My letter:

The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife recently made a decision to allocate half of the havestable Columbia River spring chinook return to non-Tribal gillnetters in the lower river. Harvest of these chinook using gillnets results in twice the mortality of released wild fish than harvest using sportfishers, while returning many times less money per fish to the ailing Washington economy. Moreover, gillnet harvest at the rates WDFW is proposing will result in death to 7% of the wild ESA listed steelhead run. This travesty will reverse recovery efforts and is totally unacceptable. There is more than enough sport fishing effort on the Columbia to harvest all the available spring chinook in the lower river, and sportfishers rarely encounter steelhead while fishing with salmon gear. Moreover, since the Tribal fishery has been awarded 13% of the allowable ESA spring chinook impact, and the non-Tribal fishery only 2%, it seems that more than enough commercially caught spring chinook will be available to satisfy market needs. More non-Tribal commercial fish will just lower the value of the Tribal market further. It seems far better for both the economy and the resource for sports fishing to be employed exclusively to harvest the non-Tribal allocation of Columbia spring chinook.

I would really like you to give some attention to this matter, and to contact Dr. Jeff Koenings, WDFW Director, to encourage him to make the right resource allocation decision. Hundreds of thousands of sportfishing Washington voters will be watching how this goes, and will remember who was on the side of the resource at voting time.

Thanks for your attention to this matter,