Nick,

Yeah, I can afford a fishing license. My kids are grown and on their own, so even as a fixed income retiree I have more discretionary money than I did while raising my family. Enough so that I can buy a non-resident British Columbia fishing license and a non-resident Montana, oh, and last summer a non-resident Colorado fishing license. And all of those non-resident licenses are better values than my resident WA fishing license. Why is that? Because none of my non-resident licenses help pay $93 million for salmon hatcheries, where over half the salmon are caught in Canada, and of those that return to WA, most are caught by non-treaty commercial and treaty fisheries, with a paltry few being creeled by recreational anglers.

This is a matter of principle for me even if it is about the $$ for many. And no one should have 4 kids who cannot afford them. - As Todd wrote, stupidity should hurt.

I don't want a return of the Columbia River endorsement. It originated at sportfishermen's request to fund fishery monitoring of mid-C and tributary fisheries as required by NMFS because of ESA stocks being present. And WDFW adopted a Columbia River policy in 2013 to phase out mainstem CR non-treaty gillnetting. Last year the WDFW Commission double-crossed sportsfishers by backpedaling on that policy, and the mid-C tributaries haven't been open to fishing in several years. I'm willing to pay the CRE when the streams re-open and WDFW moves forward, not backward on the CR gillnetting policy.

WDFW is planning to close the Skagit steelhead season in 2021 unless they get their supplemental budget request. And they close the Stillaguamish River for 3 1/2 months (last Sat. in May through Sept. 15) because the tribes have the Department by the short and curlies at NOF, not because of Chinook conservation as they falsely claimed. And they closed most of the Chehalis River basin last summer initially due to low spring Chinook abundance, even though spring Chinook are always in low abundance, along with appropriate Chinook closures throughout the basin for conservation. As one of the Region 6 bios wrote in an email string, ". . . if we close rivers to all species fishing every time we have a low (salmon) escapement, we're out of business." Or words to that effect.

If WDFW thinks gamefish closures are the solution to their low salmon abundance fish management problems, then I want them out of business. If WDFW won't fight for sportfishing, then taxpayers and license buyers are being ripped off. If they want to take our money and use it for foreign, commercial, and treaty fishing, but not sportfishing, then the Department is more useless than tits on a boar.

As near as I can tell, the Department has no plan, nor any plan to make a plan, for the Stilly to be open for gamefish in 2020. They seem content to have it closed for the next 100 years or until Stilly Chinook are extinct. Five years now, and no intention to even try to secure their own ESA permit from NMFS so that tribes can't tell them how to manage sportfishing. I don't see how that isn't criminal negligence. And we should pay increased fees to support this?

If I were compute savy enough, I'd set up an automatic system to bombard legislators with 200 emails a day from now through the end of the session to remind them that they should gut the Department's budget, all except for the part to pay for Skagit fishery monitoring. Bastards!