BY ANDY WALGAMOTT, NORTHWEST SPORTSMAN MAGAZINE
WDFW’s budget just took a $10 million hit coming out of the recently concluded Washington state legislative session, with big reductions to fishery monitoring, biodiversity and lands maintenance, while plans to fill nearly a dozen vacant game warden positions were also handcuffed.
That’s according to Director Kelly Susewind, who this morning told his bosses at the Fish and Wildlife Commission, “The bottom line is bad for us, frankly.”
These new cuts pile on top of reductions of around $19 million $3 million passed last year.
Susewind said WDFW worked in the halls of power to try and “correct” things with the budget but wasn’t able to make much progress.
The 2026 supplemental operating budget, as well as the supplemental capital budget, still need to be signed by Governor Bob Ferguson, who could also veto elements should he so choose.
But it could have been worse for WDFW.
House Democrats’ initial operating proposal included $1.5 million in cuts to critical fishery monitoring, but the final conference budget adopted Senate Democrats’ $700,000 fin-clipping of that particular budget element. As North Cascades steelheaders learned bitterly earlier this year, when there isn’t money for monitoring impacts to an ESA-listed stock, there just ain’t a season.
Lawmakers also tempered how much was cut for lands maintenance by several hundred thousand dollars, and a proposed $2 million cut to the biodiversity program was only halved in the end.
In the coming weeks, the impact to WDFW will become more clear. Still, it all has staffers, commissioners and a budget advisory panel looking around for other funding options for the agency, with some enviously eyeing a recently passed Oregon’s lodging tax increase that will be dedicated to Beaver State fish and wildlife.
And it is also a sign for Susewind that he, his employees and the state’s fish, wildlife and wildlands need to recruit better support from inside the state Capitol Building.
“Our old core at the legislature who we could always count on to be champions and at least get our issues in front of the right folks at the legislature are either not there or they’ve taken on new roles and just aren’t available,” he told the commission, which is meeting this week in Walla Walla.
Susewind said that it was on him to work to get a better outcome in next year’s long session of the legislature, including saving “one-time” funding set to expire. During yesterday’s Big Tent Committee meeting, he told commissioners that he will be tasking staffers with identifying a legislative “champion” for WDFW.
THE $10 MILLION IN CUTS COME FROM various programs and parts of WDFW’s budget, and the largest single hit is $1.9 million from the Wildlife Program, some 10 percent of the budget for the division. Documents say that could impact wildlife population monitoring, lands management and other activities.
Another $1.5 million was cut from Business Services – think HR, IT, license sales, etc. – $1 million from Administration and $1 million from biodiversity work.
One million dollars was also pruned from the Fish Program, as was $700,000 from fishery monitoring.
That latter one could draw alarm from anglers, as similar cuts last year kiboshed the Skagit-Sauk catch-and-release winter steelhead fishery this season because there was no money to perform creel samples and patrol the rivers, as required by a federal permit to open fishing there. However, that particular fishery was funded through the “Quicksilver Portfolio,” and in this case Susewind indicated that the specific budget language provides more flexibility.
Another $580,000 was weeded out of WDFW’s lands maintenance budget, which comes on top of an ongoing $1.2 million pruning that began last year, “a big chunk” that frustrated Susewind. He said the agency had been working to increase funding to keep state wildlife areas and water access sites in good shape and to be “better neighbors” with adjacent landowners.
WDFW has also focused on building the number of game wardens it fields across the state, and for this session they piggybacked on Ferguson’s stated priority to increase local law enforcement. But lawmakers weren’t willing to fulfill WDFW’s $3.3 million request to boost officer numbers; they signed off on only $622,000 of that.
That means 11 currently vacant positions will remain unfilled, and while in the end that might not seem like that big of a deal, during today’s commission meeting, Region 1 Director Mike Kuttel shared that WDFW’s Ferry County position is vacant – the county is one of the state’s better for hunting and it’s home to a destination fishery – but with this budget, that position could be going away, keeping Northeast Washington’s five officers and one sergeant stretched thin for the foreseeable future.
“And that’s a real potential consequence of the budget situation,” Kuttel said.
WDFW has pointed out that even as Washington’s population has grown 60 percent in the last three decades and the job that its officers are expected to do has also increased, the capacity to handle all that has lagged far behind.
“This will more than set us back to below where we were 30 years ago,” said Susewind.
LEGISLATORS WEREN’T NECESSARILY BEING SPITEFUL towards WDFW this session. Dealing with yet another massive budget shortfall is just a situation that’s unlikely to work out positively for natural resource agencies, especially when things like the millionaires tax swallows lawmakers’ time at the end of the session.
But the cuts had commissioners casting around for stopgaps late this week.
Commissioner Lorna Smith of the Port Townsend area said it was ironic to learn about WDFW’s reductions when the Oregon legislature’s 1.25 percent state lodging tax increase is expected to raise $30 million a year for wildlife habitat and recovery efforts, poaching prevention, wolf depredation compensation, wildlife corridors and combatting invasive species.
Smith asked, what is Washington doing wrong and Oregon doing right, and were there some lessons to be learned?
Susewind pointed out that it was just a few years ago where the situation was reversed: Washington was the envy of fellow states after the legislature pumped $23 million from the General Fund into WDFW’s biodiversity work.
He said when times are good, it’s just easier to fund fish and wildlife work, but in tougher budget climates, depending on the General Fund could leave an agency “vulnerable” to cuts.
