Published: June 05, 2009 09:59 am      

Fish agency needs fishbowl planning

I believe that the folks who run the Maryland Inland Fisheries Division are trying to become better communicators. I would add that it is about time.

Evidence of the attempt to communicate was the open house conducted May 9 at Allegany College of Maryland. It was on a Saturday and went on for seven hours.

The agency threw one stone at two birds that day, dealing with regulations being proposed for 2010 and also with the dissatisfaction of some Western Maryland anglers over the no-kill, no-bait brook trout regulations in much of the Savage River drainage.

Open houses have good points and bad. Such settings give an angler a lot of opportunity for one-on-one conversations, a lot of personal time with a biologist.

From the point of view of the agency, such open houses divide and conquer any opposition, not allowing one person to hear the objections or views of another person. Thus, verbal feeding frenzies usually do not take place.

In any event, I admire the agency for talking about the brook trout regulations even though it has been 2.5 years since they went into effect.

I have said to Bob Lunsford, former inland fisheries director, Don Cosden, current inland fisheries director, Howard King, former head of the whole fishing shebang, and now Tom O’Connell, current top guy for all of Maryland’s fisheries, that they would do well to copy the format of their wildlife sister agency in dealing with the public concerning regulations.

The Maryland Wildlife Service brings stakeholders together in Annapolis well before regulations are officially proposed. They say “Hey, this is what we are thinking about doing. This is why we are thinking that way. What do you think?”

Sometimes, based upon the reaction and reasoning, the agency changes the proposals. One such recent example is the backing off of a change in the opening day of mourning dove season. The agency was proposing to open the hunt on the first Saturday of September, but hunters wanted to keep it on Sept. 1 no matter upon which day of the week it fell. The hunters won.

Fishbowl planning — so named because everything is visible — is nothing new. Such planning brings interested parties into the process very early. The only reason to not have such planning is that there is something to hide or that the scientific facts do not back up your proposal.

O’Connell told me on May 9 that he knows the fish agency has some work to do in better communicating with the license buying public. I take that as a great starting point. I think it was important that the head fish guy thought enough to come to Cumberland on a Saturday in May to communicate. After all, there are a lot of things in and around the Chesapeake Bay with which he must deal as well.

I have read through the entire presentation about Western Maryland brook trout and you can too, even though you were not at the May 9 meeting. Go to www.md.dnr.state.us and then click on “fishing.” Down the page you will find a link to the 43-page brook trout document that was displayed at the local meeting.

Here are a few things I derived from the package.

• Brook trout monitoring will continue through 2013, thus I would think that the regulations will stay in place even though a decision about their viability was to be made at the end of 2011.

• The Savage River drainage regulations are to be used as a blueprint for managing other brook trout populations. The native brookie streams on the east side of Dan’s Mountain are described as needing intensive protection, so it isn’t a far reach to envision no-bait, no-kill rules being instituted there.

• The agency wrote, “We work hard to provide the public with accurate information, but sometimes this information is misunderstood or gets mis-communicated by the media or stakeholders. We understand that this is a result of passionate people dealing with complex issues.”

If wrong, I will stand corrected. I am not aware of any other medium contesting the brook trout regulations or reporting in depth about them other than the Cumberland Times-News and any journalist other than yours truly. I would have had no problem if either my employer or I had been identified. There is no need to take a shot at the entire media world.

Contact Michael A. Sawyers at msawyers@times-news.com.