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Commentary: Pennsylvania Fish & Boat Commission should cut back on trout stocking

Pennsylvania Fish & Boat Commission’s trout stocking program isn’t well. What ails it? Money troubles. The commission recently staved off cuts to stocked trout by taking enormous taxpayer bailouts.

Over $100 million from a pool of tax money, Capital Funds, that’s intended for public infrastructure (roads, bridges, etc.) was instead used to pay for hatchery maintenance the commission couldn’t afford.

So did this huge sum of taxpayer money solve the agency’s hatchery money troubles?

No, $100 million in taxpayer bailouts was a temporary Band-aid for cash-consuming hatcheries still facing rising inflation and declining license sales. Thus, Timothy Schaeffer, Fish & Boat Commission executive director, and Sen. Greg Rothman are currently preparing a Senate bill to introduce this session attempting to divert yet even more money into hatcheries on an annual basis.

If passed, it would allow the trout-stocking program to raid the commission’s popular boat fund that pays for stream access, boat ramps, docks, parking facilities, kayak launches, boater safety and much more.

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So, how did a trout-stocking social program budget balloon into a burglar of funds meant for boaters and bridges? The short answer is, decades of legislators not addressing financial problems at the commission.

You may not have noticed the roughly 40% drop in fishing license sales beginning 35 years ago, in 1990. However, commission leaders and state legislators were well aware.

In fact, legislators ordered Penn State Smeal College of Business to analyze the Fish & Boat Commission’s finances in 2017. They identified cost issues from trout stocking as a key problem.

Penn State predicted license sales were likely to continue declining, a correct prediction 2017-present. Penn State also predicted license price increases could only offset fewer licenses sold to a point before price hikes declined license sales even further.

Thus, Penn State concluded that the Fish & Boat Commission “should” and “could” cut the number of both hatcheries and trout stocked to stay afloat financially and keep license costs controlled.

Commission leaders and their supervising legislators sadly didn’t heed Penn State’s recommendations. They instead awarded the aforementioned $100 million in taxpayer capital funds to hatcheries in 2020.

Director Schaeffer justified accepting this money with “trout production facilities are public infrastructure.”

He also attempted multiple times to deny the well-known fact that the commission’s stocked non-native brown and rainbow trout are highly invasive. In a recent Senate hearing, he lied to Sen. Cris Dush on tape, claiming the fish were “not invasive” only to be later corrected by multiple fisheries scientists on television.

In fact, the International Union of Conservation of Nature ranks brown and rainbow trout as top 100 most harmful invasive species out of 5,000 known globally. Bailing out invasive trout production instead of making cuts is what Director Schaeffer considers “public infrastructure” worthy of $100 million taxpayer dollars.

Spending on this social program continues to balloon out of control relative to its declining participation. We have to ask why it’s currently crickets from state legislators supposed to be preventing this kind of aforementioned waste, fraud, and abuse?

Sen. Rothman should be making the commission invest in public-fishing opportunity more wisely instead of raiding the boat fund with a Senate bill. Thirty-five years of declining license sales data prove the outdated myopic focus on stocking isn’t keeping people in fishing anymore.

Stocking has a place but it shouldn’t be bankrupting the Fish & Boat Commission. The agency is foolishly putting all its eggs in the hatchery basket. Instead, kids need more stream access near home and youth-fishing programs for already abundant wild fish.

The commission should secure the future of fishing with adaptation instead of stocking itself into bankruptcy.

(James Suleski is a native fish conservationist, stocking reform advocate as well as a passionate angler in central Pennsylvania, where he fishes, works and lives.)

13 thoughts on “Commentary: Pennsylvania Fish & Boat Commission should cut back on trout stocking”

Chris
April 23, 2025 at 5:45 pm

James you so very wrong to say that

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Melissa
April 23, 2025 at 8:07 pm

ooof all these financial facts are easily verified on google. this is pretty damning for PA fish and boat. this government agency is the definition of waste, fraud and abuse.

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Lou
April 23, 2025 at 8:25 pm

Put the money where it belongs. Into fixing the roads in Pa. Fix the potholes that are recking our cars. That’s what the money is for. I refuse to buy a license anymore.

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1. Mark
  April 26, 2025 at 3:26 am
  
  They need to up the stocking back to what it once was. 4 to 9 stockings per season on a lot of the streams. Not 4 to9 buckets at each spot/ bridge. Reduce smaller stream/ lake stocking. No programming will work if you don’t have fish to catch, or keep interst old or youth ! Get back to common sense, the money is there.
  
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2. Kevin Stahl
  April 26, 2025 at 8:03 am
  
  Maybe we should have an investigation on where the money is going!! How many overpaid people do they have. How much money is being spent on pet projects
  
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Jason
April 23, 2025 at 9:10 pm

I fish a few times a week, so the cost to me is minimal, but I understand why people who only have a few chances a year to hit the water don’t buy licenses anymore.
I would like to see a complete overhaul of the trout stocking system. I would also like to see the reduction of brown trout stocking and the complete end to rainbow stocking, replaced with brook trout.
The fish commission will tell you rainbows are more resistant to higher stream temps and easier to raise than brookies, but the answer to that is fix the habitat. Fix our eroded and polluted streams and give the fish the habitat they need to populate themselves.

