Originally Posted by
georatm2011
*this explains a few things, let me know what you guys think
My name is Brian Young. I am the coordinator for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s (Department), Fishing in the City Program (FIC), servicing Los Angeles and Orange counties, and alternately the rest of the South Coast Region (SCR) [Coastal counties from Santa Barbara to San Diego]. Thank you for your interest in the Department’s urban fish stocking efforts. I have been asked to better explain the Department’s channel catfish (catfish) stocking efforts, within SCR, as there has been much confusion over the matter in recent years.
In the interest of full disclosure, I may repeat some information that you have already been given, but it is important to understand how everything fits together. As you have already been informed the Department has, for many years, stocked catfish in many urban lakes within SCR. Though I cannot speak definitively about catfish stocking prior to August 2005, I can say with near absolute certainty that from August 2005 thru June 2013, up to 31 lakes within the counties of Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego were stocked once a month during the catfish delivery season (annually from May – November). What most people do not know is that the Department does not have any warm water fish hatcheries from which to produce catfish, and therefore must purchase, on contract, all the catfish that it stocks within the state. In SCR the responsibility for scheduling and paying for these plants rests with FIC, and at one point we were spending over $300,000 a year for catfish purchases.
This would not have been possible if it were not for grant funds the Department receives from the Federal Government through the Sport Fish Restoration Act (SFRA). As FIC is 100 percent grant funded through SFRA, no license money is used to purchase catfish for delivery to the urban lakes in SCR. What this also means is, like all grants, the granter gets to have a say in how the funds are spent. Since FIC is, at its heart, an Aquatic Education program (AE), and the underlying grant is for AE purposes, the grant administrators, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Service) has the right to review, and if they feel it is necessary, require FIC to make changes to the program.
At the end of 2012/2013 fiscal year the Service notified the Department that AE grant funds used for stocking fish must have an identifiable education component; and further cited that the current stocking policy used by FIC statewide did not fully meet this requirement. It is for this reason that catfish planting has been scaled back to its current levels.
As for your suggestion about finding additional funding, SCR FIC continues to look for alternate funding sources, but locating an extra $200,000 in annual funding is not a small task, and if we look at FIC statewide the number soars to more than $500,000 annually. FIC is also looking at updating education protocols to meet the Service’s requirements.
I hope this sheds some light on your questions and concerns. If you have any other questions, please feel free to contact me using the information below, or e-Mail me at