Chehalis River Alliance Statement on Winter 2022 Flooding and the LAND Steering Committee

The newly formed Local Actions Non-Dam Alternative (LAND) steering committee is looking to develop holistic and sustainable flood reduction projects in the Chehalis Basin.

The Chehalis River Alliance (Alliance) represents a diverse group of community members. Some of us are still cleaning up flood water, helping our neighbors, watching mud-slick treeless hills with a sense of dread, and assessing damage and future hazards. We empathize with the grief and trauma these events have on us, on the land, and our neighbors. The Alliance’s members would like to offer our thoughts and prayers to those impacted by the latest flood in the basin, and offer thanks to all of those responders and officials that worked so hard to keep us safe. 

As we look to the future, our vision includes working with our entire community to increase resiliency and move people out of harm’s way.  It will be a long road, but we are confident that with this hard work, we will no longer spend so much time and effort recovering from future floods.

  A basin-wide solution that works for everyone will be a tall order, and will entail much study and compromise. The newly formed Local Actions Non-Dam Alternative (LAND) steering committee is charged with developing a solution that does not include a dam.  We whole-heartedly support this step, and we realize that each member is a good faith representative who wants the best for the region. 

This process won’t  be easy - it is rushed, underfunded, and a few years behind the rest of the work. We hope these constraints will change. We want to see the best possible outcome and think there are four actions that will facilitate a better LAND process and ensure sound solutions that safeguard all: 

1. Time: LAND will not have the appropriate time to develop a foundation and understanding of the challenges and solutions. It would require at least another year or so, the original option has had decades of analysis. We feel that giving the LAND 1/5 of the time that the original project proposal has been given would at least give the temporal space necessary to develop something comparable.

2. Funding: Because the alternatives were never really fleshed out or even offered in the initial reviews and proposals, the funding for this process was essentially used to develop a second project, not an alternative. We think that this should be rectified, because the original efforts focus on two versions of the same project or nothing. We feel this process should be given equal funding. Although this may not be feasible, we would like to encourage budget funding and allocation processes to consider at a minimum, doubling the current funding allocation.

3. Data: The charge of the LAND is to use already collected data to make their assessment. This can be problematic, if the original alternative was just a second version of the proposed project, then all data will be skewed to questions that support that hypothesis. In short, the LAND needs to ask different questions if they have a different hypothesis. For example, if one says “I think X so I will test Y for its relationship to X '', this is great, but when one changes the question to “I think Z has a relationship to X '' one would not then test for X’s relationship to Y. In summary, assumptions, hypothesized solutions, criteria and parameters have limited past studies to the proposed project, not to a true local-actions alternative. Therefore, it can be deduced that there may be tons of questions, data, and metrics, criteria that need to be evaluated and re-supported with evidence. We feel an increase in time and budget can facilitate an acceptable solution. 

4. EIS Reconciliation: As mentioned by the LAND steering committee and the Alliance, the SEPA/NEPA dichotomy is a barrier to finding sustainable solutions in the basin. We encourage the Office of Chehalis Board to either reconcile the two documents or have a qualitative review drafted that can remove or identify assumptions and data gaps and produce a set of facts that are the same. We feel it will be very difficult to come to an agreement when the information is divergent.

The Alliance is hopeful that this process develops a holistic and sustainable LAND recommendation. Overall, if the LAND is to be successful it should be given every opportunity to achieve its fullest potential. Making sure the steering committee and the Basin have enough time to provide quality recommendations should be a key component of this process. Guaranteeing the right amount of funding allocation to see the process through is paramount to having a comprehensive plan. Asking different questions and seeking new information should be a function of the LAND. Lastly, the reconciliation of the divergent EIS documents is needed so decision makers and community members can all be using the same set of facts to inform their opinions and decisions. 

The Alliance thanks you for your time and we look forward to the realization of a LAND alternative that is robust and meaningful.

Sincerely, 

The Chehalis River Alliance 

Local Action Non-Dam (LAND) Steering Group Will Include Chehalis River Alliance Members

We are pleased to see that the recently established Local Action Non-Dam (LAND) Steering Group will Include new representatives of a number of conservation focused organizations and Chehalis River Alliance Members. This is an important opportunity to imagine a holistic solution to flood management that properly balances the needs for salmon and steelhead recovery, animal migration corridors, anticipates climate change impacts, and serves the communities of the Chehalis Basin.

The LAND steering committee is tasked with hiring a contracting firm to assemble and produce relevant studies to seek non-dam solutions to the flood damage in the basin. In the next year their work will lead to a comprehensive roadmap to reduce flood damage without a dam. To be successful they must show that the same amount of damage reduction can be sought without a dam on the Chehalis River.  

