As you may have heard, over the last several years our hatcheries have been undergoing much needed deferred maintenance/upgrades (
https://cdfgnews.wordpress.com/2018/...d-maintenance/), have had gas bubble disease issues (
https://wildlife.ca.gov/Science-Inst...fornias-waters) and most recently have been infected with a novel bacteria (
https://nrm.dfg.ca.gov/FileHandler.a...=180707&inline) which necessitated the destruction of over 3 million hatchery trout. As a result, the number of trout available for stocking in southern California over the last 3-4 years has been severely reduced. The limited quantity of trout available necessitates allocation to lakes/streams that depend upon trout to provide viable fisheries.
Lake Perris is not one of those places. An angler survey/tagged trout study conducted 2009-2011 at Lake Perris showed that only 3.5-7% of the trout were reported as caught. Catch rates were OK ranging from 0.14 to 0.37 fish an hour (1 fish for every 3-5 hours of effort), however only 17% of the anglers that fished Lake Perris were targeting trout. Bass, panfish and unspecified target ("anything") anglers far outnumbered trout anglers. The dominant pursuit of other species and the poor return rate of trout at Lake Perris does not justify their stocking in lieu of lakes/streams that have much higher trout specific effort and return rates. The smaller County Park lakes and local mountain lakes/streams are an excellent example of waters that meet those criteria.
Additionally, CDFW has completed an extensive habitat mitigation project at Lake Perris to rehabilitate the warmwater fisheries that were affected by the prolonged drawdown necessitated by a dam remediation project (
https://wildlife.ca.gov/Science-Inst...ag/lake-perris). This project unto itself, has set Lake Perris far apart from any other fishery in southern California moving forward.
When the disease issues are resolved and hatchery production can again meet the needs of the lakes/streams that depend upon trout to provide viable fisheries, and if there is excess production (which there very well could be), then allocation decisions regarding lakes like Lake Perris will be re-evaluated at that time.