From an article in today's New York Times about the Bronx River:
In 2006, parks officials and environmental groups stocked the river with 201 alewife herring, and three years later some herring returned to spawn. To help herring climb upstream to better spawning pools, officials want to build three sets of aluminum fish ladders, each set costing up to $400,000.
$1.2 million for three aluminum herring ladders in the Bronx will probably strike a lot of people as an excessively costly government expenditure in the current political and economic environment.