Collaboration key to Skagit River System Cooperative

For over 40 years fishery biologists and other scientists have been working in collaborative efforts to improve salmon fisheries in the Skagit River. Since 2003, the Skagit River System Cooperative, a partnership between the Sauk-Suiattle Indian Tribe and the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community, has included ten governmental agencies, universities and non-profit organizations in its efforts.

A cooperative in name but not in organizational structure, the SRSC started in 1976 with a third Washington treaty tribe, the Upper Skagit. Steve Hinton, restoration director, recounts that it was “in the true spirit of cooperation that they pooled their resource to hire their first biologist. It was very much in line with the spirit of a cooperative by pooling resources that would be diminished if every tribe worked on its own.” The original name was Skagit System Cooperative.

Today SRSC has staff working in five areas: restoration; timber, fish and wildlife; harvest management; research and environmental services. Funding is through the tribes and from grants from various governmental and private sources. They have had budgets of well over a million dollars annually.

Hinton’s restoration program started with his hiring in 2000. They have implemented over 50 projects to restore salmon habitat in the only river in Puget Sound that produces substantial runs of all five native salmon and trout species. In the 3,100 square miles Skagit River watershed, the task is huge.

Their work to restore estuarine habitat at the north end of Swinomish Channel was highlighted in an August Weekly News article. The Cooperative is active up river, also. A September ribbon cutting ceremony recognized the finish of the Illabot Creek project, proposed in 2001 and finished this year. The three-million-dollar project resulted in Skagit County building two bridges east of Rockport to allow the stream bed to create and build up alluvial fans for fish spawning habitat.

Hinton named other upstream projects: Hansen Creek, east of Sedro Woolley, will replace the Minkler Road bridge and relocate a ditched channel, and the Barnaby Slough project, southeast of Rockport, now in its design phase.

These are examples of SRSC working with everyone that is active in the restoration community throughout the river basin, said Hinton. He emphasized working on common ground, both physically and metaphorically.

“It is all that much more imperative that we work as a cooperative, and it is not everyone for themselves,” he said. “We want sustainable runs for all five species of salmon. We want to make sure they are there for the seventh generation.”

He knows that there are at least a couple of generations – 50 years and more – of work ahead of them to approach that goal.

And that goes back to the founding efforts. Hinton reflected on the foresight of key individuals at all three tribes. It was “the founding policy folks who were key board members of our initial years and elders into the 1990s,” he noted.

Speaking to the conflicts on the nightly national news, Hinton said “That emphasis in combining resources is a better way to go. Current issues are splitting us apart. Encouraging ways to bring us together are better not just for the tribe but for local communities.”

That is cooperation, even if it is not a formalized business structure.