I appreciate that, Mr. Sprout, but the scientific assessment seems to have some holes in it, and it's been pointed out by all the members of the committee that it certainly appears, upon the surface, to be quite problematic.
I appreciate what you're saying about the timeframe, and it is only a personal assessment here, but I've certainly removed a few thousand yards of gravel in the past--not from riverbanks, but it can be done--and quite frankly, I still have difficulty. If the long-term purpose of this is to actually remove enough gravel to deepen the channel somehow and increase flood protection, and if you could remove the risk from the pink salmon totally by that narrow window of time, by simply doing it every second year instead of every year, on a continual basis, with no mitigation at all, no environmental damage whatsoever to the salmon resource, then perhaps that would be better than not allowing any extraction at all, if that's where this ends up.