Okay, let’s not overreact. This is a petition to join the legal proceeding that is U.S. v Washington. This case has been on-going since the 1970’s. It is not a legal challenge to the season setting process. Yet.

If Fish Northwest is allowed to join the legal case, they will likely push for the actions they describe in their petition. But FN would have to clearly show why WDFW is not representing their interests since their objection is with WDFW, not the Tribes. The court may not look at a disagreement between WDFW and an interest group (FN) as being relevant to the case.

And, quite frankly, it’s not. WDFW has the statutory obligation to represent the interests of the residents of the State of Washington. If they fail to do that, don’t blame the U.S. v Washington court or the Tribes. An analogy might be that if a subset of Tribal members did not like the outcome of the NOF negotiations, could they petition the Court to intervene to protect their interests from the decisions made by their Tribal leaders? Most folks on this BB would view that with considerable skepticism. But that is what this petition seeks from a non-Tribal perspective. I won’t try to predict what might happen in this instance, but FN has a big hill to climb…...

I think a better question is why does U.S. v Washington still exist? The U.S. v Oregon case was dismissed two years ago without any of the Parties asking for dismissal. The Federal District court decided on its own to dismiss U.S. v Oregon. And the U.S. v Oregon case arose from the U.S. v Washington litigation, and they litigated the exact same issues on the Columbia River as U.S. v Washington did in Puget Sound. FN would be better off petitioning the court to dismiss U.S. v Washington entirely, and then seek to have the issues revert to a public (non-legal) process in which all parties could participate. In my view, if U.S. v Oregon can get dismissed without any of the parties petitioning for dismissal (which is what happened), then U.S. v Washington can be dismissed too. Maybe all it takes is for someone to ask………

As a side note, FN states in their petition that the State has a right to 50% of the harvestable fish. That’s not correct. The courts have said the Tribes have a right to 50% of the harvestable fish. The courts never said the State has the right to the other 50%. The State may be allocated the other 50% but they may or may not be able to actually harvest that 50%, depending on other factors such as the ESA. In this case, they may not be able to achieve the harvest objectives due to the restrictions (on both parties) rising from the ESA. Or the non-Tribal harvest that occurs outside of Puget Sound (SE AK, West Vancouver Island, Strait of JDF) may be the difference in the non-Tribal harvest. Todd mentioned this in his post. He is exactly correct. So it would be wrong to suggest that Puget Sound anglers are entitled to 50% of the harvestable fish. They clearly are not, but the petition seems to suggest they do.

In my view, it would help if WDFW would explain, in detail, why the allocation decisions result in the outcomes we’re seeing. I will agree that it’s not clear, and is a cause for confusion and frustration as reflected in the FN petition.

I also posted a very similar response on IFish, for those of us who frequent both BB's.