Final Joint WDFW/Tribal Wild Salmonid Policy

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The Habitat element involves: (1) salmonid requirements for survival, growth and reproduction; (2) how these requirements are influenced by natural physical processes and habitat conditions throughout the various salmonid life stages; (3) how human activities have affected these natural processes and habitats; (4) representative performance measures we can use to ensure success; and (5) examples of actions we can take to maintain or restore the processes and habitats vital to salmonid production. Summarized below are action strategies which are recommended to be successful in meeting the habitat goals and ultimately the overall goal of the Wild Salmon Policy. This initial list is intended to provide the basis for implementation actions and plans.

The Action Strategies are organized into the following components:

• Habitat Protection and Management
• Basin Hydrology and Stream Flow
• Water and Sediment Quality and Sediment Transport
• Stream Channel Complexity
• Riparian Areas and Wetlands
• Lakes and Reservoirs
• Marine Areas
• Fish Passage and Access
• Habitat Restoration

Each component provides recommended action strategies that will address the issues specific to that component. Please note that many of the recommended action strategies are actions already being taken at federal, state and local government levels, and by tribes, or being taken voluntarily by individual land owners. Because this is a policy, except in a few cases, it will not specifically identify all of the wide variety of existing programs and activities in place for habitat protection. Rather, the policy provides principles and processes in a more general sense and specific programs will be identified during implementation.

Inadequate attention to one or more habitat components within the habitat element may reduce or eliminate the benefit of another. For example, riparian buffers and stream channel complexity will be of reduced value to wild salmonids if stream flows are inadequate or fish access is precluded. For anadromous salmonids, production gained from freshwater rearing habitat can be lost if nearshore marine conditions for feeding and migration are inadequate.

Habitat quality is also related to all the other elements in the policy, particularly to spawner abundance and ecological interactions. Freshwater productivity can be heavily influenced by returning adult salmon whose carcasses provide a source of marine-derived nutrients (nitrogen, phosphorus and carbon) to the streams and riparian zones and lakes. Spawning aggregations of some freshwater salmonids produce similar responses in streams isolated from the ocean.

Habitat protection and management first require an overarching goal and philosophy to guide the policy implementation. They also require a number of institutional, housekeeping details to ensure efficiency of staff and budget for those involved or affected by this effort. This includes coordination of regulatory and proprietary efforts, up-to-date comprehensive information to guide habitat decisions, and sharing, interpretation and application of that information to habitat issues. Acquisition of key parcels or easements adjacent to salmonid habitat will be an effective way of partially protecting and restoring salmonid populations as well and will be a part of the overall habitat approach. For full benefit and success, however, it will be necessary for local planning and implementation groups to adopt and embrace these action strategies in local watershed plans.

With this approach and framework in place, a habitat policy will address the issues of maintaining and restoring the physical and chemical processes necessary to meet salmonid life requirements, protecting and restoring key habitats and providing adequate migratory pathways between habitat types.

The following are examples of actions that will help to achieve the performance measures for this component:

1. While it is the intent of the policy to avoid all habitat impacts, the policy recognizes that at times the needs of society will degrade habitat. Therefore, all human actions potentially affecting salmonid habitat should use the following hierarchy of approaches:
   1. Avoiding the impact altogether by not taking an action or part of an action that would cause adverse impacts;
   2. Minimizing adverse impacts by limiting the degree or magnitude of the action and it's implementation;
   3. Rectifying adverse impacts by utilizing proven methods that demonstrate success of repairing, rehabilitation, or restoring the affected habitat to its full productive capacity;
   4. Reducing or eliminating adverse impacts over time by preservation and maintenance operations during the life of the action; and/or
   5. Monitoring the impact and taking appropriate corrective measures to achieve the identified goal.

   Seek full restoration, where feasible, or monetary compensation from responsible parties for direct loss of salmonids or adverse impacts to salmonid habitat, particularly in situations resulting from actions taken contrary to Department or Tribal recommendations in areas designated as high risk by watershed analysis. Monetary compensation shall be usually reserved for fish kills or habitat damage where restoration is impossible. Compensate for the impact by replacing or providing substitute resources or habitats. This hierarchy will be applied to all planning activities and permit reviews and is recommended for other agencies and private citizens as an approach to protecting salmonid habitat. Avoidance is the most preferred and should be the most commonly used form of protection. Mitigation will be used only when no practicable or feasible alternative exists.

