Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar wrote a letter on Friday to the director of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service seeking answers to the future of the rainbow trout stocking program at the Willow Beach National Fish Hatchery. The Service claimed could not afford necessary repairs to a water line to continue the program.
On July 25, 2014, the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Fisheries, Wildlife, Oceans and Insular Affairs Subcommittee held a hearing on Gosar’s legislation, H.R. 5026, the Fish Hatchery Protection Act, and revealed “some troubling things,” according to Gosar.
In his letter Gosar writes, that the Service revealed that it “failed to hold a public comment period and did not consider job losses or associated economic impact before terminating important recreational fishing programs. Even Deputy Director Steve Guertin testified, ‘This was not our [USFWS] finest hour’.
“The Deputy Director went on to testify that USFWS did not consider 1,700 jobs in Mohave County and $75 million in economic output associated with the Willow Beach Hatchery or the 4,000 jobs and $80 million in payroll nationally before terminating rainbow trout stocking programs throughout the country. I call on USFWS to find a solution for the Willow Beach Hatchery and resume the rainbow trout stocking program as soon as humanly possible,” concluded Gosar.
In an exchange during the July 25, 2014 Gosar said, “The Fish and Wildlife Service stated in a letter to this Subcommittee sent on May 30, 2014 that the reason for terminating the rainbow trout stocking program at the time was that the agency didn’t have the 1.5 to 8.5 million dollars to repair a broken water [supply] line and to keep the trout stocking program going… Recent engineering reports indicate that these estimates were a gross exaggeration and that the broken water [supply] line would only cost around $100,000 to fix. If the water, now listen very carefully, if the water supply line is fixed, does the Fish and Wildlife Service plan to reinstate the trout propagation program at the Willow Beach Hatchery?”
Willow Beach National Fish Hatchery is located on the Arizona side of the Colorado River eleven miles below Hoover Dam, within Lake Mead National Recreation Area. According to the Service, historically, Willow Beach stocked rainbow trout from Lake Powell to Yuma, Arizona. Shortly after the Endangered Species Act was enacted in 1973 the hatchery began working with threatened and endangered fish native to the Colorado River. In the past the hatchery has worked with the endangered Colorado pikeminnow and humpback chub.
The Service had announced that as of 2014 “the hatchery will no longer be raising rainbow trout and will focus on work with the endangered bonytail chub and razorback suckers in partnership with the Bureau of Reclamation and the states of California, Nevada and Arizona as part of the Lower Colorado River Multi-Species Conservation Program.”