Please forward this to everyone you know. Family and friends need to sign on. We need giant numbers of responses.

Attached is a letter at the bottom that you can cut and paste, then email to NOAA. We have been outgunned by a particular non profit that is in the works of shutting down all of our hatcheries through litigation.

Are we going to allow lawsuits to manage our fisheries. We have a nonprofit organization that has continually sued the state, and received grant money from them, trying to stop hatchery released fish. Hatcheries are mitigation for damns and habitat loss. Step back and think about this for a minute. These lawsuits are going to force us into Boldt 2. We have a treaty with the tribes to keep them in fish. When these lawsuits force the shutdown of our hatcheries, it will break our treaty agreement with the tribes. BOLDT 2 is now in the process of becoming reality.
This is happening in our world today. This paragraph is taken from the Reel News from April 2014. It is written by Darrel Ticehurst that worked with PFMC and recreational fishing. He is in California and has seen it turn upside down. It talks about the biggest threats to recreational fishing. Here is the first point.

1. Runaway Environmentalism
Yes, most of us consider ourselves to be environmentalists. We care about our heritage and want to leave it intact for our grandchildren. But these runaway enviro groups have long passed beyond those basic motivations. Environmentalism is now big business. They are raising huge amounts of funding to support their enormous staffs of lawyers and idealists lobbying at state and federal levels. And they are anti-fishing, whether commercial or recreational. Why? Because if they can magnify the crisis, overstress the current situation, they can raise more funds. Their contributors need to feel they are “doing good” so the runaway enviro movement feeds them the overstated and manufactured environmental crises they need to open their checkbooks. Overfishing is rampant on our Pacific Coast? Check. Never mind that the Pacific Fisheries Management Council (PFMC) has been intelligently managing overfishing for the past 15 years. Facts and science are only tools to be used for political advantage, not to save a resource.
Runaway environmentalism is here to stay and the science no longer matters. What matters to them is that they get a “win” and their next round of funding.

Cut and paste this letter below and sign it. Feel free to craft your own letter. The other group has already responded previously and had 2000 requests to not release these fish. They went uncontested. We have to go way beyond this count and please be cordial. They are on the pay to causing hatchery extinction.

Please submit them by email to on or before August 13 to:
EWShatcheriesEIS.wcr@noaa.gov

August 5, 2015

National Marine Fisheries Service
Sustainable Fisheries Division
510 Desmond Drive SE
Suite 103
Lacey, WA 98503

Subject: Early Winter Puget Sound Hatchery Steelhead HGMP EIS Scoping, Federal Register Notice RIN 0648-XE039, July 14,2015

The following are my comments in response to above Federal Register Notice (FRN).
As a concerned citizen and fisher of the state of Washington, we believe that hatcheries are not the problem causing the decline of our Steelhead in our river systems today. Our steelhead are in trouble from California to Alaska and this is not an isolated problem, but a coastwide problem.
Please allow no time extensions At a minimum, this means that there should be no extensions allowed on comment periods and no discretionary grants of additional time so that proponents can run to the courthouse and cause a delay, running the clock out.
Poor habitat causes take of fish every day. Currently, our warped idea of conservation translates into closing hatcheries and fisheries and doing nothing to address the degraded habitat which precludes salmon recovery.
Hatcheries can help rebuild natural populations or buffer impacts on natural populations, meet treaty fishing rights, and critically important tribal and non-tribal fisheries simply could not happen today without hatcheries.

We want to see the Published Final end date for EIS (Environmental Impact Statement) NEPA Record of decision, and final ESA decision be on or before March 1. This allows time for litigation and the release of the smolts in a timely manner.
Please dedicate all of your resources to these particular EWS HGMPs so to meet the timeframe and not run the clock out on this program. We have wasted the last two years of broodstock and if this third year brood stock is lost, it will kill this program for ever.

For the alternatives you asked for , we would like to see an alternative added to the list:
Please use added alternative #5 below, with alternative #2 as a second choice
Please add Alternative 5: Increasing annual early winter hatchery production to one million or more smolts. This is to ensure fair consideration of a full range of possible alternatives and to recognize that marine and freshwater habitats are continuing to decline such that increased hatchery production will be necessary to compensate.

Sincerely,
Name
(Your Organization if affiliated)
Address
Phone
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