Commercial, Sports Fishers Prepare For Battle

If Initiative 640 becomes law, Washington state’s gillnetters and bottom-fishing trollers probably will have to sell their gear.

That’s why commercial fishermen and sports anglers are engaged in a battle of words for registered voters’ hearts.

The gillnetters and trollers contend that passage of the initiative would cost 20,000 jobs. Baloney, say the sports fishermen, and they’ve compiled figures showing only 20 percent of the 2,500 commercial salmon fishers earn enough to feed, cloth and house their families.

Many fishermen who have commercial licenses, sports fishermen contend, actually are sports anglers who just want to increase their salmon take.

The initiative, written by Frank Haw, a nationally known fisheries biologist and onetime director of the Department of Fisheries, would require the use of salmon and sturgeon fishing gear that would result in the release, unharmed, of 85 percent of nontargeted salmon, steelhead, searun cutthroat and sturgeon.

In addition, the initiative would:

Prohibit marine fish and shellfish fisheries practices that result in more than 25 percent of the weight of the target species.

Direct the governor to try to reduce the number of Washington-origin salmon caught in Canada.

Manage hatcheries to provide salmon for harvest, yet remain consistent with protection of natural runs.

Although gill netting and bottom-fishing trolling would be banned, purse seining and recreational fishing would continue.

One of the benefits of banning gill netting and bottom-fishing trolling, initiative supporters say, would be the end to killing of seabirds and porpoises that become entangled in nets.

Each year, Haw and friends contend, thousands of seabirds and some porpoises become entangled in nets of commercial salmon fishermen and die.

Sports fishermen leading the SOS campaign have asked Eastern Washington sports organizations to support them.

A few days ago, Haw and SOS co-chairmen James McKillip and George Tellevik asked the Inland Northwest Wildlife Council to support the drive to get signatures on initiative petitions. Bob Panther, council executive director, said the group’s board will act on the matter this month.

Meanwhile, SOS members and their supporters are getting signatures of registered voters on petitions. Thousands of persons who attended the two big sports shows on the Coast last week signed the petitions.

The sportsmen must have a minimum of 181,667 signatures of registered voters on the petitions by July 7. Haw said SOS is shooting for 225,000 signatures to be sure there are enough to place the initiative on the November ballot.

Haw and friends know that getting enough valid signatures to put the initiative on the ballot won’t be easy. And if they succeed, they also know, the well-financed commercial fishermen will step up their campaign to convince voters that the initiative would cost thousands of fishermen their jobs.

Commercial fishermen say they’ve pledged $250,000 to defeat the initiative. Sports fishermen, on the other hand, so far have raised only a small amount of the money they believe they’ll need to win voter support.

Knowing that commercial fishermen would contend that thousands of jobs would be lost if the initiative becomes law, Haw and supporters decided to find out how many licensed commercial fishermen catch enough salmon to make a living.

They learned from the Department of Revenue that in 1989, the most recent year for which figures were available, four out of five commercial fishers were exempt from the business and occupation taxes because they earned less than $10,000 annually.

Furthermore, they determined fewer than 3,000 of the 6,200 commercial fishers earned the major portion of their income as commercial anglers.

Initiative supporters contend that only a tiny fraction of salmon fishermen were commercial fishers in 1993, compared with about 400,000 recreational fishermen. Sports anglers contribute millions to the state’s economy, they noted, while commercial fishers actually are subsidized by the state and businesses.

Haw and friends say the only way to stop wasteful fishing practices is by initiative. Commercial fishers have so much political clout, they say, that neither the Legislature nor the Fish and Wildlife Department dares incur the wrath of the powerful commercial fishing lobby.

Any meaningful reform, SOS says, is not in the cards.

What’s in the cards is a knockdown, dragout fight.

MEMO: You can contact Fenton Roskelley by voice mail at 459-5577, extension 3814.