Some of you have asked what HHC did this last session.
Hunters Heritage Council Killed Bills 2022 Session
SB 5656: A bill that looks good on the surface, but is terrible. If the Senate does not confirm an appointment to the Fish and Wildlife Commission within 12 months, the appointment to the Commission expires and the Governor must provide a new appointment. If the Chair of the Natural Resources Committee doesn’t like an appointment he/she can sit on him/her, a potential for a horrible abuse of power. This bill also strips the balance doctrine on the Commission. Just an awful bill.
HB 2027: Another bill that looked good and had potential, but was poorly drafted. A joint legislative task force on the governance of the WDFW is created. This task force is charged with reviewing options to restructure or eliminate the Commission, recommend options for a new governance structure of WDFW, and review the statutory mandate (read into that, reduce the importance of hunting and fishing) of both the Department and the Commission. This bill had potential, it needed lots of work, but in its original form, it was garbage. The hunting community was way underrepresented, a representative from a true hunting group would never have been chosen, and the bill was way too partisan. I was asked about this bill in Northwest Sportsman; the animal-rights groups loved it, and I sure gave them an opposite opinion!
SB 5721: Consolidates WDFW into the Department of Natural Resources. Hunters and fishers would have lost big time with no Commission oversight and the stripping of the legislative mandate that hunting and fishing is a priority of WDFW. A putrid bill.
HB 1718: This is the reintroduction of HB 1375 from last session that banned mink and fur farming for COVID related reasons. They stripped the COVID-19 part of this bill and made it a pure animal-rights bill. This was a bill prohibiting activities related to the production and manufacturing of fur products. Another crazy bill.
SB 5708: This may be the most radical bill of them all. This bill would go further than the California fur ban. This would ban fur and taxidermy in the state of Washington. A crazy animal-rights bill.
ESSB 5613: This to me was the worst animal-rights bill of the session. This will have removed the county sheriff’s right to kill cougars, bears, or bobcats with the aid of a dog or dogs in a public safety response. This bill violates the Washington State Constitution as the county sheriff being the chief public safety officer, and would challenge the county sheriff as chief executive officer and conservator of the peace of the county in RCW 36.28.010. This would take away what little predator control we have. This passed the state senate on a straight party-line vote. After a lot of hard work, the Hunters Heritage Council killed this bill in the House Committee on Rural Development, Agriculture & Natural Resources.
SJM 8009: Senate Joint Memorials don’t do a thing in terms of policy. SJM 8009 wasn’t introduced until after our last legislative report was published. SJM 8009 calls for a national biodiversity strategy, supporting the Biden Administration policy. This just means that our state agrees or signs onto that policy agenda. The Center for Biological Diversity was pushing for this hard. This was a political muscle vote, which side hade or muscle to come out one top. We won.
