WA Fish-Hunt Fee Increase Bill Subject Of Thursday Legislative Hearing

Washington state lawmakers will hold a public hearing Thursday afternoon on a bill that would increase most hunting and fishing license fees by 38 percent.

Substitute Senate Bill 5583 will be before the House Appropriations Committee towards the end of a jam-packed session that begins at 1:30 p.m. tomorrow and will be televised live on TVW, and then is scheduled for possible action Saturday morning by the committee.

The bill very narrowly passed out of the Senate last week on a 25-24 vote that saw five Democrats join all Republicans in opposing it. Its revenue assumptions are baked into the upper chamber’s proposed operating budget, and if passed in the House and signed by Governor Bob Ferguson, the increases would go into effect July 1, 2025.

Speaking in favor of his own bill last week, Senator Marko Liias (D-Edmonds) argued on the floor of the Senate that it makes an “inflationary adjustment” to keep up with costs that have risen since the last fee hike in 2011.

In a brief video, Senator Keith Wagoner (R-Sedro-Woolley) said between SSB 5883 and a proposed Discover Pass price increase, the majority party was “taxing good clean fun and enjoying the outdoors.”

“It used to be, you bought a license whether you were gonna hunt or fish or not. But in today’s environment, nobody can afford to do this. This hurts people at the bottom of the economic spectrum, and it hurts all Washingtonians in general,” Wagoner said.

While the fee increase was not requested by WDFW as part of its annual wish list to state lawmakers, the agency has moved from being neutral on the bill in late February to supportive.

“We are signed in pro because it’s now incorporated in the Senate budget and a fee bill is also assumed in the House budget,” stated spokeswoman Sam Montgomery late this afternoon. “This indicates that some of the funding in the Department’s budget is dependent on the fee increases to offset part of the general state fund cuts.”

WDFW’s CFO and legislative liaison are both signed up to testify tomorrow.

As of 5:22 p.m. Wednesday, 625 out of 629 people who have signed in on the bill oppose it. Nearly all of those people signed in as individuals; notably, no traditional conservation organizations have signed in one way or the other.

SSB 5583 would raise $19.3 million every two years, according to fiscal note attached to the fee bill, but would probably also lead to an 11 percent dropoff in license sales and an estimated $350,000 decline in disbursements from the partially license-tied federal Pittman-Robertson and Dingell-Johnson Act disbursements.

According to a WDFW staff memo out last week, the revenue raised by a fee hike would essentially just go toward replacing a like amount of General Fund dollars that legislators are looking to suck out of the agency’s budget.

The bill would also allow the Fish and Wildlife Commission to create license surcharges “to fund compensation, central service and other operating costs approved by the Legislature,” per a legislative staff report. Senator Shelly Short (R-Addy) offered an amendment to strip that provision out of the bill, but it failed.

Senior hunters would actually see the cost of their hunting licenses decrease by 66 percent, matching discounts available for fishing licenses.