2. Conduct a coordinated, comprehensive inventory and assessment of freshwater/marine salmonid habitat, including aquatic biointegrity, with periodic updates:
   
   1. Include all habitats necessary for maintaining life history stages of existing and historical salmonid populations, incorporating both physical habitat elements and biological monitoring parameters such as water chemistry and prey-base assemblages and densities.
   2. Use the inventory to establish and evaluate watershed protection and restoration strategies.
   3. Create a system to keep cumulative track of approved and pending state and local environmental permits, accessible to the tribes, state and local agencies, and the general public.

3. Define and improve quantitative relationships between habitat forming processes and the creation and maintenance of physical habitat. Establish habitat performance measures based directly on salmonid production/productivity.
   

4. Routinely review and update physical habitat performance measures in the policy to reflect the best available science and data.
   

5. Develop a process to coordinate local, state, tribal, and federal regulatory and proprietary authority that ensures opportunities for public review and input and that ensures that all components of the habitat policy are adequately and efficiently implemented. This coordination process should include regularly reviewing and recommending revisions to regulations and/or reviewing and revising typical permit conditions as appropriate to protect salmonid habitat.
   

6. Develop a statewide, unified natural resource damage assessment and restoration strategy that will fully compensate the public for unauthorized activities that injure salmonids.
   

7. Develop regulations and enforcement mechanisms to bring assurance of salmonid habitat protection.
   

8. Encourage voluntary compliance with state and local habitat protection laws, consistent with this policy.
   

9. Rigorously enforce current regulations to protect salmonid habitat where voluntary efforts are not underway or are unsuccessful.
   1. Prioritize enforcement of salmon habitat protection measures.
   2. Increase accountability of governments for enforcement of state and local habitat protection laws.
   3. Establish public and private partnerships in enforcing laws needed to protect salmon habitat.
      

10. In collaboration with affected parties and in other forums addressing these issues, develop and propose rule changes or legislative changes to improve wild salmonid protection in four major areas: (1) forest practices (including Department representation on the Forest Practices Board); (2) growth management (addressing minimum standards for zoning, platting, and protection of critical areas); (3) water allocation (addressing water rights and permitting, instream flows beneficial to wild salmonids, exemptions, water conservation); and (4) agriculture. The Department and the Tribal Parties should work closely with the Joint Cabinet for Natural Resources, the Washington State Natural Resources Council, the Joint Legislative Task Force on Salmon Recovery, and local watershed groups to accomplish this objective. Additional new forums may also be necessary.
    

11. Support a uniform state water-type classification system for use in protecting salmonid habitats. Efforts should be made to verify correct water typing prior to any land or water use decision or plan.
    

12. Provide public access to the wild salmonid habitat information to maximize the effectiveness of habitat protection and restoration efforts.
    

13. Identify key parcels of wild salmonid habitat as a priority for state-funded land acquisition programs.
    1. Support a dedicated funding source for securing wild salmonid habitat.
    2. Acquire key wild salmonid habitats using watershed inventories and analyses as a basis for identifying critical habitats. Acquisition priorities should be consistent with restoration priorities.
    3. Increase efforts to seek opportunities for acquisition of easements or land trades that secure wild salmonid habitat.
    
    

14. Develop an improved version of watershed analysis or equivalent procedure to meet both Endangered Species Act and Clean Water Act requirements, and that will address all watershed land uses. Watershed analysis is recommended as a tool to assess watershed processes and condition and develop management and restoration strategies.
    

15. Identify and discourage the use of federal, state, and local subsidies that directly or indirectly detrimentally affect salmonid habitat.
    

16. Develop strategies and conduct analysis of cumulative effects resulting from past and currently approved activities before further habitat impacts occur.
    

17. In the event that any population fails to meet its prescribed spawning abundance levels, make an assessment of habitat, harvest management, and hatchery issues affecting escapement and make harvest and hatchery production adjustments as needed to meet the spawner abundance goal for the wild fish population. In addition, whenever failure to meet the prescribed spawner objectives is attributable, at least in part, to habitat degradation or loss, make an assessment to determine if the performance standards for the respective habitat components are being met, and make adjustments accordingly.

