BY ANDY WALGAMOTT, NORTHWEST SPORTSMAN MAGAZINE
To put it into salmon fishing terms, a pair of Washington Fish and Wildlife Commission members have been left marked by the net of an investigation into their poor responsiveness to public records requests, meetings with litigious groups and actions towards WDFW staffers, but for now they swim free, albeit it with terse orders to behave for the remaining months of their terms.
The lack of immediate penalties for Lorna Smith of Port Townsend and Melanie Rowland of Twisp will aggravate fishing and hunting interests and government transparency sticklers, and it left one longtime observer of Washington fish and wildlife issues feeling that Governor Bob Ferguson had gone “soft” on the duo.
Said another, Ferguson “chose politics over the law when it comes to holding these commissioners accountable. Collusion, corruption and perjury are now the accepted standards for the Washington Fish and Wildlife Commission.”
The latter were the words of Brian Lynn, the Spokane-based vice president of marketing and communications for the Sportsmen’s Alliance – the organization which helped spur the investigation via public records requests and a lawsuit – as reported by the Washington State Standard, which this afternoon first published the Democratic governor’s “warning” letters to both Smith and Rowland.
Still, given what’s now in their personnel files, it’s hard to see how Ferguson will ever reappoint Smith or Rowland – two of the most disruptive appointees to the citizen panel overseeing WDFW policies and its director in quite some time – when their time comes full in exactly 120 days, 3 hours and 31 minutes.
But who’s counting? 🙂
It’s hard to summarize how we got to today, but it’s safe to say that it’s a road that goes through 2022 and 2023’s cancelling of the limited-entry spring black bear hunt by the commission and what public records requests around that episode (and others) did and didn’t immediately turn up.
Along the way, last year there was the “Knoll Memo” from a WDFW legal liaison who reviewed evidence against Smith, Rowland and others and issued what might be considered a police affidavit, and out of that came the Transformative Workplace Investigation report, which was released a month ago and partially corroborated the memo’s allegations.
In his “confidential” letter to Smith, Franklin Plaistowe, Ferguson’s chief operations officer, wrote that there were “instances where you fell short of meeting expectations related to the Public Records Act and, in some instances, the Open Public Meetings Act.”
That included taking around nine months to respond to a records requests from a seven-day period and stating that Smith hadn’t searched a personal device for those but that responsive records were in fact on the device; and 18 months for a broader request and which records were only produced for after a lawsuit was filed, which Plaistowe wrote was “concerning.”
As for Smith’s many meetings with groups litigiously antagonistic towards WDFW and fishing and hunting, Plaistowe wrote that while the TWI report didn’t find evidence of collusion, it “did conclude that the meetings undermined the perception of impartiality and transparency.”
In his similarly “confidential” letter to Rowland, Plaistowe noted similar slow responsiveness to records requests, and furthermore stated that she’d clicked a form button attesting under penalty of perjury she had no records on personal devices but “did in fact send and receive text messages on a personal device that were responsive to the request.” He also pointed out that TWI found, by Rowland’s own admission, she would not respond to one request unless she was “forced to.”
Rowland also participated in meetings with outside groups that, while not to the level of collusion, also “undermined the perception of impartiality and transparency,” Plaistowe wrote.
And he also referenced Rowland’s ugly June 2022 confrontation with WDFW Wolf Policy Lead Julia Smith that left Smith feeling attacked and was reported by the TWI investigator as “intense and prosecutorial in style.” Rowland’s a former federal ESA lawyer, and she ultimately “apologized” to Smith afterwards, the governor’s COO noted.
In a lengthy “Expectations of you going forward” section in the letters to both Smith and Rowland, Plaistowe wrote that commissioners are “expected to maintain the highest standards of transparency, professionalism, and compliance with the law,” and he stated that for the remainder of their terms, the Governor’s Office expects them to:
• Promptly and comprehensively comply with both the Public Records Act and Open Public Meetings Act;
• Strictly observe conflict of interest rules, including “recusing yourself from matters of personal or organizational relationships that can even create and appearance of a conflict of interest”;
• Engage in a professional matter with WDFW staffers and fellow commissioners;
• And refrain from threatening retaliation or engaging in retaliatory behavior against those who participated in TWI’s investigation.
It’s unclear if that last one would include Smith’s federal civil rights lawsuit against WDFW Director Kelly Susewind and Deputy Director Amy Windrope, for which court filings on a motion to dismiss are due this month, but failing to do so, Plaistowe wrote, will result in their being yanked off the commission before the end of their term, which comes December 31.
That was not the outcome Sportsmen’s Alliance had hoped for. They had asked Governor Ferguson to remove Smith and Rowland, as well as two other commissioners. The Eastern Washington Council of Governments, comprised of 15 Eastside counties, also recently asked for Smith and Rowland’s removal.
They may only have to wait through the end of this fall’s salmon spawning runs for that to happen.
