Rob Masonis Quotes (6 Quotes)

It's a step forward for water management along the Columbia River.

It makes no sense to put dam removal on the back burner and to place all eggs in the 'other measures' basket, when there are no affective alternatives to dam removal that the NMFS has put on the table. A big illusion among the public is that those alternatives (to dam removal) have been identified by the NMFS. Somewhere between May 18 and the draft biological opinion that is now public, a decision was made to abandon the course that was consistent with the best science. The NMFS doesn't have that freedom.

The bottom line is that the 'ghost' biological opinion involves a plan that is much more in line with the science than the draft biological plan that is out on the streets.

Somewhere in the system you need to make significant changes. If the dams are not removed, we may well be forced to acquire 1 million acre-feet of water from Southern Idaho irrigators, taking up to 643,000 acres of land out of production, eliminating more than 6,500 jobs and eliminating as much as 430 million in income.

This petition should be a wake-up call to those claiming that the Columbia Basin salmon can be recovered without significant change. We should focus on identifying solutions to the challenges we face, such as improving water use efficiency and finding alternative means of providing the economic benefits of the lower Snake River dams.

If we're going to have more supply available both for in-stream and out-of-stream uses, it's going to require those tools. It's not going to be massive new storage projects.