2 Bills In Olympia Would Tweak Fish And Wildlife Commission Appointment Process

Two bills that would tweak the nomination process for Washington Fish and Wildlife Commission appointments have dropped this week, with one creating a committee of stakeholder groups to make recommendations to the governor and the other tasking counties with filling half a dozen seats.

Both offer an alternative to another bill introduced this session that would kill the WDFW oversight panel’s authority and move the state agency into the governor’s cabinet. Essentially, they represent the sportsmen-preferred “option 3” from the Ruckelshaus Center report on problems and potential solutions around commission “dysfunction” seen in recent years. They would daylight a process that became rather nebulous under former Governor Jay Inslee.

House Bill 1930 from Representative Tom Dent (R-Moses Lake), ranking minority member of the House Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee, would task county commissions with naming six of the nine members of the WDFW oversight panel and leave the other three up to the governor and the senate to choose.

The six commissioners from the counties would correspond to WDFW’s half-dozen regions, so representatives from, say, Ferry, Stevens, Pend Oreille, Lincoln, Spokane, Whitman, Asotin, Garfield, Columbia and Walla Walla Counties would each create a pool of applicants and then collectively appoint one person from that pool to the commission to “represent their region.”

The governor’s and senate’s three appointees would be at-large, with at least one from each side of the Cascades. Overall, no more than two commissioners could be from the same WDFW region.

Under Dent’s bill, appointees would be required to have held a fishing or hunting license in three of the past five years, and the commission would need to meet in-person in all six of WDFW’s regions “to represent different interests and constructively communicate and address conflicts,” subject to funding availability to do so.

HB 1930 is also cosponsored by Representative Ed Orcutt (R-Kalama) and over the weekend it drew interest on the Hunting-Washington forum.

Meanwhile, the other bill, Senate Bill 5728, dropped today and comes from Senator Keith Wagoner (R-Sedro-Woolley), and it has support from a range of hunting, fishing and conservation groups.

It would create a single nominating committee that would come up with recommended commissioners for the governor to choose from. The governor could only make appointments off their list.

The nominating committee would be pretty broad. It would consist of 14 different members representing big game and small game hunting organizations; a recreational fishing organization; fishing guides or charters; hunting guides; commercial fishing or aquaculture industries; the sport fishing industry; environmental organization focused on land and water conservation or management; agricultural world; outdoor recreation business community; county or city governments; law enforcement; and federally recognized tribes from either side of the Cascades.

The committee would be appointed by the governor and any potential commissioner they forwarded to the state’s chief executive for the Fish and Wildlife Commission would need a two-thirds majority stamp of approval from them. If the governor dilly-dallied about filling a commission vacancy, the committee could name a replacement after 90 days.

Commissioners would also need to have purchased a fishing or hunting license in two of the past five years, except if they’re members of federally recognized tribes, and would need to support recreational hunting and fishing as the preferred management of sustainable critters, support science-based management of said populations and “follow the mandate of the department and the commission,” along with various other qualifications.

SB 5728 would keep the commission representation structure as is, i.e., three from each side of the Cascades, and three at large, but no two members from the same county.

The bill has support from the Washington State Guides Association, Teddy Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, Northeast Washington Wildlife Group, Inland Northwest Wildlife Council, HOWL for Wildlife, Ducks Unlimited, and Association of Northwest Steelheaders, among other organizations. Full disclosure: I offered suggestions to it as well.

“The sportsmen community decided to write our own bill because we felt like the current appointment system was the right one, but it needs more checks and balances to produce better and more qualified candidates for the Fish and Wildlife Commission,” said DU’s Matt Little, who has been shepherding the bill into Olympia.

Right now, neither Republicans’ bill is scheduled for a hearing in either the House or Senate natural resources committees. But they represent an alternative to HB 1685 from Representative Larry Springer (D-Kirkland), which would do away with the commission’s oversight authority and tuck WDFW under the governor’s thumb. That idea is supported by Washington Wildlife First.

Commission appointments in recent years have become far more charged with concerted efforts by WWF and others to “reform” state fish and wildlife management. Sportsmen felt they hadn’t been consulted back in January 2021 when Lorna Smith and former commissioner Fred Koontz were named to the commission, nor in January 2022 when Melanie Rowland, Tim Ragen and John Lehmkuhl were added, violations of RCW 77.04.040, which calls for “representation recommended by organized groups representing sportfishers, commercial fishers, hunters, private landowners, and environmentalists.”

How far any of these bills progress remains to be seen, but these latest two show that there is grassroots support for keeping the WDFW-Commission structure as is but with improvements in who can serve on the panel and creating a more transparent, consensus process in how they are appointed.