Recreational Fishing Alliance (RFA)

I am the Washington State Co-Chairman. I report directly to our executive director and our legislative director. They are two of what is only three or four full time lobbyists working in DC for recreational fishing interests. Compare that to 37 for commercials and you can see where the problem lies. Essentially what we try to do is take an issue, bring all the recreational partys together (anglers, industry, etc) and find common ground. Then we take advantage of our 501-C4 non-profit status to put as much political pressure as possible to get things done. When we find a elected official that wont work with us, we may support a person who is running against him/her. Or we may put up someone to run against him/her. We have no problem putting money into campaigns, but its the voters that give us our power to change things. It depends on a large membership with grassroots lobbying to bring it all together. For more info, the websites were listed in an above post. I appoligize for lack of updates on the local site as much of it is old news.

Any specific questions, feel free to ask.

On the wild steelhead thing, go to
http://www.savefish.com/newsletns.html The second link down is our position on all issues where release is imposed by regulation.

The short of it is that we don't generally support total release by regulation unless there is a damn good scientific reason.