Committee Day For Washington Fish And Wildlife Commission

It was committee day for the Washington Fish and Wildlife Commission, and members of the various subpanels talked and heard about the Conservation Policy, federal funding concerns, a potential new keeper sturgeon fishery on the Mid-Columbia, and proposed chronic wasting disease regulations, among other things.

Tomorrow, on day two of three of the commission’s monthly meeting, there will be discussions and public hearings on 2025 black bear and cougar hunting proposals that the commission is reserving for its own decisionmaking (the rest of the big game regs were delegated to Director Kelly Susewind to authorize), as well as other matters, but here’s what caught my ear as I worked on magazine stuff through the day Thursday:

CONSERVATION POLICY

“It’s not dead. We’re still interested in working on it. We think it’s still very important to do.”

So diagnosed John Lehmkuhl of Wenatchee, chair of the Big Tent Committee, about the controversial Conservation Policy that has been off boil the past 14 months.

He said there are ongoing discussions with tribes about conservation and the policy that was quietly rolled out in September 2021 and which noisily crashed into a brick wall as various tribes objected to it in January 2024.

As she had pushed for right before that very clarifying moment early last year, today Commissioner Melanie Rowland of Twisp wanted to know if there was a timeline for the commission to ultimately adopt the Conservation Policy and said she would “push pretty strongly” for just such a deadline. In the past, she and another commissioner have felt that there’s simply no more time for talking about it given their perception of climate change and human development’s impact on the state’s natural environment and resources and the responsibility to address that.

Lehmkuhl indicated that during tomorrow’s committee reports before the full commission he would raise the issue of the Conservation Policy and, essentially, the question of when the citizen panel hoped to accomplish it.

That would put it before Commission Chair Barbara Baker, one of the document’s architects, and who was not present at today’s meetings, which are being held at Tri-Cities’ Three Rivers Convention Center and broadcast on TVW.

FEDERAL FUNDING

With Washington state legislators next week expected to roll out their 2025-27 budget proposals in the face of a multi-billion-dollar deficit (a 38 percent fishing and hunting license fee increase and return of the $8.75 Columbia River endorsement are on the table) and mixed messages – to say the least – coming out of Washington, DC, Commissioner Jim Anderson of Buckley wanted to know about any potential impacts of lost federal funding for WDFW.

Deputy Director Amy Windrope told Anderson and the rest of the Big Tent Committee that the state as a whole has been tracking federal grants and moneys, whether that be for Washington fish and wildlife work or other matters, but that to her belief, none for WDFW had been shut off as of this morning.

She pointed to Congress’s recently passed Continuing Resolution to temporarily fund the national government, and added, “There’s some uncertainty about how that will play out between the federal agencies. But as of right now, we do not see a risk right now. We see risks, but not enacted now.”

She was backed up by WDFW budget guru Morgan Stinson.

“I think that that’s dead right,” he said. “We’re not out of the woods, but also those risks have not crystallized into exactly problems for us.”

Last Friday in Salem, in response to a similar concerns, ODFW Chief Operating Officer Ken Lofflink told his state’s commission that the agency had seen federal awards and contracts frozen and then unfrozen, awards removed from the federal payment system and then put back in, and messages from federal partners that funds would be frozen but that never actually happening, but that as of last week, “all of ODFW’s federal awards are active and available for drawdown, and everything is operating as business as usual, if you will.”

Commissioner Steven Parker of Yakima pointed out that if there wasn’t a loss of federal dollars, there was still likely to be a “loss of services” benefitting the state that federal agencies wouldn’t be able to supply due to staff cuts.

“That is also something that we’re tracking right now,” replied Windrope. “Where the services that we need from our federal partners are not being delivered, we’re also flagging that for our (Attorney General) and for our Governor’s Office.”

Committee Chair Lorna Smith of Port Townsend also worried about the federal government getting rid of the Endangered Species Act, passed by Congress more than 50 years ago, and in claiming that that’s “not beyond the realm of possibility,” she wondered if the state should be “beefing up” its protections for listed species.

NEW STURGEON RETENTION FISHERY IN THE OFFING

During an interesting presentation before the Fish Committee on the effect on dam building on Mid-Columbia River sturgeon populations – those from Priest Rapids up to Chief Joseph, in WDFW’s geographic lexicon – as well as hatchery augmentation efforts and monitoring and evaluation performed by various utilities and other entities, regional fisheries manager Chad Jackson spoke to potential season structure and rule frameworks for keeper fisheries in that stretch of the big river.

He was angling for the commission to delegate rulemaking authority to the director to create permanent seasons in the fishing regs pamphlet, and said they would be led off by one anticipated to start this year on Rocky Reach Reservoir, the Columbia between Orondo and up past Chelan Falls and Beebe Bridge.

“The monitoring and evaluation data there is telling us that recreational fishing will be beneficial towards focusing on some of those earlier (hatchery) release events and helping to equalize some of those families” of fish, Jackson stated.

