Washington Commission Meeting Observations

[Silver Hilton]

I was one of the crowd at the commission meeting today. Kudos to all who showed up, we had a pretty good turnout.

The Washington Commission voted for the most favorable option presented to them for sports fihers today. They directed Jeff Koenings to work towards a 60/40 split of the allowable impact on wild salmon, with the 60% of the impact going to the sportsfishers. This is pretty good, to my way of thinking, given the current situation. The likelihood is that we will be able to fish through April without any closures.

The Commission added language to the instruction that the Department have management flexibility to move 5% of the allowable impact between the user groups if conditions warranted. For example, if the Columbia blows mud so that the sporties can't access all their quota, the department is to have the flexibility to reallocate that amount to the commercials so it doesn't get wasted. I am leery of that instruction, as criteria were not given to the department as to what a reasonable reason for making this change would be. It is likely that any judgement would only go from the sporties to the commercials.

Of the people offering testimony, several individuals were notable. I am sorry for my probable misspellings of people's names.

Bob Schlect, of Bob's Sporting Goods (Longview), Rich Cado, of Far West Sports in Fife, Randy Ducet, of Three Rivers Marine, and Dan Grogan, of Fishermans Marine Supply all took time out to come up and speak for the fishery. Terry Turner and Jim Tuggle of the Washington Council of Trout Unlimited were right there to demand less impact on the steelhead. Mike Gilchrist was eloquent, as was Pete Morris (from Ifish). Several individuals got up and made themselves heard, and more sportsmen were in the crowd. All in all, my feeling was that a good showing was made by the sportsfishing team.

There were a couple of worrisome items. The WDFW staff is asking that allowable impact on wild winter steelhead be raised to a minimum of 5%, with authority to allow up to 7% impact. This is troublesome to many observers. No hard rationale was presented as to why this should be tolerable, and many of the sports representatives protested vociferously. For this to happen, I believe NMFS has to be consulted and to agree. I'm not precisely sure of the process.

I found the meeting to be pretty informative, and will be attending more in the future.

Perhaps others who were there can add some thoughts - I'm sure I missed a lot.

Thanks for your report SH and thanks to all who were able to make it! I was not able to make it up to Olympia.
The wild steelhead mortality allowance is intolerable and you can bet that we will be lucky to keep it even that low.
I am hoping that groups like ANWS,TU, Oregon Trout and Native Fish Society will be doing something to fight this shortshighted decision.
Thanks go to Pete for his hard work on this allocation situation.

[Pete]

SH, Thanks for the very nice summary of the hearing today. I think we did as well as can be expected. Certainly, there are some things that still need to happen before this process is finished. Letters and phone calls to the Directors can help with the following issues: </font><ul type="square">[*]<font size="2" face="verdana,arial,helvetica">The "shape" of the season needs to be decided.</font>[*]<font size="2" face="verdana,arial,helvetica">The final allocation needs to be adopted by the Columbia River Compact on February 5th in Oregon City.</font>[*]<font size="2" face="verdana,arial,helvetica">We still don't have assurance of a full, 7 day a week season through the month of April.</font>[*]<font size="2" face="verdana,arial,helvetica">We still don't have assurance that the river above I-205 won't be closed.</font>[*]<font size="2" face="verdana,arial,helvetica">We still have no assurance that commercial over-impact won't hurt our season.</font>[/list]<font size="2" face="verdana,arial,helvetica">
Thanks to those who wrote, called or testified.

[TheRogue]

I stand corrected on the sportie industry representatives not being there! That is excellent news, and probably helped push the decision to favor the sporties more....as well as the always great testimony by Pete! [img]graemlins/applause.gif[/img] [img]graemlins/applause.gif[/img]

TR

[Pete]

Shucks, I just said I want to be able to plan ahead to invite out of town relatives to fish sometime in April without the possibility of the fishery being shut down unexpectedly and messing up our plans like they were the last couple years. There were others that did some heavy lifting who really deserve recognition ... NSIA did a very nice job organizing their testimony and had retail competitors sharing the microphone in support of sport fishers. There was a lot of work done in the state capital during the week that made testimony effective yesterday. The real thanks go to a commission that was willing to listen to the public and reserve their decision until they heard and understood enough to be thoughtful in their direction to staff.

