Tribes need to exercise caution

Now that gill-netting lake trout from Flathead Lake appears imminent — possibly beginning sometime next month — all we can do is strongly urge the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes to proceed with wisdom and caution.

Fortunately, that is how the tribes are describing their plans.

“This is not a blind charge forward,” said Barry Hansen, the tribes’ lead biologist for lake trout suppression work that is intended to benefit native trout. “It is the same progression we’ve done for the last 14 years with a new tool (gill-netting) that we will apply carefully and incrementally. And there will be plenty of opportunity for people to see the results.”

We certainly hope so, because that’s not exactly how this project has taken shape over the last few years. Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks withdrew as a partner on the project, citing concerns about the content of an environmental review for the project and the process for developing the review.

Granted, the tribes put more than three years and a lot of effort into developing an environmental impact statement, which exceeds 400 pages, but it was still a process that lacked the rigorous public scrutiny that we’ve seen before for endeavors of similar magnitude.

Whether it be wolf recovery and delisting, or even laying out a plan for snowmobiling access on the Flathead National Forest, in those cases there have been ample public hearings and significant adjustments in response to public concerns.

Not in this case.

The only public meeting held in Kalispell was back in 2010, when netting was proposed as a pilot project under a less rigorous environmental assessment. Not long after, the tribes decided to pursue a 50-year suppression effort that could involve removing up to 143,000 lake trout annually.

That of course required shifting to a detailed environmental impact statement. But there was no restart on the public involvement process; the environmental assessment strangely morphed into an environmental impact statement and there ended up being scant opportunities for critics to sound off. The final EIS was quietly rolled out on Feb. 21 with an obscure notice in the voluminous Federal Register.

We’re fairly certain that a similar approach to wolf de-listing would easily be picked apart in court by environmental litigants.

The potential adverse consequences from this project are considerable, as we’ve pointed out before. Whether it be a severely diminished lake trout sport fishery (which will come with economic fallout), or netting by-catch of bull trout that could short-circuit the entire purpose of the project, or the potential degradation of the lake’s water quality, or just the cost effectiveness of spending nearly $1 million a year on lake trout suppression, the public has plenty of things to be concerned about, and those concerns should be addressed on a continuing basis.

It’s our hope that the tribes will do just that and that caution is the watchword for this effort.

Editorials represent the majority opinion of the Daily Inter Lake’s editorial board.