Carcassman,

Truly WDFW and NMFS allowed this to happen. However I don't think the story is exactly that simple. It's easy in hind sight to say that during a period of budget cuts the agencies should have dropped some other action in order to staff the HGMPs in order to complete them in timely fashion. I'm not willing to second guess WDFW on this. In many ways the department was struggling to just remain functionally relevant because of the budget slashing. Some of the staff who had worked on HGMPs left the agency and came to work at NMFS, generally helping to reduce the backlog of overdue biological opinions, not work on HGMPs. We are a nation of laws, but the law ignores simple things like agency budgets, and separate courts can and do order conflicting priorities at times. When the budget can fund one task, there is no way that two can be performed.

And then there's politics. The political process defines the legislative mandates of agencies. And the political process funds those mandates. Or not. Unfunded mandates are not at all uncommon among agencies. Talk about being between a rock and a hard place. However the public outcry did get heard by Senator Cantwell's office, and NMFS got two more staff positions to work on the Puget Sound HGMPs. Of course this is all reactive, and it's hard to say how the agencies will respond, if they are able, to the Columbia River Mitchell Act hatchery lawsuit.

Sg