17-05-2025
Hunting advocates petition for removal of four Washington Fish and Wildlife commissioners
May 16—A national hunting advocacy group wants four Washington Fish and Wildlife commissioners gone, citing a trove of internal documents that the group says shows the commissioners acted improperly.
The Sportsman's Alliance Foundation petitioned Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson asking him to remove commissioners Barbara Baker, Lorna Smith, Melanie Rowland and John Lehmkuhl from the nine-member panel that oversees the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.
In its 25-page petition, the group argues that thousands of pages of internal correspondence it obtained through a public records request show the four commissioners "violating numerous norms, expectations and requirements of the law" while discussing upcoming votes and other issues via email.
Evan Heusinkveld, president and CEO of the Sportsmen's Alliance, said in a statement that the commissioners' behavior amounts to "bad government on steroids."
"Secret meetings, exclusion of tribes and others from public meetings, an obvious and open contempt for the public, and a total disregard of the law — it's all there, and it's obvious that this is simply the way these four commissioners do business," Heusinkveld said.
Commissioners are appointed by the governor. The governor also has the power to remove them.
The governor's office did not respond to a request for comment before deadline Friday.
The four commissioners targeted in the petition were appointed by former Gov. Jay Inslee. Baker, who is from Thurston County and serves as commission chair, has been on the panel since 2017. Smith, of Jefferson County, has been on the panel since 2021. Lehmkuhl, of Chelan County, and Rowland, of Okanogan County, were first appointed in 2022.
The Sportsmen's Alliance requested public records including correspondence from the four commissioners in September 2023 following the vote earlier that year to end spring bear hunting in Washington.
WDFW's public records analyst found more than 470,000 records that were responsive to their request. After filing a lawsuit in January over a delayed response to its request, the alliance has now received 17,000 records as of this month, according to the petition.
A WDFW spokesperson confirmed the timeline of the alliance's records request but declined to comment further.
The alliance has specific grievances with each commissioner, and it airs some of them in the petition, but it maintains the documents show a consistent pattern among the group of flouting open meeting requirements, disregarding the interests of Native American tribes and showing disdain for public involvement in wildlife management.
The petition says there's ample grounds for removing the commissioners, and that the alliance has "hundreds, if not thousands, of pages of additional examples to support their removal, and we are ready, willing to be able to share these with the Governor, if needed, to ensure a swift and just response to this petition."
The petition is the latest in a string of controversies to come for the commission, which has the final say on wildlife management and things like hunting and fishing regulations.
Hunters have been critical of the panel over the past several years, arguing that decisions like ending spring bear hunting and changing cougar regulations are an attack on hunters. Meanwhile, environmentalists have argued that the commission is too friendly to hunters and anglers at the expense of wildlife.
People on both sides of that debate, however, have been frustrated with how the commission operates. A December report from the William D. Ruckelshaus Center found that many observers see the commission as "dysfunctional."
The past five months have been marked by conflicts over who should sit on the commission. Inslee named commissioners for two of three open commission seats just before leaving office, only to have those appointments rescinded by Ferguson. Ferguson named three commissioners to fill those seats in April.
Then, Washington Wildlife First, an environmental group, sued over Ferguson's reappointment of commissioner Molly Linville, arguing she couldn't be appointed to the panel because she simultaneously held a seat on a local school board. Linville has since resigned from the school board.
The suit echoed one filed by the Sportsman's Alliance Foundation two years earlier over Smith's commission seat — Smith had been serving on a local planning board. That case ended up before the state Supreme Court, which sided with the alliance.
