Political Quotes

“For years, the Walla Walla District of the Army Corps of Engineers has managed several miles of the public shoreline along the Columbia and Snake Rivers in the Tri-Cities area of my congressional district. Five years ago, in 2006, the Corps sought to update its McNary Shoreline Management Plan, which had last been revised in the early 1980s. The existing management plan includes a permit program for private property owners that seek to build or use docks along the river shoreline. The 2006 revision was so controversial that the Corps was forced back to the drawing board. It proposed a variety of restrictive measures, including a moratorium on the building of docks by private property owners along the shoreline and requiring existing dock owners to tear out their docks at great personal expense in order to keep their permits. {time} 1620 The Corps got an earful at a public meeting on the proposal and this year came back with a similarly controversial proposal, which included new questionable mandates from the National Marine Fisheries Service-- including specific requirements for the length, width, color, and transparency of each dock, all of which NMFS claims would help save salmon. Mr. Chairman, with all existing local docks as is right now, salmon runs are at near record levels along the Columbia River, and the Corps itself acknowledges that juvenile salmon in the McNary area average 20 to 30 million. Mr.…”