The basic life need for all living organisms is water and, obviously, a fish out of water is in trouble. The amount and quality of the water, and its pattern of flow are among the key factors of critical importance to salmonids.

The following are recommended action strategies that will help to meet the performance measures for basin hydrology and stream flows:

1. Develop and integrate water conservation guidelines and standards into regional and watershed-based water resource planning and implementation. Savings from conservation programs should, as needed, be used to restore optimum stream flows. Continue development and use of water rights as a means to achieve water conservation to benefit stream flows. If needed, request funding for development of statewide water conservation standards.

2. Ensure that maintenance or restoration of the hydrologic regimes necessary to protect or restore salmonid habitats and life history needs are an integral part of upland management plans and practices, growth management planning, and stored water management plans.
   
   1. Develop strategies to maintain, restore, or emulate natural processes and land features that allow river basins to intercept, store, transfer, and release water so that stream flows are maintained and natural hydrologic regimes are attained.
   2. Develop means (including incentives, zoning, reaggregation of small parcels, clustering) to retain forest, agricultural, and rural lands in order to protect the extent and functions of aquifer recharge and discharge areas, wetlands, riparian zones, and frequently flooded areas.
   3. Develop mechanisms that limit the total effective impervious surface in a watershed subbasin to, or below, a threshold that prevents loss of habitat quality, habitat quantity, juvenile salmonids, and salmonid diversity. In watershed subbasins currently exceeding this threshold, employ best available technology to manage existing or anticipated stormwater runoff. These efforts can be coordinated with development and implementation of a statewide stormwater management strategy that recognizes and avoids impacts to salmonids that manifest at smaller discharge events than do damage to the channel.
   4. Develop mechanisms that limit increases in the duration or frequency of flow events in a subbasin below a threshold that juvenile salmon may use for overwintering habitat. In subbasins currently exceeding this threshold, increase habitat complexity to provide areas of low velocity for juvenile salmon to utilize as refuge during high flow events.
   5. Coordinate water resource planning for stream and potable uses with Growth Management Act (GMA) planning. Determine adequate water supplies in a manner that accounts for the protection and restoration of stream flows.
      1. Identify and map known or potential aquifer recharge areas that provide base flows to streams, lakes, and wetlands.
      2. Protect and restore groundwater recharge and discharge areas that are important for wild salmonids.
         

3. Protect (and restore where feasible) floodplain habitat of value for wild salmonids.
   
   1. Employ low-density and low-intensity zoning and regulation.
   2. Utilize floodplain management measures that provide retention or reclamation of flood plain function and extent.
   3. Require that new roads constructed in floodplains avoid increasing water surface levels and minimize the channeling effects that convert sheet flow to directed flow points (bridges, culverts) during flood events. Correct, to the extent possible, existing roads that function as dikes to reduce or eliminate their adverse hydrologic impacts.
   4. Forest harvest planning should include harvest scheduling - including rotation ages that will prevent damaging changes in stream hydrology from rain-on-snow events, reduction in large woody debris recruitment, increases in the frequency and duration of flows above those suitable for juvenile salmonid overwintering, and other hydrologic effects. Forest-road densities should be limited to thresholds which avoid damaging changes in stream hydrology and direct impacts to rearing salmonids.

4. Establish and revise, as necessary, stream flow rules before any additional out-of-stream uses are permitted. Establish and maintain stream flows (minimum low flows, channel-forming and maintenance flows) that optimize habitat conditions for migration, spawning, incubation, and rearing for wild salmonids and their prey base.
   

5. Maintain stream flows by modifying stored water release strategies and addressing interbasin transfers of water.
   

6. Protect stream flows from impairment by groundwater withdrawals where groundwater is in hydraulic continuity with surface water. This protection includes minimizing the effects of exempt wells on stream flows.
   

7. Promote the use of best available irrigation practices that emphasize water and wild salmonid habitat conservation. State funding for new installation and upgrades of water delivery systems should be provided only where best available technology is used.
   

