted in reduced harvest impacts on weak and ESA-listed stocks in the mixed-stock fisheries on the mainstem," Sweet wrote.
The same letter puts it more directly: "As a practical matter, the sole function of the current SAFE program, both in effect and by design, is to augment harvest opportunities for recreational and commercial fishers."
SAFE was designed around a trade. Hatchery salmon are reared in off-channel sites such as Youngs Bay and Blind Slough so that nets can work there rather than in the mainstem, where ESA-listed wild fish swim alongside hatchery stock. BPA paid for it as mitigation for hydro system damage. The June letter says the mainstem benefit was never proven.
Oregon says it was blindsided.
"This decision by BPA caught us by surprise. It puts decades of fishery reform work at risk and goes against the recommendation of the regional fish and wildlife managers and the Northwest Power and Conservation Council to fund this work," said Dr. Debbie Colbert, director of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.
The Northwest Power and Conservation Council had backed continued funding. BPA went the other way, observing that its recommendations do not bind the agency's purse.
ODFW's ocean salmon and Columbia River program manager, Tucker Jones, framed the loss in wider terms.
"SAFE is a cornerstone program that provides terminal, ocean, and mainstem harvest opportunities, supports living-wage jobs in coastal communities, provides forage for critically endangered southern resident killer whales, and reduces pressure on vulnerable Columbia River stocks," Jones said.
The sums involved are modest. BPA contributed around $1.6 million annually, about two-thirds of operations and maintenance, and the shortfall across ODFW, WDFW and Clatsop County totals roughly $2.4 million. Against that, SAFE commercial fisheries were worth about $6 million in Oregon economic impact during 2025, with some $5 million a year reaching fishermen at the dock.
One number complicates the usual Columbia River politics: recreational anglers take an average 34 percent of SAFE fish. That helps explain why a sportfishing lobby group is publicly defending a commercial fishery.
"This is one more nefarious effort by the BPA to step away from its fishery obligations, and this will affect both commercial SAFE fisheries and the Buoy 10 and nearby ocean fisheries," said Liz Hamilton, policy director of the Northwest Sportfishing Industry Association.
Gnat Creek Hatchery has historically put out 560,000 spring Chinook a year on its own. Those releases now hinge on whether three agencies can close a $2.4 million gap in under three months.