TURNERS FALLS — The fish are being fed, but the Conte Anadromous Fish Laboratory has been closed as part of the government shutdown, with all its roughly 16 full-time employees furloughed without pay.
Only three of those are designated “essential employees” with access to the U.S. Geological Survey facility for up to two hours a day. Of those, neither the one working to minimally maintain the building nor the two workers feeding and caring for the sturgeon, brook trout and other species are being paid.
“Any activities regarding USGS work is suspended,” said Branch Chief Adria Elskus. “We can’t answer email, we can’t answer the phone. We can’t do USGS work at home.”
Once the 18-day-old shutdown ends, Elskus said, “We can’t be assured we’ll be paid. Our (retroactive) pay is completely up to Congress. It’s not a given. … It’s so nerve-racking, because you don’t know if you’re going to get paid. And in the meantime, of course, you’re not getting paid, you have household bills.”
Elskus, who was working for Conte Lab at a University of Maine field station during the 2013 federal shutdown, said, “Last time, it was for two weeks and somehow we had a sense it would be ending. Now it seems to be up in the air. It’s an anxious time.”
Migratory Way, the access road to Conte Lab, is closed to traffic. The road, which is used by walkers, cyclists and joggers as well as bird-watchers and fishermen, is owned by First Light Power, but USGS has an easement and is responsible for maintenance. Elskus said it was closed for security purposes.
Principal investigator Alex Haro, who works on the kind of “fish-passage engineering” projects that are typically in hiatus at this time of year, anyway, because of seasonal fish behavior, said that impact is greater on the physiology and ecology experiments done by graduate students and interns. Those studies have been halted by the shutdown, because they also are denied access to the facility.
“Those projects, which are dependent on the lab being functional, are more seriously impacted than we are,” he said. “They have projects that are more at risk. I’d hazard a guess that probably being shut down for a week or two, that probably would not impact things too badly. But if it goes on more than two weeks, they’ll have some serious impacts.”
Typically, Haro said, “If we’re not running experiments, we all have work to do. We’re writing papers for publication, writing articles for publication or doing reports, or we’re trying to get funding, etcetera. Pretty much everything is in a holding pattern .”
The funding proposals and grant writing that fish lab workers would now be doing “is very critical at this stage, because all the funding we got came from the federal government when the first opened, including all project money. Now we’ve been level-funded so long, we don’t even meet our payroll base with federal funds. It’s especially important that we find money by contracting with other federal agencies or with companies that want to test something out.”
Haro said that although workers have been told to “hang in there,” because retroactive pay has historically been granted following government shutdowns, there’s uncertainty with this one.
“I’m OK for now,” he said. “My ability to weather this kind of thing is a lot better than a starting graduate student, who might be living paycheck to paycheck, or for some of our technicians. For them it’s probably a much more serious issue. But I have projects and things that need to get done. I’d like to get moving on them as soon as I can.”