I don't know if it was as low as 10$ but there's a place in Canada that will run them for ~14$ a sample.

A correction/clarification is needed in regards to the "skim" from dedicated funds. I was under the understanding that the Office of Finance and Management was the agency taking the money. I was wrong. I rec'd the following information this afternoon:

"The indirect figures shown below (also sometimes referenced as proportionate administrative funds/costs), represents the portion of costs needed from our dedicated accounts to support administrative functions in the Business Services Program within WDFW. This indirect rate (proportionate administrative funds/costs) is applied to all of our dedicated accounts."

For the PSRFE fund, it amounts to 12% ($318,972) for the 2015/16 biennium budget amount of $2,656,030 which monies come from the old salmon stamp fee ($10) that is now included in your saltwater license purchase.

The reason it's cheap is because the Canadian lab doesn't have baselines for every river in Washington State. If you send them a coho sample from Puget Sound they can only tell you it is from Puget Sound, not the basin it originated from like the WDFW lab is able to do. If doing a stock composition of harvest or some other analysis that needs detail, it would be fairly worthless to know that every fish was only from Puget Sound.

Looks like I misunderstood who was sucking a sizeable portion of the "dedicated" funds from those accounts. Bushbear also has addressed that it is going to WDFW rather than the budget agency. Guess that is better - but still not great. $300+K would buy a lot of fish food.

And does the legislation establishing those accounts include/allow WDFW's administrative costs?