The WDFW's rules on mining streams are HIGHLY permissive (for example, the "Fish and Gold" rulebook of April 2009 itself constitutes a miner's permit; see http://wdfw.wa.gov/publications/00290/wdfw00290.pdf), and there is virtually no enforcement (possibly no enforcement at all). It is a fact that suction-dredge mining has the potential to damage streams in which endangered runs of salmon and steelhead live. Furthermore, many hundreds of permits (so-called Hydraulic Project Approvals or HPAs) that represent exceptions to the mining windows specified in the "Fish and Gold" rulebook have been issued by the WDFW. The WDFW has very little if any idea of what those projects that it routinely rubber-stamps with stream-specific HPAs actually do (or have done) to the streams in question. By comparison with Oregon, California, Idaho, and British Columbia, Washington's regulation of suction-dredge mining is lax yet we have plenty of endangered runs of salmon and steelhead. My own view is that the streams with endangered species are public resources and the use of dredges to exploit them for private profit should not be allowed at all (hobby panning for gold is different). Representative Tarleton's bill is a commonsense, overdue move to bring some meaningful oversight to an activity that can further damage our already degraded streams.