eddie..glad to see you post the "maximum sustainable harvest" angle to this story. For many years I have been preaching to the commission and others that the mandate they hand their hats on shouold read: "Maximum Sustainable Survival"

Standing in the way are gill nets , the tribes, and a lack of universal marking of all hatchery fish. Oh and budgets....WDFW outlined their budget problems on Friday at Port townsend and painted a pretty disgusting picture of the State dinging them for millions of dollars for unrelated costs..One example is the $1,000,000.00 for their "share" of state clerical workers. The state of Washington has an extremely high level of public employees...shall we say too many pigs at the trough? So with 5 people doing the job of one the budget isn't billed to the agencies that are so bloated but divided "evenly" across all agencies. Another big drain on the WDFW budget is the money they have to kick into the pot or should I say the money that is sucked out of their fish and wildlife budget to help pay for the myriad of law suits mostly originating with DSHS....the most corrupt and bloated of all state agencies ( and the biggest) So when employees on the state payroll sue and win $20 million dollars because they had to work 40 hours a week for their salary when others only had to work 35...The other agencies like WDFW suffer.

So at the end of the day we don't have enough money to support fin clip programs and enforcement. Too bad. I say fire atleast 20% of those on the state payroll and when you get rid of the fat approach the rest of them and increase their productivity of weed some more out. Then with all that money you save get the WDFW budget back on track to do what is necessary.