In November 2022, the Washington Fish and Wildlife Commission voted to permanently eliminate the state’s spring black-bear hunt by a 5-4 margin. Now, the Sportsmen’s Alliance is seeking to remove four of the five commissioners who voted against the hunt, claiming that they “demonstrated incompetence, misconduct, and malfeasance” in the events leading up to the vote.
On May 16 of this year, the Sportsmen’s Alliance filed a petition with Governor Bob Ferguson, asking him to remove four commissioners: Barbara Baker, Lorna Smith, Melanie Rowland, and John Lehmkuhl. The fifth member who voted against the hunt, Tim Ragen, is no longer on the board. According to the petition, the named commissioners used a daisy-chain communication technique to shore up the necessary support to cancel the bear hunt before the public meeting in 2022 even began, thereby circumventing state law governing how public boards must operate.
The request, in its current form, is a plea to the Governor asking him to remove the members. Despite the petition’s lack of legal standing, it presents claims that appear to be substantive beyond the usual antics of a lobby group. The request is backed by “evidence” obtained via a public-records request submitted to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) by the Sportsmen’s Alliance on September 10, 2023.
Following the public-records request, WDFW’s records analyst identified 471,000 documents pertaining to the bear-hunt vote and communications leading up to it. Over the course of nearly a year and a half, however, the department produced only 119 of the documents. On January 28, 2025—a total of 500 days after the request—the Sportsmen’s Alliance sued WDFW, claiming that “anyone with a modicum of knowledge of human history would have good reason to believe that the state of Washington will cease to exist as a political entity long before Department of Fish and Wildlife completes its production.”
In the small number of documents they did manage to procure, though, the Sportsmen’s Alliance claims there is ample evidence that the five commissioners privately colluded to can the bear hunt.
According to the petition, the commissioners would meet in groups of three or four, then send one or two representatives to lobby other commissioners, effectively creating a wall of support while skirting Washington’s legal requirement that a majority of members be present to constitute a “meeting.”
The petition reads, “This is the very definition of a political cabal flouting the public’s strong interest in transparent government. When you read these thousands of pages, as we have, it is beyond obvious that this practice was a well-honed routine among Baker, Lehmkuhl, Rowland, Smith, and former commissioner Regan. We see often, ‘Don’t reply here’ and other devices deployed to encourage daisy-chaining as the preferred method to avoid the Open Public Meetings Act. The result, unfortunately, is that the actual commission meetings are clearly nothing more than a sham, with a preordained decision well in hand before the public is invited or allowed to participate in any meaningful way.”
MeatEater reached out to Commissioner Lehmkuhl (one of the four named in the petition) for comment. “I’ve fished and hunted all my life and worked in the profession for 50 years, so I’m a bit unsettled that a hunter organization, and its members in Washington, would attack me this way,” he said in an email. “I’ve always made myself available to hunters to discuss the issues, just as I do with all interest groups, because it’s my job. The Sportsmen’s Alliance has never contacted me, nor according to our records have they commented publicly on hunting issues before the Commission in the last several years since records have been kept. I guess I don’t understand hunters these days.”
He also noted that, “allegations of me breaking the law should be litigated in the courts, not on Facebook or in internet forums where the burden of proof is non-existent.”
Indeed, the Sportsman’s Alliance has been making videos with the evidence they’ve been turning up in public records—likely as a tactic to increase pressure on Governor Ferguson. The videos, for the most part, are voice-over screen captures of text message and email exchanges between commissioners. And though the narrator frequently interjects with his own opinions, the videos serve as a valuable window into how the commission functions outside of official meetings. The board—to nobody’s surprise—appears to have a serious transparency issue.
“Going through the information and emails, it just feels like someone unfogged the glass for the past few years, but there wasn’t a surprise in the clarity,” Washington BHA Co-Chair Mandy Wittmier said. “While there is a lot of smoke from information that has surfaced, and it is concerning, distressful, and distasteful, it’s still hard to find the real fire—if there is something in there that is legally enforceable or something that rises to the governor’s desk to take decisive action. The commission has yet another opportunity to fix itself, but it has to have the desire and leadership to do so.”
Wittmier also mentioned that several commissioners, including Lehmkuhl, are reluctant to engage at all with BHA and other sportsmen’s groups, despite their legal mandate to cooperate with groups and individuals.
Bigger picture, it’s clear that the Washington commission has some work to do. An external review conducted last year—though mostly devoid of details—repeatedly highlights the lack of transparency and accountability, and notes that some people think the commission is unreasonably biased toward special interests, specifically animal rights groups.
The question now is: will the Governor step in, per the Sportsmen’s Alliance request, or will the same problems continue to plague the commission? Will the commissioners step up to the plate and take accountability, or will they disappear back into the fog? Either way, the next few months could be telling as the Governor’s office weighs the options.
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