Susewind said that WDFW has looked at funding sources like the Oregon lodging tax hike, as well as an “REI tax” – a reference to 2019’s House Bill 2122, which retailers and a trail org stomped on like hikers gone wild in a fragile alpine meadow – and Missouri’s 1 percent sales tax reserved for natural resource departments.
During Thursday’s Big Tent Committee meeting, Commissioner Barbara Baker of Olympia rued not taking the lodging tax approach for her coveted biodiversity funding package. She said that if Oregon Governor Tina Kotek signs that bill, it would mean “the people who write the budget won’t have the opportunity to dial that up or down.”
Maybe not, but it’s also dependent upon people staying in hotels, B&Bs, campgrounds and whatnot, and that’s dependent upon the economy.
As for sportsmen, there’s something of an illusion about WDFW’s recent budget situation. Yes, last year state lawmakers increased fishing and hunting license fees by a whopping 38 percent (and granted the commission authority to increase fees via surcharge for certain other operating costs by November 1 of odd-numbered years.). But at the very same time, they withdrew an equal amount of General Fund dollars from the agency’s budget, meaning in the end it was a wash and WDFW isn’t sitting on a big pile of new cash.
And because our license dollars can only be used for managing fish and wildlife – “as it should be,” Susewind noted today – given the budget situation, natural resources just weren’t a legislative priority for General Fund dollars, leading to the cuts.
THERE WAS A RELATIVELY LOW NUMBER of fish- and wildlife-related bills introduced this short session. After the Olympia Outsider™ detailed 16 bills of note, he was able to get in a whole bunch of much needed doomscrolling time because there weren’t a lot of hearings to follow.
A very modest bill that would have directed WDFW and DNR to work together to implement wildlife corridor planning with state road work got caught in the headlights in the House. A bill simply to request Congress to amend the Marine Mammal Protection Act to allow pinniped removals in Puget Sound was also trapped in the lower chamber. And the House is where a bill to phase out the sale of tires with a preservative that ultimately kills coho also swam off to die.
And those were the most active ones. Wolf and hatchery bills received courtesy public hearings, and that was all she wrote for them.
Susewind did report today that while two bills related to the Bob Oke pheasant farm – which is polluting groundwater in the Chehalis area – didn’t pass, WDFW received a directive known as a budget proviso to begin to look for alternative sites to raise ringnecks and remediate the pollution at the farm from too much bird poop over the decades.
Two troubling provisos from 2025’s session were also pointedly brought back up in the budgets by lawmakers.
One, which is “pretty concerning” to Susewind, directs WDFW to begin the process of selling a Columbia River water access site to the Port of Woodland. He said it would be “impossible” to replace the access, which is officially known as Woodland Bar but also called Woodland Bottoms and features a rough boat ramp and shoreline for plunking.
The port has plans for the site to become a concrete production and loading facility and has sued WDFW towards that end. Susewind said the port believes the original deed says WDFW must sell the land to it when it wants to develop the site.
Agency attorney Joe Panesko characterized the proviso as an attempt to shortcut state statutes regarding the disposal of state land. Susewind said that WDFW always wants to be a willing partner, but without a “viable replacement” site in this case, the agency is “not willing to forego that.”
The other proviso he alerted the commission to was being directed to prepare an appraisal for the Point Whitney tidelands ahead of selling it to the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe. In this case, Susewind said the agency is working with the tribe, but the question in his mind is, how can public access and opportunities there be preserved? Hood Canal is where this particular issue is especially touchy.
Lawmakers did provide WDFW with $350,000 to complete a fisheries analysis for the Lower Snake River Recreation Study, which the state is completing after the Trump Administration unilaterally pulled out of the Resilient Columbia Basin Agreement.
The proviso cheered Liz Hamilton, policy director for the Northwest Sportfishing Industry Association.
“If Congress moves to restore the river and rebuild Snake River fish stocks, it must fully account for the replacement of services currently provided by the four lower Snake River dams, including energy, irrigation, transportation, and recreation,” she said. “This study of river restoration presents a rare opportunity to document the substantial economic gains of revitalized fisheries extending from Marine Area 1 into Idaho – benefits that would flow directly to rural and river‑dependent communities.”
In the end, the only fish- and wildlife-related bill that passed the legislature and was signed by the governor this session was HB 2554, which repeals a post-Boldt Decision voter initiative that would have, in part, overridden tribal fishing rights. It was considered “unconstitutional” by WDFW and its predecessor from the get-go and never applied, and now will be scrubbed from state statute.
For Washington Fish and Wildlife Commission Chair Jim Anderson of Buckley, passage of the bill was a “full-circle moment.” Harkening back to the mid-1980s and the start of his career there, he said his first meeting at the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission – where he went on to be the executive director – was about “how is this going to play out?”
Fast forward four decades, and the question today is, how will the 2026 supplemental operating and capital budgets play out for WDFW? That is TBD.
In an all-staff email this afternoon, WDFW Chief Financial Officer Morgan Stinson said that the executive team “recognizes this budget contains impactful reductions and is difficult news” and would be hosting a budget-focused virtual “coffee chat” with staffers next Tuesday.
He added that anyone who needed more support should check in with the state Employee Assistance Program.
Correction: Subsequent to this blog being published, WDFW staffers said 2025 budget cuts actually amounted to $19 million, not $3 million, as originally reported. The $3 million figure came from Friday’s Fish and Wildlife Commission briefing on budget outcomes.
