Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife

Yep.

Senator, yeah, w- we are all too familiar with maybe WDFW's unwillingness to change at times.

But to, to kind of continue on this discussion regarding funding and, and hatchery production, you, you're probably familiar with that, um, or funding reductions that they've decided to implement that would reduce the Columbia River hatchery production.

Um, how would you oppose, uh, production cuts, and how would you hold Bonneville accountable for meeting its, uh, fish mitigation responsibilities?

They're really wreaking havoc with the trout fishery here.

The, uh, Washington Fish and Wildlife, in conjunction with, uh, with Canada, the ri- uh, the, uh, BC Hydro in Canada-

Mm-hmm

... decided that we didn't have enough sturgeon up here, which we did, that we had, you know, the right number for the truncated system.

They do.

It doesn't matter if it's something that makes so much sense, much like Senator Jeff Wilson out of Washington here, Longview area, tried to introduce a bill last year to generate monies to assist WDFW with, with the sea lion population control.

Look, Washington has the green light from NOAA, exterminate 2,500 sea lions in the Columbia River in tributaries over the next five years.

They basically got 500 a year for five years.

It never moved forward because she couldn't stand the audacity of thinking about Persons are gonna kill sea lions? Not on my watch.

Well, he's completely out of touch with the reality and what we need.

Washington needs, WDFW needs money to move forward with pinniped predation removal.

But yet we have a legislator or legislators that will go back into session again this year and more than likely continue to remove monies from DFW's budget.

Yep.

The WDFW commission.

And how did they get there? They're appointed by the governor.

Ah, yes.

If you guys want to go fact check all this and look at yourself, it's called the Knoll Memo.

And it was from Thomas Knoll.

Basically, a WDFW legal review of the commission.

Yeah.

People have not been allowed to fish these salmon for three decades.

In 2025, Washington Fish and Wildlife reported only 900 Cedar River Chinook salmon returning to spawn.

There's a lot of things that are working against them.

They have to make it through the Ballard Locks.

One thing, Mr.

President, is the states are receiving hundreds of millions of dollars every year for wolf management, and they're going through the state agencies, the state WDFW, and we're funding our own demise.

They're using the money they get from you to put us ranchers out of business.

So do you think we

And of course, this is nature and biology, so there are no hard and fast rules here.

But essentially, this comes from the WDFW's own species page, and all of these resources will be linked below if you want to dig into this stuff a little bit more on your own.

You absolutely can do that, but these guys are going to deposit their eggs in gravel in the fall.

They emerge from that gravel next spring, and they will go to sea in their second spring.

One other thing that's really interesting is the rain trigger.

This is probably one of the most useful pieces of biology for you.

WDFW species page puts it very plainly, returning coho often gather at the mouth of streams and wait for the water flow to rise.

So they'll actually stack up and they'll sit there and when a good rain comes in, they're going to be on the move, which means you should be watching the weather forecast also, not just your tide chart, ironically.