Tacoma Weekly: State plans for hatchery do not pass sniff test

From the Tacoma Weekly:

A concern for the Puyallup Tribe is the fact that part of the federal land claims settlement involved the Tribe paying for construction of a major part of the hatchery in exchange for the state’s promise to use it to increase annual Steelhead production on the Puyallup River system from 100,000 to 200,000. The Tribe has approached the state to buy the hatchery but the discussions went nowhere; more recently the Tribe asked about leasing it for Steelhead production instead of trout, but the state rejected that idea, saying the state only wanted lake trout to stock lakes for recreational fishing. Even if the state required a private operator to only produce trout at the hatchery, this deal – any deal – at least should have been a matter of public negotiations rather than a no-bid contract of a public resource like Fish and Wildlife officials did with Pacific Seafood, tribal officials said. That is especially true when wildlife officials had been apparently telling legislators and Tribal officials no such deal was even in the works.