For $2,500, you can purchase a five-day fully guided fishing trip in Alaska. You’ll camp on a prime beach near a pristine river and sleep in deluxe tents, and someone else will do the cooking.

Bayview, Idaho, isn’t as famous as Alaska for fishing trips, though some Bayview folks had hoped that it might become so. Those hopes are damaged for now. Developer Bob Holland’s marina project went horribly awry April 17. A Lake Pend Oreille kokanee salmon spawning bed was destroyed when steel dock pilings were pounded through it. Kokanee form the foundation of the lake’s $17 million fish tourism effort.

The death toll: Tens of thousands of kokanee fry.

Townspeople are still reeling from the news. “When he messed up our fish, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” said Hobart Jenkins, chairman of the Bayview Chamber of Commerce’s development analysis committee.

One monetary figure – $2,500 – is really sticking in their craw. That’s the maximum fine Holland faces for violating state lake protection laws. Just $2,500. The price of a deluxe flat screen television, a first-class airfare ticket to Europe, a fishing trip to Alaska.

This paltry fine has been the same since 1974, when lake protection laws were passed in Idaho. In the past, the Idaho Department of Lands has asked the Legislature to increase those fines. So far, no luck. Idaho is a state where many residents don’t believe in the long reach of the law into people’s lives – or their businesses.

But since the Bayview kokanee travesty – and the awareness of the $2,500 maximum fine – residents have united to express their outrage to their state legislators. It appears that the message is being heard.

“I, for one, am trying to formulate a way to come up with fines that would be punitive,” said state Sen. Michael Jorgenson, a Bayview Republican. “What’s $2,500 to a big development company? Nothing. I think it should be a percentage of what the estimated value of the development is worth.”

State Rep. Jim Clark, a Hayden Lake Republican, said, “The $2,500 in this case doesn’t do anything. When you have a case where it’s so egregious, there should be a next level of fines.”

The $2,500 maximum fine can’t be changed until the Legislature reconvenes in January. In the meantime, residents, government agency officials and elected leaders are researching other kinds of possible sanctions against Holland.

But Bayview and North Idaho residents need to keep the heat on their legislators to change this preposterously low fine. State laws extend to all of North Idaho’s keepsake lakes, and these safeguards should never come cheap.