Brian Stewart, the Cascades to Olympics Program Coordinator for Conservation Northwest and the Facilitator for the Chehalis River Alliance, explains: “I am excited and honored to have been appointed to the Local-Actions Non-Dam Alternative (LAND) steering committee. Through our work in collaboration with the Chehalis River Alliance we identified concerns with a dam and we voiced those concerns and because of the tenacious work of our partners in the Alliance, we now have the desired opportunity to seek a non-dam solution as an alternative.  It is humbling to be part of such an important process and to work with such well respected and knowledgeable people”.  

Listed are the newly appointed members of the Local Actions Non-Dam (LAND) Steering Group:  

Glen Connelly Confederated Tribes of the Chehalis Reservation  

Tyson Johnston Quinault Indian Nation  

Steve Malloch Western Water Futures LLC 

Norm Chapman City of Centralia Planning Commission Member 

Todd Chaput Infrastructure Initiatives Program Manager Economic Alliance of Lewis County 

Jess Helsley Washington Program Director, Wild Salmon Center 

Dan Maughan Farmer/Bee Keeper (Maughan Family Farm of Adna),  

Brandon Parsons Associate Director, Rivers of Puget Sound and Columbia Basin 

Brian Stewart MES Cascades to Olympics Program Coordinator 

Learn more at the The Chronicle article: Office of Chehalis Basin Names 9 Members of Committee to Look at Non-Dam Alternatives

Chehalis River Alliance Statement on the Chehalis Basin Board’s Budget

The Chehalis River Alliance (Alliance) recognizes the recent efforts of the Chehalis Basin Board (Board) to revise and successfully adopt a more equitable budget for implementation of Chehalis Basin Strategy efforts over the coming biennium. The Quinault Indian Nation and Confederated Tribes of the Chehalis led the way in calling for increased transparency in the budget process and holding the Board accountable to make an investment towards meeting Governor Inslee’s request “to define a process and timeline for developing and evaluating a basin-wide non-dam alternative to reducing flood damage and to use the best scientific evaluation of options to preserve and restore salmon runs and protect the basin’s human communities.”

The Alliance is grateful for the leadership from the Quinault Indian Nation and Confederated Tribes of the Chehalis, who invoked the strength and tenacity to stand united in voicing their dissent- calling for significant revisions to what was originally a tremendously biased and proposed dam-centric budget. We appreciate the Quinault Indian Nation’s request in late May for more detail about the budget, which helped to provide transparency in the budget process. We acknowledge the Chehalis Tribe’s strength in offering a non-vote, not stopping the budget, but instead drawing attention to the areas in the budget that did meet the needs and expectations of the community or the environment. Indigenous voices give strength and representation to those without a seat at the Board table- including the many species we are collectively working to preserve and protect.

Ultimately, the final budget addressed most concerns identified by the Tribes and other dissenting voices. However, as was indicative during the approval process, there are still some concerns with the adopted budget included below.

The budget as originally proposed included numerous line items that were pre-decisional- focusing on the proposed dam as the only flood damage reduction option. This signals that even though the environmental analyses have yet to be concluded, the Board has pre-determined that the proposed dam is their preferred alternative.

Actions implemented as a part of the Chehalis Basin Strategy warrant comprehensive environmental review, the outcome of which should be used to make unbiased decisions about which actions should and should not be implemented. The public expects a transparent and non-biased process that they will hold the Board accountable to.

The concern of funding pre-decision actions was identified and addressed by the Quinault Indian Nation, which resulted in the decision by the Board to defer a portion of the proposed spending for the proposed dam until completion of the environmental review processes. This provides the Board with flexibility to allocate those now unobligated funds later in the biennium based on the most up-to-date and accurate information.

Another significant failure of the initial budget was the lack of a significant investment in the development of a basin-wide flood damage reduction strategy. The development of such a strategy requires significant investment, not at all dissimilar to the investments already made to explore the proposed dam alternative. This should be a robust effort that utilizes the best available and most up to date science to enable comparative analysis of a suite of flood damage reduction actions against the proposed dam. We expect the process to build from the local actions planning efforts that took place this previous winter along with the additional development of detailed flood mapping, risk and economic analyses coupled with local land use planning efforts. If executed properly, this will result in a comprehensive strategy of flood reduction actions providing an opportunity of comparison across actions.

If the Board is truly looking to fulfill the intent of the Strategy - to reduce flood damage for Basin residents and to protect and restore aquatic species habitat - they will put a genuine effort into the development of this basin-wide flood damage reduction strategy. Based upon the disingenuous comments from some Board members at the last meeting, we are left wondering if the Board is sincere in exploring alternatives or simply placating dissenting voices. Residents of Washington State and the Basin deserve better.