I really wanted to avoid getting involved in the back and forth here, but I feel compelled to address comments that are simply inaccurate.

Goose, I don't know how to put this delicately, but I'm afraid you're misinformed about that grace period. It ended in Jan 2001. NMFS has certainly decided not to take any enforcemnt action against WDFW (or the Tribes) while they all "negotiate" the HGMPs, but there is NO official or lawful "grace period" in effect. If there was, our notice would have no merit and you'd have nothing to be upset about. We can only seek relief for violations of the ESA. (Despite what you may think, we're not idiots, and we don't just make stuff up. This is the sort of thing we might have checked before we went to all this trouble.)

As to your other points; I'll leave it to others to debate you on conjectural points with made up numbers. But I will say that WT's whole approach to resource managemnt is all about recognizing and managing for the risk and uncertainty in the available data. However, we look at it a little differently than the approch you seem to advocate. We would take a look at the data points, and manage for the conservative end of the CI, in order to give the resourse the benefit of the doubt, not the stakeholder, particularly when the resource is in clear decline. No data does not mean no problem; the burden of proof should be on the fisher, not the fish. Making the salmon PROVE they are in trouble is what got us here.