Commentary: Pennsylvania Fish & Boat Commission should cut back on trout stocking – Outdoor News
Pennsylvania Fish & Boat Commission’s trout stocking program isn’t well. What ails it? Money troubles. The commission recently staved off cuts to stocked trout by taking enormous taxpayer bailouts.
Over $100 million from a pool of tax money, Capital Funds, that’s intended for public infrastructure (roads, bridges, etc.) was instead used to pay for hatchery maintenance the commission couldn’t afford.
So did this huge sum of taxpayer money solve the agency’s hatchery money troubles?
No, $100 million in taxpayer bailouts was a temporary Band-aid for cash-consuming hatcheries still facing rising inflation and declining license sales. Thus, Timothy Schaeffer, Fish & Boat Commission executive director, and Sen. Greg Rothman are currently preparing a Senate bill to introduce this session attempting to divert yet even more money into hatcheries on an annual basis.
If passed, it would allow the trout-stocking program to raid the commission’s popular boat fund that pays for stream access, boat ramps, docks, parking facilities, kayak launches, boater safety and much more.
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So, how did a trout-stocking social program budget balloon into a burglar of funds meant for boaters and bridges? The short answer is, decades of legislators not addressing financial problems at the commission.
You may not have noticed the roughly 40% drop in fishing license sales beginning 35 years ago, in 1990. However, commission leaders and state legislators were well aware.
In fact, legislators ordered Penn State Smeal College of Business to analyze the Fish & Boat Commission’s finances in 2017. They identified cost issues from trout stocking as a key problem.
Penn State predicted license sales were likely to continue declining, a correct prediction 2017-present. Penn State also predicted license price increases could only offset fewer licenses sold to a point before price hikes declined license sales even further.
Thus, Penn State concluded that the Fish & Boat Commission “should” and “could” cut the number of both hatcheries and trout stocked to stay afloat financially and keep license costs controlled.
Commission leaders and their supervising legislators sadly didn’t heed Penn State’s recommendations. They instead awarded the aforementioned $100 million in taxpayer capital funds to hatcheries in 2020.
Director Schaeffer justified accepting this money with “trout production facilities are public infrastructure.”
He also attempted multiple times to deny the well-known fact that the commission’s stocked non-native brown and rainbow trout are highly invasive. In a recent Senate hearing, he lied to Sen. Cris Dush on tape, claiming the fish were “not invasive” only to be later corrected by multiple fisheries scientists on television.
In fact, the International Union of Conservation of Nature ranks brown and rainbow trout as top 100 most harmful invasive species out of 5,000 known globally. Bailing out invasive trout production instead of making cuts is what Director Schaeffer considers “public infrastructure” worthy of $100 million taxpayer dollars.
Spending on this social program continues to balloon out of control relative to its declining participation. We have to ask why it’s currently crickets from state legislators supposed to be preventing this kind of aforementioned waste, fraud, and abuse?
Sen. Rothman should be making the commission invest in public-fishing opportunity more wisely instead of raiding the boat fund with a Senate bill. Thirty-five years of declining license sales data prove the outdated myopic focus on stocking isn’t keeping people in fishing anymore.
Stocking has a place but it shouldn’t be bankrupting the Fish & Boat Commission. The agency is foolishly putting all its eggs in the hatchery basket. Instead, kids need more stream access near home and youth-fishing programs for already abundant wild fish.
The commission should secure the future of fishing with adaptation instead of stocking itself into bankruptcy.
(James Suleski is a native fish conservationist, stocking reform advocate as well as a passionate angler in central Pennsylvania, where he fishes, works and lives.)