8. Where voluntary efforts have not been successful, attain and maintain instream flows through (1) increased enforcement of existing instream-flow regulations, (2) active pursuit of relinquishments and abandonments, (3) reduction of waste, (4) increased water-use efficiency, (5) dedication of water from federal projects, (6) pursuit of water rights, and (7) denial of new consumptive water rights. Increased storage may also be investigated, where feasible, as an option to gain additional flows.
   

9. Institute specific wild-salmonid habitat protection criteria as part of the analysis to determine which flood control projects will be funded. These criteria will include channel-forming functions and values, bed character and quality, and overwintering habitat areas.
   

Salmonids are dependent on abundant, clean, cool water for their survival. Several water quality components are important to, or regulate, salmonid habitat and resources: water temperature, dissolved oxygen, pH, total suspended solids (TSS), and specific toxic materials. The quality, delivery and transport of sediments throughout stream channels, lakes, and marine areas plays a significant role in salmonid survival and production.

The following action strategies are recommended in order to meet the performance measures for water quality and sediment quality, delivery and transport:

1. Ensure surface water runoff, water discharge, water conveyance systems and irrigation return flows meet applicable water quality standards for a receiving water body.
   

2. Establish spawning and rearing habitat criteria (e.g., percent fine sediment) through the state water quality standards triennial review process.
   

3. Develop and implement a statewide stormwater management strategy that uses the best science and data to develop land use options that avoid significant changes in basin hydrology and non-point source point pollution that affect salmonid rearing, spawning, and migration.
   

4. Develop a statewide, unified aquatic-sediments strategy to prioritize clean-up of contaminated-sediment sites associated with salmonid production.
   

5. Continue to support a statewide, unified natural resource damage incident response, clean-up and assessment and restoration strategy to fully compensate the public for damages incurred due to releases of toxic substances.
   

6. Organize a forum to promote understanding and communication between the fish and wildlife management community and the agricultural community on issues of salmonid production and the production of agricultural crops and products. This could be modeled on the Timber, Fish and Wildlife Agreement that was used to address the interactions of timber management activities and fish. Develop an improved regulatory framework, including best management practices, that assures agricultural activities will comply with federal and state water quality requirements.
   

7. Rigorously enforce compliance with the Clean Water Act, including the development and prioritization of total maximum daily loading (TMDL) allocations for water bodies, and those parameters that could adversely affect salmonids.
   

8. Ensure that water quality standards recognize the value of salmonid carcasses up to historical levels as a source of nutrients.
   

9. Develop interim approaches, including best management practices, for impaired water bodies or watersheds for which a TMDL has not been developed.
   

10. Deny, defer, or condition activities or permits that will adversely affect salmonid habitat or state waters to ensure that no further degradation would occur.
    

11. Employ and promote land-use practices that prevent significant changes in the delivery and transport of sediments. Priority consideration will be given to high-risk areas where potential for adverse impacts is greatest, such as highly erodible areas.
    

12. Employ and promote sediment control measures for activities that can introduce unnaturally high levels of fine sediments into streams and estuaries such as gravel or rock crushing/washing, gravel/dirt road use in wet weather, and land clearing on erodible soils.
    

13. Employ and promote sediment control measures that protect all waters, including small non-fish bearing streams especially in areas with steep headwall slopes, unstable slopes, and high mass-wasting potential likely to result in sedimentation and pool filling, and to protect the integrity of downstream salmonid-bearing waters.
    

14. Manage watersheds to ensure that gravel and sediment delivery to streams approximates the natural disturbance regime.
    

15. Design and operate dams and water diversion structures to facilitate the normal downstream transport of sediments. Require spawning gravel supplementation to mitigate spawning gravel supply depletion.
    

16. Ensure that gravel removal and dredging operations are evaluated, conditioned, and limited to protect incubating salmonid eggs and salmonid habitat, including instream, riparian, wetland, and marine resources. Evaluations should include appropriate alternatives analysis.
    

Salmonids have evolved and adapted to a stream's natural disturbance regime that provides a variety of in-channel features important to their survival, growth, migration, and reproduction. These features include pools, riffles and intermediate areas such as glides, cascades and waterfalls. Other features include substrate size and distribution (silt, sand, gravel boulders, etc.), sediment delivery and transport processes, water depth and velocity, undercut banks, side channels and instream large woody debris. These features collectively define the complexity - or simplicity - of a stream channel. Typically, complex channels are more productive for salmonids than simple channels.

