Fish and Game Politics

Y'can never take the politics out of fish and wildlife management. But you can and must take the politicians out. Politicians, by their nature, will try to seize control of fish and game agencies, and they succeed wherever sportsmen and environmentalists remain apathetic and unengaged. Usually, the first step is stacking the agency's policy-setting commission, the members of which are generally appointed by the governor and sometimes confirmed by the legislature. When politicians control commissions (and, thereby, fish and wildlife decision making) they cater to the big money that underwrites their campaigns—large, extractive industries inconvenienced by the needs of fish and wildlife. "One of the big things that has led to politicization of fish and game agencies in the Northwest is the [ESA] listings of salmon and steelhead," says Bert Bowler, who retired as Idaho's salmon biologist last September and continues to defend the resources as native fisheries director for Idaho Rivers United. "The governors said, 'This is bigger than you fish and wildlife agencies. We need to get involved here because our constituents are at risk from the feds.' The sad part of all this is that the states aren't standing tall representing the needs of the fish. Oregon, Washington and Idaho have been neutered. I've never seen it this bad. The fish need strong agencies, and they don't exist."

Rod Sando, former director of the Idaho Department of Fish and Game agrees. "It's a generic problem particularly here in the West," he says. "I think it comes down to the transition that's going on from the extractive economy to the new economy of tourism and recreation. In the Idaho Fish and Game Commission and others--Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, to some extent Montana—you see commissioners who are not fish and wildlife advocates so much as advocates for ranching or timber or mining. In Washington the commission isn't bad on resources, but the department is in trouble with the legislature."

Indeed it is. Last February a bill was introduced in the state House of Representatives that would remove budgetary authority from the Fish and Wildlife Commission and let the governor appoint the Fish and Wildlife director. No case study more graphically illustrates what Sando is talking about than his own forced resignation on January 23, 2002. If there's one thing the threatened and endangered salmonids of the Columbia system needed, it was a strong, principled Fish and Game director in Idaho, a leader willing to stand up to the powerful commercial interests preventing recovery. Sando, who had distinguished himself as head of the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources for eight years, was just such a leader. When he arrived in Idaho on April 1, 2000 he found the department in shambles. The agency was hemorrhaging money; morale was at an all-time low. The mess had been created and left by Stephen Mealey, a director who displayed no commitment to anything save telling sportsmen, environmentalists, politicians and resource extractors what they wanted to hear. He promised the moon and the stars and the planets, then delivered glow-in-the-dark ceiling decals.

Eventually this modus operandi angered the resource extractors, and they had him fired. One of the things he promised was that he wouldn't let the commission come out with a statement of simple biological truth--that the best way to recover Columbia Basin salmon and steelhead was to remove the four lower dams on the Snake River. But at a hearing in May, 1998 overwhelming testimony in favor of dam removal forced the commission to do just that. The legislature was apoplectic. In retaliation it held hostage a desperately needed license-fee hike, offering to pass it only if the commission reversed itself and proclaimed that salmon and dams could coexist just fine. It tried to strip the department of salmon-management authority and tried to fire the head of the salmonid program and the chief of fisheries. The governor prevailed on the Fish and Game Commission to remove from state hatcheries all displays suggesting that a free-flowing river might be salubrious for salmonids.

"I was at the hearing when our commission made its stand on salmon in 1998," says Bowler. "They didn't say go out and breach the dams. They just reported our science—that if you want to recover the fish, a free-flowing river is the way to do it. The governor's office had brought in all these tobacco scientists to try to counter it. That's how it always was. When we would put out the science, the governor's people would come out with tobacco science in an effort to convince the public that you couldn't trust us or our data: 'Well, gee, we just really don't know if salmon need water.' It got almost that ludicrous. They would counter with: 'No, the dams aren't a problem. They're actually better for the fish.' Idaho took the lead on this in the Northwest because the governor's office seemed so threatened by what these fish might do to the status quo. The status quo in Idaho is water and dams on the lower river for navigation to Lewiston."

To show how much he really loved salmon, Idaho Governor Dirk Kempthorne set up a September, 1999 photo op at Redfish Lake in which he released hatchery-bred sockeye adults while uttering such banalities as: "There's something spiritual about this. This is exactly what nature intended."

Really? Nature intended more sockeyes to reach their historical spawning habitat via governor than by swimming themselves? Nature intended that the entire natural run of sockeyes that year—the second highest return of the decade—would be seven fish? Nature intended that the lower river be transmogrified to a series of warm, predator-infested, silt-choked deadwaters where humans collect smolts in nets, tote them seaward in barges, and then pretend that it works? vWhen nature was running the show, the Snake River rose and fell with the seasons, chilled out in tall forests and shaded canyons, rushed and tumbled and breathed in oxygen, picked up and spread gravel and dead wood. In those days the river produced almost half the chinooks spawned in the entire Columbia system. Combined runs of all salmonids are thought to have approached 8 million.

Leaned on by Kempthorne and the legislature, Mealey issued a gag order to department personnel, forbidding them to talk publicly about Snake River salmon recovery. (Immediately thereafter wads of toilet paper appeared in the mouths of all the mounted fish on display at the Boise headquarters.) When reporters asked questions about salmon and were told that it was verboten to speak of such things, First Amendment removal became a bigger story than dam removal. Mealey had been brought in by Kempthorne's predecessor, Phil Batt, to restrain what Batt perceived to be a rogue agency. Kempthorne found Mealey useful for that purpose, also. But after Mealey's dismissal by the commission, the legislature gave Kempthorne a more reliable device—a new bureaucracy called the Office of Species Conservation that stripped the department of management authority for all threatened and endangered species and placed it with the governor.

Kempthorne--who, as a US senator, led Western Republicans in a failed jihad against the Endangered Species Act--is using the Office of Species Conservation not to recover Snake River salmonids, bull trout, wolves and the like, but to filter professional science coming out of the Fish and Game Department so that special interests won't be inconvenienced by the Endangered Species Act. Not only does the office bleed $500,000 a year from the state budget--a huge amount in Idaho--it shortstops federal dollars and decides how Fish and Game will spend them. Running the office is Jim Caswell who, as supervisor of the Clearwater National Forest, presided over the destruction of its fragile soils, forests and trout streams while fighting the roadless initiative offered by his enlightened boss, Mike Dombeck.

Sando was just the prescription fish and wildlife needed--a smart, tough pro who said what he meant, never showed his back in a fight, and stood up for the resource and his fellow biologists. Staff and sportsmen adored him. He rebuilt morale and got the department out of the red and well into the black. It wasn't long, however, before he got crosswise with the legislature and governor. Kempthorne had instructed state employees that, when discussing salmon management, they were to speak with "one voice"--his voice. But, unlike Mealey, Sando couldn't do that. His written mandate was to follow fish and game policy, and the commission, not the governor's office, sets it. Until he heard otherwise from the commission, the department's policy was going to be that a free-flowing Snake River is what salmon needed. Two months before the governor forced him out the commission gave him a raise.