Posted on 03/25/2014 4:45:30 PM PDT by Hildy
BULLHEAD CITY — Mohave County will explore every avenue to keep the 50-year-old Willow Beach National Fish Hatchery rainbow trout stocking program going, said District 2 Sup. and Board of Supervisors Chairwoman Hildy Angius, R-Bullhead City, as she updated the Colorado River Tea Party Patriots at their Saturday meeting.
The program is of great economic benefit to the Tri-state, which relies on sport fishing to help draw tourists to the area.
Before the stocking program was suspended, an estimated 4,000 trout were stocked monthly below Davis Dam. The Bullhead City Council passed a resolution in February requesting the Fish and Wildlife Service to reconsider the ending of the program.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said two intake pipes that feed the trout hatchery need repairs and there is no money available. Two massive trout die-offs occurred in August and November of last year, killing 40,000 and 20,800 trout respectively. Piping from the river was clogged with vegetation in August and in November; water flows in the river dropped below the elevation of the hatchery water intake pumps. Hatchery workers were able to save the remaining 11,000 trout by releasing them into the river.
Angius and District 3 Sup. Buster Johnson, R-Lake Havasu City, recently traveled to Washington, D.C., to attend a legislative conference of the National Association of Counties. The U.S. House Natural Resources Committee subcommittee on Fisheries, Wildlife, Oceans and Insular Affairs happened to be holding a hearing concerning hatcheries at the same time. County staff assembled material for Angius to take to Washington. She met with committee staff members and briefed them on the history of the Willow Beach hatchery.
During the hearing, Angius reported, David Hoskins, U.S. Fish and Wildlife assistant director, admitted his department did not perform an economic impact study, did not have a public input period, and did not contact Mohave County to inform the county of its decision to end the program.
Angius said she met with Hoskins and he told her there was no money to repair the pipe.
There was a follow-up meeting in Denver on March 13, during which Arizona Game and Fish Department representatives and Mohave County Administrator Mike Hendrix presented solutions to Hoskins to save the program, Angius said. Game and Fish has offered to donate excess trout from its hatchery system to Willow Beach until the facility is repaired.
“We have a lot of people helping us behind the scenes,” Angius said. “Chris Cantrell and Jim Devos from Arizona Game and Fish have come forward with offers of assistance and ideas. Sen. (John) McCain, Sen. (Jeff) Flake and Congressman (Paul) Gosar have been instrumental in letting the agency know that what they are doing is unacceptable.” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., has also spoken in favor of retaining the program. Others have weighed in on the future of the hatchery program throughout the West, including Nevada Sen. Dean Heller, Nevada Congressman Joe Heck, Arizona congress members Trent Franks and Ann Kirkpatrick, New Mexico Congressman Ben Lujan, Idaho Sens. Mike Crapo and James Risch, Utah Sens. Orrin Hatch and Mike Lee, and Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso.
“This is not a partisan issue. This is a future of the West issue,” Angius said.
Angius said she is scheduled to testify before the U.S. House Committee on Appropriations subcommittee on Interior, Environment and Related Agencies on April 10. She said she “will request that the broken pipe be repaired immediately and the rainbow trout stocking program at Willow Beach be fully funded.”
The program is part of a mitigation for the environmental impact of the Hoover Dam. “They have a legal obligation to keep it as a mitigation hatchery,” Angius said. “They contend Willow Beach is not a mitigation hatchery. We contend that it is. We believe we have the proof.”
But we had 5 billion to give to the Ukrainian Maidan “socialist national” movement.
Id rather have a trout hatchery
It’s all agenda driven.
It's for the fishzes.
Most of the stocked trout provide food for the striped bass.
CC
Ping
Dear Mojave County,
Hold a bake sale. Buy your own damned trout.
Leave the rest of us taxpayers out of it.
Thanks in advance.
L
It’s only taxpayer money they want to spend.
Dear Mohave county trout lovers.
Y’all are going about this from the wrong angle. You gotta set the right bait to get the enviroweenies hooked. Something along the lines of, Help us Greenies! Trout is bear food. Without trout all the bears in the world will starve to death. Oh noos! the horror!! the anguish!! Now go get y’all some private enviro funding and laugh all the way to the lake. happy fishing :)
A Game Warden always noticed that Old John always caught his limit of fish. One day he finally asked Old John how he always got his limit. Old John invited him to go along. It wasn’t long til they got to Old John’s favorite spot and anchored.
Old John reaches down into his tackle box and pulls out a stick of dynamite...lit it and threw it in the lake. KA-BOOM
Now there’s fish floating all over the place. “Whoa” said the warden “that’s illegal”. Well, Old John just reaches in and pulls out another stick. He lights it and throws it in.
KA-BOOM, more fish!
The Warden starts giving John the third degree, “John, I am going to have to arrest you if you do that again. It’s illegal to have dynamite, let alone use it for fishing”. While the warden is giving him the third degree, Old John just reaches in the tackle box and pulls out another stick of dynamite, lights it and tosses it to the Warden and said “Now, you gonna talk all day or fish”?
Excuse me Mr. Lurker, when the Hoover dam was built, the government. Made a contract to fix the damage that was done. That was 55 years ago. I agree with you, ultimately the State and/or County should and will take this over. But to end this program it without so much as a courtesy call will right now destroy our economy which is tourist based. Sport fishing puts billions of dollars into the economy across the Country. Of all the programs to cut now, this is not one of the. Do you have any idea how much money goes to endangered species? Your government is still spending the same amount of money, actually more, on endangered species that have a less than 1% survival rate in the water. It’s complicated.
Actually, substitute wolf. That’s another thing we are fighting here. the Feds are surrounding opus with wolves. We did toy with the idea to tell the ages that the Wolves eat trout and we were sure they wouldn’t take it away.
There is no such thing as a “contract” with the government. That’s been litigated to death.
This country is BROKE.
Buy your own damned trout. Keep your grubby paws off my paycheck.
L
In addition, we have offered to cost share and buy fish privately.. They won’t let us put “non-compliant” fish into the federal waterways. they have their own rules and regulations.. So I ask you, if you represented people who built their lives and livelihoods around a program that was legally mandated, what would you do?
I wish we could. but they won’t let us and I will not allow my County to wither and die because of their mismanagement. But I respect your opinion. You don’t have to be so nasty.
It’s all taxpayer money .. Everything. that’s the set up.. That’s the control. You tell the federal government to give the publicly held lands that they are illegally holding back to the States and you’ll see a boom in this Country like you’ve never seen. We are dying out here and the federal government is taking more of our land every day.
When did they take the lands from the states?
What would I do? I’d find a way for my County to buy its own damned trout and tell the Feds to go pee up a rope.
Screw their rules and regulations. Get the County Sheriff to tell them to get the hell out of his jurisdiction.
Stop being a sheep.
Ask Trout Unlimited. They seem to stick their noses into everything.
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