The following action strategies are recommended for maintaining or restoring stream channel complexity:

1. Allow river and stream channels to maintain or restore their natural meander patterns, channel complexity and flood plain connectivity. Where feasible, restore these features.
   

2. Maintain or provide functional riparian corridors. See also action strategies under riparian areas and wetlands (next component).
   

3. Avoid or minimize channel relocations or encroachments. Where channel relocations are absolutely necessary, ensure that new channel design and construction will not result in a net loss of function or value. Where altered channels are being rebuilt or restored, the reconstruction design should conform to the performance measures identified in the policy.
   

4. Restrict large woody debris (LWD) removal from stream channels and floodways. Where LWD removal is warranted because of damage to public or private capital improvements, relocate LWD to other areas within the channel. Discourage LWD removal for other purposes.
   

5. Develop performance measures, including channel complexity and sinuosity, for historically non-forested areas and intertidal lands of rivers and streams.
   

Riparian areas and associated wetlands perform a variety of functions, all of which have a direct or indirect effect on salmonid production.

The following action strategies are recommended to protect and restore these areas:

1. Develop wetland protection standards specific to the needs of wild salmonids.
   

2. Support a mechanism of wetlands inventory, tracking, and characterization.
   

3. Develop integrated strategies to include regulatory and non-regulatory approaches (e.g., incentives such as current-use taxation, conservation easements, awards/recognition, or land trusts or other forms of acquisition) to improve stewardship of riparian and wetland areas and buffers supporting wild salmonid habitat.
   

4. Ensure that land-use plans avoid the loss or degradation of riparian and wetland areas, fundamentally through land use allocation, and secondarily through application of mitigation techniques.
   

5. Where wetlands alterations are unavoidable, support wetlands permitting programs to achieve no net loss of wetland acreage and function.
   
   1. Provide for a mechanism to assess the effectiveness of wetlands mitigation to replicate wetlands functions and extent.
   2. While avoidance of wetland impacts is preferable, there may be times when off-site mitigation is more practical, affordable and effective. A state mitigation banking protocol should be followed when site specific wetland impacts are unavoidable and mitigation should occur within the same affected subbasin. The protocol should ensure the needs of wild salmonids are met, including criteria for success and monitoring strategies.
      

6. Over the long term, seek to gain an increase in wetland base and functional characteristics.
   

7. Oppose new road construction or other encroachments in riparian areas and wetlands. Where construction, reconstruction, or upgrades are unavoidable, minimize encroachments in riparian areas and wetlands and mitigate for adverse impacts.
   
   

Lakes and reservoirs are significant and ever-changing features of the landscape of Washington. The over 8,000 lakes identified in the state vary widely in age and successional stage, origin, elevation, productivity, shape, hydrology and water quality, and in shoreline configuration and level of human development. Some are nearly pristine and virtually unchanged physically. Others, typically low-elevation lakes such the Lake Washington/Sammamish system, have been extensively altered and developed with wholesale changes in inlet and outlet drainage systems. Many lakes have been manipulated in some fashion; usually for lake-level maintenance, flood control or hydroelectric power generation, and they are often equipped with control structures at their outlets.

The state also abounds with human-built reservoirs. Most have been converted from previously free-flowing stream reaches. They range from small impoundments to single large dam/reservoir structures up to entire river system impoundments such as the Columbia River system of hydroelectric dams. Some are designed to allow fish passage, while others completely obstruct passage or the passage facilities are inefficient or ineffective.

Recommended Action Strategies for Lakes and Reservoirs include:

1. Ensure that land-use plans and regulations take into account the particular sensitivity of lake habitats as identified in the lakes introduction.
   

2. Ensure that lake level manipulation operations plans protect salmonid habitat.
   

3. In areas of significant nearshore use by wild salmonids, minimize the size and numbers of docks, floats, ramps, and bulkheads, and seek appropriate mitigation. Use community or shared/common structures where possible. Avoid the use of treated wood or other materials that release toxic substances in these structures. Where use of treated wood is proposed, the Department shall review and condition permits to protect salmonids and their habitats.
   

