Gov. Kate Brown set the hook on sport anglers this past week with her appointment of an Astoria gill-net industry strategist to the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission.
Bruce Buckmaster's nomination, due for Senate confirmation in a hearing May 14, is already drawing rapid and rabid fire. A closed meeting scheduled for Wednesday in the Oregon State Library to introduce appointees to invited user groups was canceled late Friday by the governor's office.
There will be no public forum on the appointments until May 14.
Spokesmen for both the Oregon chapter of the Coastal Conservation Association and the Association of Northwest Steelheaders, their members already bristling over substantial hunting and fishing fee increases proposed over the next six years, urged members to contact their senators and oppose Buckmaster.
"The appointment ... feels like a slap in the face to 600,000 angling license buyers," said Bruce Polley of Sherwood, vice president of CCA/Oregon.
Buckmaster was one of four nominees to the commission.
Two others, Holly Akenson of Enterprise and Michael Finley of Medford, are re-appointments. Finley is the commission chair.
Jason Atkinson, former legislator and Republican gubernatorial candidate, has also been appointed to the Fish and Wildlife Commission
The fourth is Jason Atkinson of Medford, former Republican legislator and one-time gubernatorial candidate. Atkinson, a fly-fisherman, has been active in Klamath River issues, among others. His appointment is viewed as a balance to Buckmaster, but sport anglers were hoping for a commissioner with more specific angling orientation. Among several well-qualified applicants was Madelynne Sheehan of Scappoose, an environmental lawyer and publisher of "Fishing in Oregon."
Anglers already chafing over the fee increase fear for the future of the fledgling Columbia River plan, which shifts commercial, non-tribal, nets into off-channel zones by 2017. It was strongly opposed by gill-netters, led in part by Buckmaster and Salmon For All.
The CCA nearly launched an initiative petition to ban outright the use of gill-nets in the state, but then-Gov. John Kitzhaber steered them instead into the legislature, where the plan was adopted into law.
Buckmaster's appointment, if confirmed, could resurrect the ballot initiative and help torpedo the proposed fee increase, already under fire.
Richard Whitman, Gov. Brown's natural resources adviser, acknowledged the potential damage to the fee increase, but said it may be doomed anyway.
Whitman pointed to Buckmaster's extensive background in fisheries, well beyond the net issues, and said the appointment is also meant to "help heal wounds" in Clatsop County, where netters and their neighbors feel disenfranchised.
"We have to give the plan a chance to work," Whitman said.
Perhaps, given a little more background, the same should be said of Buckmaster's appointment.
Whitman and Gov. Brown personally interviewed Buckmaster, as did Kitzhaber. Whitman said Buckmaster assured them of his support for the Columbia River plan.
Buckmaster, 64, is the former owner of Bio-Oregon in Warrenton, a hatchery fish food manufacturer. He is also an avid sport angler.
His credentials include commercial and hatchery experience from Chile to Alaska, service on the Columbia River Sea Lion Task Force, the Oregon Hatchery Resource Center Advisory Board and the Oregon Department of Fish & Wildlife's Native Fish Policy Task Force.
"Nobody thinks one man can come in and throw the Columbia River plan in the trash," Buckmaster said. "That's just not going to happen."
While he doesn't agree with everything in the new Columbia River plan, "We're going to have to make that policy work," Buckmaster said. "If it takes seines, fine, although the jury is still out on seines; and fine, let's find more off-channel areas to put fish. We were told this will become a win-win for everyone. I'm interested in making that happen."
Hatchery and harvest reform are long overdue, Buckmaster said. "I'm about two things; first is abundance, second is that no one group should get it all, not commercial and not sport. There has to be access to fish for the general public."
Buckmaster said he wants to revisit the hotly contested barbless hook rule, which he said "doesn't seem necessary to me."
He also is open to reviewing the controversial sport-closure bubble in front of Youngs Bay, with an eye to making it more accessible to sportfishing as long as there are no adverse effects to commercial harvests.
In the end, however, he said there is much work to do statewide well beyond the Columbia River plan.
His detractors, Buckmaster said, "don't know me. I'm not a bomb thrower. I'm much more interested in abundance and hatcheries and hatchery reform than fish fights."
We'll all be watching.
-- Bill Monroe