Joe Cunningham: “Mr. Chairman, I do not plan on taking the full 5 minutes. But the gentlewoman talked about the salmon in Washington. I…”

“Mr. Chairman, I do not plan on taking the full 5 minutes. But the gentlewoman talked about the salmon in Washington. I went all the way through campaigning in Washington and looked at some of the dams and looked at the problems they had on even the impellers of their little edge in there that they were saying were killing salmon, the small ones going down. Part of the problem is recording. You release fingerlings. They go out to sea, and then they come back, and they actually measure how many salmon come back up river, not how many the sharks get or anything else, but the actual number that get back. They also wanted to take and build this big venturi tube because they had a plan for $100 million to circumvent the dams up there that had no scientific basis, and it was going to cost them $100 million. The particular guy that runs the dam said, OK, we are going to save fish. They found out that there is this fish called a squawfish that eat their own body weight each day. Instead of $100 million, he took a group of high school kids for the summer and caught squawfish and saved about 90 percent of the fingerlings that went down and saved, this is big government's answer versus entrepreneurship. They also want to take out a lot of the dams in Washington that have recreational value and storage of water and those kind of programs.”