4. Develop strategies to address aquatic plant introduction and control issues.
   

5. Ensure that existing lake outlets afford free and unobstructed passage as necessary for anadromous and resident fish species. Avoid further installations and where feasible, remove these structures.
   
   

Washington State has approximately 100 diverse estuaries within 14 regions, exhibiting structural, hydrological and biological diversity. As with freshwater habitat, salmonid life histories have evolved in response to estuarine conditions. Estuaries are critical transition areas where seaward-migrating smolts adapt to seawater and returning adults prepare to enter spawning streams.

Recommended action strategies for marine areas include:

1. Standards for basin hydrology and stream flows, water quality, stream channel complexity, and riparian areas and wetlands should be reviewed and modified to recognize and manage for functions necessary to maintain productive estuarine and nearshore marine habitats.
   

2. Ensure that maintenance or restoration of the natural marine shoreline processes necessary to sustain productive nearshore salmonid habitat are an integral part of upland and aquatic land-use planning.
   

3. Promote land-use planning that allows natural marine bluff and riverine erosion, sediment, nutrient, and large woody debris transport processes to create and maintain the productive estuarine and marine habitats that salmonids depend upon.
   

4. Support mitigation sequencing (similar to habitat protection hierarchy) to fully mitigate for the potential impacts of proposed in-water or overwater structures on salmonid migratory pathways.
   

5. Include in watershed plans a program to restore diked, filled, and covered estuarine and tidally influenced habitats. Develop, promote, and seek funding for estuarine and tidally influenced habitat restoration.
   

6. Develop standards for aquatic lands to facilitate local planning to ensure salmonid productivity will be maintained or increased.
   

7. Develop a marine protected-areas strategy to include reserves for herring spawning habitat.
   

8. Develop integrated strategies to use regulatory and non-regulatory approaches to improve stewardship of estuarine wetlands through protection and restoration efforts.
   

9. Recognize the value of sediment transport to deltas and marine areas, and evaluate, condition, and limit dredging and filling operations to protect nearshore marine, estuarine, and intertidal habitats and functions that wild salmonids depend upon.
   

10. Promote oil and hazardous substance spill prevention, contingency, and response planning to reduce risk, minimize exposures, remediate contaminated areas, and restore lost resource functions and services.
    

Physical barriers interrupt adult and juvenile salmonid migrations in many parts of the state. Persistent blockages deny access to critical spawning and rearing habitat. Loss of access to habitat reduces overall salmonid productivity and may result in loss of salmonid populations. Fish passage is affected by and related to all the previous habitat components. Basin hydrology and stream flow are obvious fish passage parameters. Less obvious are the attributes of water quality and sediment delivery and transport, riparian areas, and lakes and marine shorelines. Fish passage, in the sense of the presence of adult salmonids, especially spawners, also affects water quality, aquatic productivity, riparian vegetation, and spawning gravel quality.

Recommended action strategies to meet the performance measures for fish access and passage include:

1. Within three years, develop criteria, implementation processes, and compliance processes to identify, correct or remove existing human-caused fish passage problems in freshwater, floodplain and estuarine habitats. Prioritize and correct known human-caused fish passage barriers.
   

2. Develop recommendations and coordinate with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and federally licensed dam operators to implement, monitor, and evaluate controlled spill programs at dams, including dissolved gas abatement and other fish passage options, to maximize effectiveness for juvenile and adult salmonid passage.
   

3. Establish procedures for evaluating, adopting and implementing new fish passage technologies, including:
   
   1. Automation of spillway operational facilities.
   2. Development, testing and construction of surface attraction flow collectors.
   3. Construction of gas abatement structures and operation strategies to control gas supersaturation.
   4. Expedite these and other activities to reach the goal of safe and effective in-river fish passage.
      

4. Promote land-use plans that prevent the impacts of road construction on fish passage. Associated components include:
   
   1. Reducing needs for new highways and streets via land use planning and transportation planning including such things as light rail, ride-sharing, etc.
   2. Reducing number of individual private roads for individual residences.
   3. Limiting most new growth to urban areas while retaining large blocks of habitat in rural areas.
      

5. Incorporate consistent state-wide criteria and guidelines for fish passage and screening into future design, construction, or alteration of instream structures, roads, and facilities.
   

