Newsom announces $60M plan to restore California’s Chinook salmon 

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) on Tuesday announced a $60 million agreement to welcome salmon and sturgeon back to the Yuba River for the first time more than a century.

Together with state, federal and local officials, the governor unveiled a landmark agreement that will reopen miles of habitat to multiple fish species. The plans will also enable the return of the spring-run Chinook salmon to their native Yuba River habitat in the Central Valley, officials noted. 

“This is a big commitment, $60 million project. We hope to get it done in the next few years,” Newsom said at a Tuesday press conference.

Half of those funds will come from the state, while the other half will come from the Yuba Water Agency, the governor explained. 

“There’s progress in an area that frankly gets under resourced, not just fundamentally in the context of the financial contributions, but I think in mindshare,” Newsom said. 

The agreement is a collaboration of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, the Yuba Water Agency and the fisheries branch of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). 

Through this cross-agency partnership, the deal also seeks to help resolve decades of conflict among fisheries groups and other Yuba River stakeholders.   

California’s Central Valley once boasted annual returns of spring-run Chinook that numbered close to 600,000, contributing significantly to the fisheries and the economy of the West Coast, according to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. 

But two federal dams built in the early 20th century to control the devastation caused by Gold Rush-era mining have hampered native fish species from reaching their historic spawning grounds, the agency explained. 

Among the actions the agreement will fund is the construction of a new fishway — a channel resembling a natural river that salmon, steelhead, sturgeon and lamprey can navigate, according to the governor’s office. They will be able to use this channel to circumvent the nearby U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’s Daguerre Point Dam, and reach more than 10 miles of spawning habitat, the plans explained. 

The agreement also involves building a modernized water diversion at the Daguerre Point Dam to supply irrigation water south of the lower Yuba River, which will help protect fish that pass by the dam’s intake zone.

Also critical to the plans is a comprehensive reintroduction program, which will aim to support recovery efforts of spring-run Chinook salmon. Officials said they hope to return the salmon to their original habitat in the North Yuba River as soon as 2025. 

The California Department of Fish and Wildlife, the Yuba Water Agency and NOAA Fisheries said they expect to finalize a settlement based on Tuesday’s framework agreement by the end of 2023.

“The Upper Yuba is arguably the best opportunity to get a viable, self-sustaining spring-run Chinook salmon population,” Cathy Marcinkevage, assistant regional administrator for NOAA Fisheries, said at the Tuesday press conference.   

“That is critical, not just to the recovery of the species, but at this point probably to its survival,” she added. “This is really a game-changer.”