[Straydog]

Again, thanks to Pete and ALL that made the time to make a difference. [img]graemlins/applause.gif[/img]

Thanks to you as well, TR. You are a class act! (not suprising considering you have Rogue blood in your veins! :smile: )

[Silver Hilton]

Pete, what was your take on the Steelhead impact increase request from the staff (Tweit and LaFleur)? I got the impression

a) that it was not driven by much of anything other than a desire to enable commerical harvest of salmon,

b) that they didn't have any particular research to support the reasonableness of the request, and

c) that NOAA/NMFS had to be consulted and approve of the change.

Some of the Washington Commission members, notably Bob Tuck and Lisa Pelly, seemed to be very suspicous of this request and initially tried to pass a motion denying the request.

[slabhunter]

SH, The 5% management flexibility worries me. If Director Koenings makes the choice, I believe he said there would have to be a d@rn good reason for a deviation from the Commission guideline of 60/40. However, if the choice is made by staff, I believe we will have the 55/45, and many more killed wild steelhead.

[ 01-18-2004, 03:42 PM: Message edited by: slabhunter ]

[Pete]

SH, I think the steelhead issue will be one to watch. I think it's got political legs.

As for the decision of the Compact, based on Commission direction, MUST be 60/40 sport with a possible 5% in-season adjustment for compelling reasons. The transcript of the meeting isn't available yet to provide the exact final wording. I don't think the Wa Comm wanted to give up much control.

[Full Freezer]

I thought I heard Bill Tweit say that the 2% number used for wild steelhead was an "arbitrary" number they used 2 years ago not based on anything scientific but it was just "thrown out there". He had said he thought the 5% with a maximum of 7% was "closer" to what he thought as a "real" number.

The arguments made by the commercial fleet were:

Wahkiakum & Pacific counties do not benefit from recreational fishermen as they travel down or up the I-5 corridor to fish for springers. Those counties get more $$ from the commercial aspect because they live there & spend their dollars in the community.

Recreational fishermen do not know or recognize all the steps or money spent taken to improve wild fish survival. One gentleman invited us to go fishing with him to see how it is done.

The recreational fishermen are able to fish tributaries while they are excluded from much of the terminal areas. Therefore, we get much more opportunity and are able to harvest more.

One man said the commission could not decide in favor of people that live in large metropolitan communities that do not directly benefit economicaly over people living in those communities who actually derive their livelyhood from commercial harvest.

Another arguement was that the commercial fleet represented the vast majority of people (consumers) who enjoy the high table quality springer who do not fish themselves. They represent ALL people other than those who fish recreationally.

The last one was that regardless of how the commission voted, the recreational harvest would always be larger than commercialy caught fish.

Are there any other view points I missed??

During the public testimony, I sat directly behind the group of Commercials in the front row, and to my astonishment, one of them was busy clipping his fingernails!!! :shocked: There were nice little snip! snip! Snip! & discarded slivers flying all over the carpet. Yuck!

Anyone going to the Oregon City meeting?????????????????????????????

[Full Freezer]

Silver Hilton? Pete? Any thing I missed?

[Pete]

I think a point missed by the entire commission is that the Select Area Fisheries (terminal fisheries) were developed with funds provided by the BPA to reduce the impact of netting in the main stem Columbia. Last year the commercials took more than 10,000 fish from the Select Area Fisheries which arguably should be considered in the total fish taken by the commercials. These fish are Willamette stock fish that would be released from federal hatcheries for all to pursue.

We still need to hear what the seasons will be and what the final decision of the Compact is.

Curiously, the ODFW Commission recommended approval of the "no fish out of the water" rule. It wasn't presented to the Washington Commission, so I'm curious to see what will happen with that.

[Full Freezer]

Would be kinda nice to see the "no fish out of the water" rule be applied to the commercials! Wouldn't that be slick!

[Point-of-Sale Clerk]

No fish out of the water rule for sporties may reduce our current impact and increase the gap between us and the commercials. The less gap, the less pressure to give more allocation to us and less to the commercials