Wilcox discusses initiatives, salmon recovery, and his bid to disband the Fish & Wildlife Commission

hi I'm state representative JT Wilcox and we're getting towards the end of this legislative session but there's still some news to share with all of you first of all you've heard uh us talk incessantly about the initiatives that qualified for consideration by the legislature and uh maybe for the ballot and uh Democrats have consistently said that uh they were not very interested in those but over the last week they've conceded that they will hold hearings for three of them now these are the three that impact policy uh they don't have much of a fiscal impact uh they have said they're not going to hold hearings for the three that have a really large fiscal impact so those will end up going to the ballot the three that are going to be heard may get a vote here in the legislature and if they uh get a vote I think that they probably will pass and those will be good improvements thanks to the people that worked hard on an initiative campaign and thanks to uh House of Republicans that are probably going to provide the majority of the votes uh but that's that's a good positive thing another piece of news you've heard me talk a lot about salmon recovery and uh you know it's easy to see how salmon recovery is good for people that fish whether they're tribal Fishers or non-tribal but I think all of us have a stake in that uh there's uh very little that happens on the landscape especially in western Washington that doesn't come under sometimes pretty severe regulation because of our failures to help salmon recovery and if you live in Eastern Washington in some ways it might be a bigger thing because salmon runs uh up the Columbia and the snake have been damaged so greatly there's a lot of talk about removing those dams the only reason that they're talking about removing those dams which are critical to our Eastern Washington economy is because we've failed at salmon recovery so if we can succeed at salmon recovery uh you can probably uh feel much safer uh in terms of our ability to operate those dams so those are important things and uh I've also talked a little bit about the Department of Fish and Wildlife and the commission that regulates that I've been a big critic uh and I've got a lot of friends that are involved in the natural resource economy and hunting and fishing that have been equally critical I don't know that I've got a perfect solution to replacing the current commission form the Commissioners are all appointed Ed by the governor uh we've got a three-term governor that's appointed every single one of them and they don't really pay that much attention uh to the interest of people that hunted fish so I dropped a bill that would uh eliminate the commission and just turn it into a regular Governor's appointment I don't think that's the perfect solution but the way you started a discussion in Olympia is you drop a bill and you see uh what people are going to come and say about that uh sometimes things work well in Olympia and uh the the committee chairman of agon Natural Resources in the house who is a Democrat named uh representative Mike Chapman is a good friend and he runs probably the most bipartisan Committee in Olympia and he agreed to hear the bill because we don't have a great solution yet he agreed that uh it would be heard after the cut off so it's not a bill that's going to pass this year but it's going to elicit a lot of comment and I thought that the hearing went pretty well there were some people applauding what I was doing there were some people that were quite angry uh but uh in the end I think people really do want to find a good solution for this and I'm looking forward to working together with friends and Associates next year to have a much more lasting solution rather than just a discussion thanks everybody