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We've Spent Billions by Lee J. Halper Lewiston Tribune, January 2, 2025

Marvin Dugger's latest accolade of the success of salmon recovery (Tribune Dec. 15) lists all kinds of percentages, which is a red herring.

A 90% survival rate sounds great, but if you're talking about just 100 fish that isn't a positive reflection on recovery. At the end, he touts hundreds of thousands of sockeye returning but excludes the years when there weren't hundreds of thousands returning or when millions did naturally, and excludes the time when only one salmon returned to Redfish Lake, requiring fish farms to produce numbers.

With recent dam removals and natural return with the future ensured for those lucky fish and fishermen, the billions we've already spent to subsidize farmers and industries in northern Idaho could have been spent substituting river transportation of goods and installing other power sources, such as solar and wind power, that the dams now provide.

This is a complex issue and blaming water spillage over the dams, which I assume is to prevent flooding of humans, is part of the problem with the dams themselves. If we want to continue to hope that billions that could be spent providing homeless veterans with treatment and housing are better spent on subsidies, we're lost. And as there are only two alternatives here to solve the problem -- continue to spend billions or remove the dams, as Rep. Mike Simpson has proposed -- I'm not for throwing good money after bad.