Washington Lawmakers Hear From Ruckelshaus Center On WDFW, Commission Review

The universe moves in mysterious ways.

Overnight, it decided to disappear my long, boring-as-@#%& blog about this week’s work sessions in Olympia on the recent organizational review of WDFW and the Fish and Wildlife Commission and how state lawmakers say legislation around the agency’s future could be coming soon.

You would actually have hated me for inflicting it upon your eyeballs – there was also going to be a pop quiz – so rather than rewrite that terminally dull tome, we’re just going to do highlights and call it a day and move on with our lives.

WHAT’S GOING ON? The House and Senate‘s Agriculture and Natural Resources Committees heard from staffers at WSU’s and UW’s Ruckelshaus Center on their 76-page report looking at WDFW and the commission’s governance structure, mandate and more. Following several years of strife, engineered and otherwise, the report was mandated by an 11th hour budget proviso in 2023. Initially, it was to have been performed by the Evergreen State College, but in the end Ruckelshaus got the job.

CONFLICT! Senior facilitator Chris Page there said the center was caught by “surprise” by the proviso. He indicated Ruckelshaus’s modis operandi is to bring disparate parties together and provide a neutral space for them to work things out based around mutual interests. Representative Kristine Reeves (D-Federal Way), chair of House AGNR, tried to reframe his surprise as “a compliment that there are legislators who trust you with such important and critical conversations.”

OVERLOOKED PARTIES! Page said staffers quickly realized the proviso left out a major party in Washington’s fish and wildlife world – the tribes. So, among the 113 people from 103 entities they interviewed were representatives from 13 tribes or confederations of tribes and two tribal fisheries commissions.

THE NUT OF THE REPORT: Many interviewees feel the commission has become “dysfunctional” in recent years – I’ve detailed ad nauseam the governor’s appointees and how roiled things have become – and so the question is what to do about that – Option 1: Not a damn thing because: chaos; Option 2: Dissolve the commission’s authority and move WDFW into the Governor’s Office as a cabinet agency; or Option 3: Fix the commission, its abused appointment process, and all the other things that have gone off the rails. Currently, sportsmen favor Option 3, fearing the politicization of fish and wildlife management under the Guvnah’s thumb, while reformist groups like Washington Wildlife First want Option 2.

WHAT TO DO NEXT 1? Fishing around for a one-sentence synopsis about next steps, Senator Mike Chapman (D-Port Angeles), chair of the Senate AGNR Committee, asked the Ruckleshausers, “What should we do from here?” Replied Phyllis Shulman, another senior facilitator there, “I would say, one thing … I experienced in sitting through these interviews is the level of interest and passion from the people who we interviewed in this, and so I would say they’re asking you to do something. They’re bringing up things … that there are opportunities to make improvements, and I would say … not everybody’s going to agree on the same improvement, as you can see in … [the] three different options. There are going to be people who say make it a cabinet agency, there are going to be people who say keep it as a commission but do the hard work of changing.”  

WHAT TO DO NEXT 2? Asked by Chapman if lawmakers should continue to look at the report and make some changes, Shulman pointed to the cost of the report, $300,000, and, again, interviewees’ interest in making changes. “There’s a lot of confusion around how the tribes fit into the commission structure and how much the commission takes into account the tribes,” she added. “I think working with the tribes will be really important, and that would be one layer. And I’d say … if you’re interested in addressing the governance structure, particularly in maintaining the commission, then probably putting together some kind of … task force to spend a little bit of time together with important facilitators to help that because, as you know, you’re going to have a lot of conflicts and differences of opinion. But with the kinds of issues that were brought up, the appointment process and accountability and following protocols and all those kinds of things, those can be the categories they could be considering and seeing if they can find some common ground and a proposal back to you” or the legislature as a whole or the governor.

WHAT TO DO NEXT 3? Representative Reeves told fellow committee members on Tuesday she understood “that we may be seeing potential legislation resulting from this work session,” while Representative Joe Fitzgibbon (D-Seattle), the House Majority Leader, earlier this week told the Washington State Standard, “I don’t think that we’ve settled on a path. I don’t think it’s necessary that this be the year that we reform the governance structure of Fish and Wildlife, but I do think it is something our members are thinking about.” He said he expected to see a cabinet agency bill, but wasn’t sure it would pass. Early in 2022’s legislative session, he and Chapman cosponsored a bill to review or restructure the commission, come up with new WDFW governance structure options and review the mandate to provide opportunity and conserve critters.

And that’s just going to have to be all the time I spend belaboring this whole incredibly important but mind-numbingly dull state of play.