COOS BAY — The case of disappearing salmon may turn into the case of disappearing disaster funds.

West Coast commercial trollers found out Wednesday that the Office of Management and Budget is proposing slashing almost half the salmon disaster money included in the Farm Bill.

OMB Director Jim Nussle said in a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., he’s requesting an additional $546 million for the fiscal year 2009 budget to cover increased costs of the 2010 census. To offset that cost — as well as increases in a couple other departments — Nussle’s proposing slashing $70 million of the $170 million targeted for the Northwest sport and commercial salmon industry.

Charleston troller Paul Merz, like other West Coast fishermen, has his boat docked. It hasn’t budged this year in an attempt to catch any Chinook. Most trollers in Oregon and California have been locked out of a season this year, as have sport fishermen seeking Chinook, due to low returns to the Sacramento and other coastal rivers.

Merz and other fishermen first got wind of the change Wednesday morning. He couldn’t believe it.

“This attempted raid on salmon disaster relief funds by the Bush administration is a slap in the face to West Coast Salmon fishermen, salmon-related businesses and their federal representatives,” Merz wrote in an e-mail.

 In his June 9 cover letter, Nussle classifies the salmon money as “lower-priority federal programs and excess funds.”

“After the reduction, $100 million would still be available for payments, which is sufficient given the estimated economic impact of recent fisheries disaster declarations for the area,” Nussle wrote.

That didn’t mollify fishermen in the least. In their minds, the government figures the census counts but fishermen don’t.

“I have no idea where that came from,” Oregon Salmon Commission Administrator Nancy Fitzpatrick said. “Hopefully we can make it go away. The industry needs that money. Taking $70 million away for whatever purpose is unacceptable.”

Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., and 13 other representatives criticized the Bush administration for not protecting river systems, fishing communities and coastal economies. So did Oregon Sens. Gordon Smith, a Republican, and Ron Wyden, a Democrat.

“Rest assured there will be a strong bipartisan effort to ensure that these cuts don’t go through,” Smith wrote in a statement.

In an effort to modernize its counting system, the Census Bureau planned to use handheld computers to conduct the 2010 census. One of the contractors, the Florida-based Harris Corporation, experienced cost over-runs during the process. The Census Bureau then decided to return to a paper-based census.

The cost to taxpayers, Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry D. Waxman, D-Calif., said in a statement, could be as high as $3 billion.

The OMB wants to find $546 million in the Farm Bill to take care of part of it. The OMB’s role in the Bush administration is to set funding priorities and assess competing funding demands among agencies.

In a personal letter, DeFazio was even more critical of OMB’s plan.

“It is outrageous that the president is trying to fix yet another one of its contract screw-ups with emergency funding for a true disaster along the Oregon Coast. The fishing community of Oregon is already suffering because of the flawed Bush policies in the Sacramento River basin,” he wrote. “They should not have to suffer again because the president has hired people in Florida who can’t count. We’ve been there before.”