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jarway66
April 23, 2025 at 10:33 pm

Interesting opinions and not far off mark. The trout stocking program is and has always been the Commission’s sacred cow and essentially untouchable because of political protection. As agency Director from 2010 through 2018, I repeatedly presented budgetary facts to both the PA House and Senate which showed the gradual decline of revenue do to declining license sales. I personally enlisted the help of PSU (not the legislature) to study the economics of our agency’s government business model. They concluded the same thing as I did. The agency needed to live within its means and not spend more than it earned. Following this advice, the Board supported the need to close two trout hatcheries and reduce the number of trout we raised and stocked. This made some anglers mad and they lobbied the legislature to fire me. Senator Scarnati introduced a Bill they called the “Arway Bill”which limited my term to 8 years which I had already surpassed. BTW- I explained that this action, if passed, would have violated the Constitution so it stalled out in the HR after breezing though the Senate and HGFC.

I retired in 2018?with the promise that they would pass legislation to grant the PFBC the authority to set our own license fees. Remarkably the bill was passed, Covid happened in 2020 and more people bought fishing licenses. However, Covid bump was short-lived and the license decline continues.

Time to take another look at reducing costs of raising trout as the author suggests and follow through with the recommendations of a business school and not a bunch of ill informed, biased politicians!

Resource First!

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1. Phil
  April 24, 2025 at 8:29 pm
  
  I appreciate everything you did during your tenure John.
  
  I submitted comments during the previous trout management plan comment period imploring the agency to start moving away from so heavily promoting stocked trout. The program is financially unsustainable.
  
  The agency’s social media pages are heavily stocked trout-centric. Then there’s this huge coordinated push in traditional media to promote stocked trout, especially leading up to opening day.
  
  Meanwhile, there is hardly anything of the same magnitude to promote our vast wild trout resources. Years ago, (I think 2005?) there was a brook trout plan published by the agency. In it one of the goals was to increase media outreach to educate the public about brook trout and to promote brook trout angling. That never happened. Now more recently, they’ve gone to great lengths to avoid mentioning brook trout specifically. Instead moving to simply referring to ambiguous “wild trout.” As if all wild trout are equal.
  
  We have so many fishing opportunities that take a back seat to stocked trout. It makes no sense to me that they insist on tying license sales to stocked trout. Trout stamp sales keep declining. It was a 6% drop between 23-24. We need more focus on naturally occurring species. Especially our native brook trout.
  
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  1. jarway66
    April 24, 2025 at 10:58 pm
    
    Thanks Phil. Much appreciated. When I was Director I continued to remind the Board that there was NO correlation between the numbers of trout stocked and the numbers of fishing licenses sold. Despite the facts, many Board members, then and now, don’t believe it. There was a paper published in a scientific journal that looked at this relationship for a variety of states that stocked trout and found the same thing. Stocking trout does not influence license sales.
    
    I personally support the need for some level of trout stocking since I have a camp in the ANF and enjoy fishing for them but this should not be at the expense of our native and wild trout resources. We have spent millions of dollars cleaning up PA waters and those are the ones that should be stocked. It’s past time to do a true cost/benefit analysis and let the chips fall where they may. It makes no sense to continue to raise and stock trout when participation rates continue to fall. To do so, compromises other services provided by the agency for our aquatic resource and the public. Here are some of my thoughts from 2011 which are still relevant today.
    
    https://www.pa.gov/content/dam/copapwp-pagov/en/fishandboat/documents/about-us/angler-and-boater/legacy-issues/2010s/documents/03marapr2011.pdf
    
    It is time for the public to get organized around this issue and demand a true accounting of the expenses and benefits of this program. The reality is that stock trout disappear from our waters at a rate of about 10% a week so they are essentially gone 10 weeks after their initial stocking. Factors include angler and other predation but most importantly floods, droughts and water temperatures.
    
    Hopefully this discussion will continue but unfortunately I see that even this edition of PA Outdoor News is still dominated by PGC issues although it’s not even spring turkey season but it is the third week of trout season.
    
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    1. Phil
      April 25, 2025 at 5:31 am
      
      It seems to me what makes the most sense is to tie stocking levels to participation levels. The easiest way to do this is to use trout stamp sales or a newly created stocked trout stamp to gauge actual participation, as some individuals purchase the trout stamp without fishing for stocked trout.
      
      That’s what the PGC did with pheasants. Perhaps they could reduce the cost of the base license and increase the cost of a stocked trout permit so that the overall cost of a license remains the same for people who want stocked trout, but people who don’t trout fish at all aren’t subsidizing a program they don’t use. Based on 2024 sales numbers, only about 56% of license buyers paid for a trout stamp. Again, not all of those folks buy a trout stamp to fish for stocked trout. Shouldn’t that percentage be mirrored in the money spent on hatchery trout?
      
      This problem will continue to worsen. The cost of raising trout will continue increasing while license sales remain in decline. The legislature and the public will likely have little appetite for raiding general tax funds or other special programs’ money (boat fund) within the agency to prop up a failing program. The more this program starts to impact other groups, the louder the voices for change will become.
      
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Pete
April 23, 2025 at 10:59 pm

They need to figure out why our creeks are void of life without trout stocking. When I was younger you could hardly cast a line without catching at least a sucker or crocker, but now there’s nothing.

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Bill Worobec
April 24, 2025 at 8:10 am

John Arway is correct. Stocking is not an answer to declining license sales.

Habitat protection and enhancement as well as protecting valuable, free wild trout and not stocking class A waters is a responsible approach. Removing gravel bars, dredging, straightening and over widening creeks are also detrimental practices that must not be allowed.
RESOURCE FIRST is the proven answer.
Resource First

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MR7183
May 1, 2025 at 4:47 pm

Stop stocking over wild trout. If you end all stocking on Natural Reproduction and Class A streams then stocking requirements will fall significantly and this problem will take care of itself. It’s that simple.

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