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Home - California Politics & News - California Spends Over $20 Million to Save Endangered Trout—Then Sprays Poison in Their Creek

California Spends Over $20 Million to Save Endangered Trout—Then Sprays Poison in Their Creek

Orange County, Calif. — Thousands of gallons of herbicides have been sprayed into flood channels that flow straight into the ocean—right in the same creeks where more than $26 million in taxpayer dollars have already gone toward saving the endangered steelhead trout.

For more than two decades, state and federal agencies have funneled millions into a fish passage project on San Juan and Trabuco creeks. Yet county crews kept spraying the chemicals, including during the steelhead’s spawning season, according to records obtained by local activists.

In 2003, California state biologists made the first sightings in decades of steelhead trout below the I-5 culvert. By 2004 and 2005, the national nonprofit Trout Unlimited launched efforts to remove barriers at the nearby Metrolink bridge and I-5. 

During that time, the California Department of Fish and Game agreed to fund a roughly $1.2 million fish passage, otherwise known as a “fish ladder,” to open an estimated 13 miles of upstream habitat.

But the ladder was never built because of engineering, flood control, bridge stability, and pipeline concerns.

From the mid-2000s to 2017, planning, studies, modeling, and stakeholder negotiations continued under Trout Unlimited, which raised an estimated $2.4 million. By 2013, the U.S. Forest Service began upstream check dam removals as part of broader habitat work in Cleveland National Forest.

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