Asked by Lehmkuhl how many sturgeon might be harvested by recreational anglers, Jackson said it depended on the pool, but for Rocky Reach, WDFW was initially looking in the high-300 to 400-fish range.

“You probably don’t want to sell your gear,” Anderson joked to Lehmkuhl.

“I already sold my boat last year,” laughed Lehmkuhl.

Daily limit would be one, two for the season.

Tomorrow, the commission will decide whether to have Director Susewind proceed with rulemaking on Mid-Columbia sturgeon seasons.

CHRONIC WASTING DISEASE

Speaking before the Wildlife Committee, Game Division Manager Anis Aoude talked about permanent rules WDFW is proposing to reduce the prevalence of “the most important disease threatening North American” deer, elk and moose – CWD.

The agency is looking to ban both the baiting and feeding of the cervid species statewide because the activities concentrate critters, making it more likely for an infected animal to transmit the degenerative, always-fatal disease to others via snot, pee, poop and other bodily fluids.

WDFW also wants to make it illegal to hunt using scents derived from cervid pee or glands because they could contain the malformed prions that cause CWD.

And all hunters who harvest a deer, elk or moose or salvage deer and elk in Region 1 – where several whitetails last year were confirmed to have CWD – would be required to have their animal sampled.

Written into the proposal is language that would automatically add other WDFW regions to testing requirements should CWD turn up beyond far Eastern Washington and its 100-series units, Aoude said.

“This is part of the Department’s effort to take all reasonable and feasible actions to limit the impacts of this disease. In this case, requiring mandatory sample submission will facilitate better understanding of disease distribution and prevalence to ultimately inform management,” WDFW spokeswoman Jennifer Sepulveda told me a couple months ago.

Today, Aoude really stressed the importance of tamping down CWD prevalence – that is, keeping the percentage of a herd infected by the disease low.

“It’s always fatal, there’s no vaccine, it can have a population-level effect when prevalence gets above a certain level. So I think that’s an important thing to key into. We can have the disease on the landscape, but if the prevalence remains low, it likely will not have a population-level effect. So that’s what a lot of our rule (proposals) are talking about, first preventing it, and then when we do get it, keeping prevalence low. So keep those two things in mind because they’re very important. Sometimes they’re confused with one another, (but) spread is different than keeping prevalence low,” he said.

The spread of CWD to Washington has been inexorable and inevitable since its 1960s discovery in a captive Colorado deer. In Wyoming, heavily infected mule deer herds have seen 21 percent annual population declines, 10 percent in whitetails.

Meanwhile, hunters are getting on board with required testing.

In 2023, when testing was just voluntary in Game Management Units 124, 127 and 130, Mount Spokane, Mica Peak and Cheney, only 39 animals were sampled. But after the discovery of CWD in a dead whitetail on the north side of Spokane before 2024’s season and testing became mandatory, 797 kills were sampled, WDFW reported today.

The idea is that testing “enables early detection and effective surveillance,” and successfully managing the disease “is more likely when prevalence is low and environmental contamination by prions is minimal,” per today’s presentation.

With a statewide feeding ban being proposed, Committee Chair Smith asked whether WDFW also planned to shut down its Central Washington elk feedlots. Aoude said it was a “good question” as well as a “complicated issue” that is being evaluated.

For decades stretching back to the early 1940s and acquisition of the wildlife areas there, the feedlots have kept the elk herds out of local aglands.

“If we were to cease to feed there, those elk will be in the fields,” Aoude said. “Now, we could reduce the population to a level there where they would not need feeding … I do agree eventually we will likely need to stop feeding those elk, but we have to figure out how we get there first.”

It would take a rewrite of the Yakima herd management plan, for starters, as well as frank discussions with hunters and the public about having fewer elk on the landscape “and see how that is received,” Aoude said.

Right now, there are about 10,000 elk in the herd and about half of them are fed at five feedlots in the area, with the other half foraging on their own in the hills.

On the one hand, reducing the herd so as to not feed and thus congregate animals represents a potential short-term hunting boon. On the other, one can imagine anti-wolf folks using any managed reduction to make wild claims that wolves actually ate ’em all.

In response to a statement from Rowland, who said the feedlots could be looked at individually for alternatives to feeding, Aoude pointed to a risk analysis looking at factors such as probability of disease, agricultural damage and population decline, and balancing those.

“I do want to say one thing,” Aoude added. “Prevalence in elk tends to be lower than prevalence in deer, and so we have that going for us. Although deer sometimes do come into those feed(lots), they’re not really congregating as much as elk there.”

He also said WDFW was working on communications around a potential feeding ban, with the first few years focused on education instead of “putting the hammer down on folks.”

“People love to feed wildlife and, you know, in most instances they think they’re doing a good thing, although we know the evidence often is contrary to that. But we don’t want to make bad people out of somebody who thinks they’re doing a good (thing),” he said.

If approved by WDFW, the rules will go into effect this year.