6. Develop and expand programs to educate people regarding fish passage issues, and when stream crossings are unavoidable, assist them in the design and construction of instream structures which facilitate free passage.
   

7. Develop an equitable long-term funding mechanism and other incentives to share costs of passage restoration.
   

8. Develop and implement effective monitoring and maintenance programs, and compliance processes that assure fish passage and screening structures are safe and efficient.
   

Any strategy designed to maintain or recover salmonid populations should have as a basic underpinning meaningful protection of existing habitat. Continual restoration of unmitigated impacts to wild salmonid habitat is undesirable, often ineffective and the most costly means to achieving salmonid population recovery; in the long run salmonid populations are best protected by ensuring habitat protection.

The following action strategies are recommended in order to meet the performance measures for habitat restoration:

1. It is the legislature's intent to minimize expense and delay due to obtaining required permits for projects that preserve or restore native fish habitat (Chapter 378, Washington Laws). The law defines watershed restoration projects and provides that projects that have been reviewed under the State Environmental Policy Act shall be processed without charge and permit decisions shall be issued within 45 days of filing a completed application. The state agencies with permitting responsibilities relevant to watershed restoration should fully implement Chapter 378. They should continue to examine opportunities to increase their efficiency in processing project permits and to enhance the design and effectiveness of restoration projects.
   

2. Apply best available science and adaptive management to restoration strategies and activities:
   1. Where possible, use some from of watershed analysis that identifies the physical, chemical and biological processes that may affect the success of the restoration strategy.
   2. Employ watershed restoration mechanisms and technology to restore and maintain habitats to optimum conditions for salmonid spawning, rearing, and migration.
   3. Use qualified experts to analyze, design, and construct specific projects and to evaluate the success of the strategy.
   4. Ensure that monitoring and contingency planning is included in project design.
      

3. Prioritize restoration activities. Considerations for prioritization include:
   1. Salmonid stock status, if available
   2. Harvest management plan
   3. Population vulnerability
   4. Possible positive or negative risks or consequences to wildlife or capital improvements
   5. Community/landowner acceptance and/or support
   6. Feasibility and probability of long-term success
   7. Compliments existing completed restoration projects
   8. Level of funding, opportunity for partnerships
   9. Ability to obtain permits in a timely, affordable basis
   10. Length of time before expected positive salmonid stock response
   11. Amount of habitat to be made available or improved
   
   

4. Plan habitat restoration at multiple scales (subbasin, basin, watershed, state, region) to ensure efforts are consistent, coordinated, and effective.
   

5. Coordinate salmonid habitat recovery plans with other planning processes such as GMA, watershed planning, flood control planning, etc.
   

6. Support stable funding source(s) for salmonid habitat restoration in capitol budgets in order to provide time and predictability for planning, development, implementation and monitoring.
   

7. Establish criteria for salmonid habitat restoration to be incorporated into appropriate state grant funding program selection processes.
   

8. Where recovery of habitat is possible, pursue restoration measures to allow wild salmonids to recolonize areas they historically occupied.
   

9. Develop an education outreach program to local communities to foster environmental stewardship.
   

10. Work with local governments to assure the availability to landowners of incentive programs, such as current-use taxation, and to advocate land stewardship and recognition programs.
    

11. Develop a coordinated, statewide geographic information system - including mapped and tabular data - among federal, state and local governments for cataloging habitat extent, condition, and restoration needs. Data should be organized and accessed according to watershed and made available to all entities who are conducting watershed protection and restoration projects.
    

12. Use a variety of methods, including water conservation, additional storage where feasible, and water purchases to restore stream flows, consistent with this policy. This should include budget authorization to purchase water, water rights, or relinquished or abandoned water rights and transfer them to the trust water rights program.
    

13. Pursue federal and state flood-control funds for restoration of wild salmonid habitat that has been damaged by flooding or flood-control activities. This could include non-structural solutions to flood damage reduction such as relocation of structures; removal of dikes and levees; and reconnection of sloughs, former side channels, oxbows and wetlands.
    

14. Provide technical support (engineering, biological assessments) to landowners and watershed groups.
    

15. Develop dedicated funding and establish criteria for decommissioning of dams.
    

16. Develop new methods and approaches for repairing, rehabilitating, or restoring salmonid habitat.