County leaders: Fish-stocking pullback stinks

A proposal to eliminate the stocking of non-native fish in several waterways and one reservoir in Tuolumne County to protect endangered amphibians has the county Board of Supervisors riled.

The proposal is the result of environmental groups bringing a lawsuit in 2006 over the California Fish and Game’s fish-stocking program. The groups — Pacific Rivers Council and Center for Biological Diversity — said the agency had never completed an environmental impact report for the 100-year-old stocking program.
  

But restricting stocking will damage the local economy, supervisors contend in a letter to Fish and Game. The stocking program is designed largely to enhance sports fisheries, but, environmentalists say, it has severely impacted populations of native species, like the California red-legged frog and yellow-legged frog.

The non-native trout eat the amphibians’ tadpoles, studies show.  Environmental groups say protecting species like area amphibians can have beneficial effects higher up in an ecosystem’s food chain.

Four supervisors approved the critical Fish and Game letter earlier this month, while one member, Paolo Maffei, abstained from voting. Maffei said he wanted to send his own letter to the agency.

The draft environmental impact statement on the proposal, prepared by Fish and Game, “grossly underestimates the impacts from freshwater sports fishing and neglects to accurately evaluate the proposal’s economic impacts to Tuolumne County,” supervisors say in their letter.

Under the environmental document’s preferred alternative, stocking would cease in Basin Creek, Deadman Creek, Herring Creek Reservoir, the south and north forks of the Stanislaus River, Sullivan Creek and the North Fork of the Tuolumne River.

The preferred alternative is the middle road of the environmental document’s three listed alternatives.

In addition, Angels Creek, Schaads Reservoir and White Pines Lake in Calaveras County would also be excluded from stocking.

Forty-nine bodies of water in Tuolumne County would still be stocked under the preferred alternative, and one in Calaveras County.

But this provided little comfort for supervisors as, they noted in their letter, the south and north forks of the Tuolumne River and Deadman Creek, which passes through Kennedy Meadows, are popular tourist destinations.

The county estimates that around $35 million of the county’s annual tourism spending can be directly attributed to anglers.

Fish and Game spokesman Harry Morse agreed that without stocking, the experience might be different for anglers in affected lakes and streams. The non-native fish would still reproduce, he said, but, he added, there are a lot of anglers in California.   

"The fishing pressure exceeds the amount of fish that are available in waters,” he said.

He noted that since the lawsuit was brought by environmental groups, the stocking program has been made more complicated. An order issued last November by a Sacramento Superior Court judge allowed the stocking program to continue through January 2010 — after the agency was unable to complete its several-hundred-page environmental impact report by deadline. But it prohibited stocking in certain waters, including several in Tuolumne County.

Stocking fish requires planning nearly a year in advance, Morse said, with the process involving ordering fish and fish food, among other things. With the stocking program in limbo, he said, Fish and Game biologists were also told to figure out which water bodies could absorb the fish that would usually be placed in other areas.

A judge is expected to rule on whether Fish and Game adequately analyzed the impacts of its stocking program before the year’s end. If so, the environmental review process would proceed normally.
 

Morse couldn’t say how long it would take before the final environmental document is approved due to the court’s involvement in the process.