[Music] Lakeland Currents, your public affairs program for north central Minnesota.

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Hello again, everybody, and welcome to Lakeland Currents.

Tonight I get to talk about one of my favorite topics, fishing, with two people who are really doing some good things in the fishing arena, I'm sure things that a lot of you have not heard about, MN-FISH and we're going to talk a little bit about MN-FISH, but before we do that I want to introduce you to my guest.

First, Garry, let's start with you, Garry Leaf.

I'm Garry Leaf and I'm a founding board member of MN-FISH and I guess the role I play is kind of figuring out, you know, the vision, the strategy, and tactics and, you know, on how we deal with the legislature.

You've done a lot of things in the outdoor arena.

Could you just share a few of those others?

Well I suppose the biggest one that I did was the involvement in the Legacy Amendment in '08 and I did the outdoor heritage piece, and in particular the Lessard-Sams Outdoor Heritage Council was a piece that I championed.

And I did the ballot campaign and that basically invests now somewhere around $160 million per year in fish, game and wildlife habitat throughout the state.

And Mark, who's a former DNR commissioner, is fortunate enough to actually serve on that so he sees all those projects.

But that started out at about 60 to 70 million per year, now it's 160 million.

Wow.

And it did a, you know, project near the Brainerd Lakes Area, with Mississippi Northwoods Habitat Project.

That's about 2,000 acres, that was 13 million.

It did another one that was as much as 40 million.

But it does, you know, waterfowl production areas, wildlife management areas, easements, you know, a lot of those kind of things.

And Mark, Mark Holsten, you used to be the DNR commissioner.

That's quite a political job, isn't it?

And what's your background besides being a DNR commissioner?

Obviously you worked your way up through the rank with the DNR.

You know what I started out as a legislator.

I got elected from my home community down in Stillwater, central Washington County area.

I represented that area for 10 years, and then in 2003 I was asked to resign from the legislature and go in and as Deputy Commissioner of the DNR.

And then eventually became commissioner in 2008.

And your title now is executive director, now I'm the Executive Director of MN-FISH Sport Fishing Foundation.

And let's just talk a little bit about what is MN-FISH.

MN-FISH is a group of 18 board members who volunteer their time to, what we're trying to do is, become a voice for the average angler here in the state, working with the Department of Natural Resources on their regulations, on their rules, on their stocking programs, all that DNR does around fishing.

Work with the administration and try to influence the legislature to whatever they're working on or try to adapt our ideas of what we want to see and the investments we want to see made back into fishing here in Minnesota.

So that's what we do, we work very closely, intimately with the legislature, the governor's office and the DNR and just trying to make fishing better here in Minnesota.

So who technically started MN-FISH?

That was a number of us got together, and I can tell you what the primary issue was, I brought what the issue was on why we should form it, which is this: the thesis was kind of a simple one, to make it understandable.

Fishing is twice as big as hunting, twice as big.

It generates $300 million a year in tax revenue to the state of Minnesota, and the argument being made was we need to see if we can figure out a way to get some of that money back and reinvested in the resource, in the infrastructure for fishing.

So our first target were the fish hatchery system.

The next target was the public boat access system throughout the state.

And the public boat accesses hadn't had a voice representing the accesses on every lake to repair that infrastructure.

Infrastructure hadn't had a voice in 20-30 years is what I was told.

And that's what we found out was that there was, fishing was, had been in essence taken for granted over a long period of time where it kind of actually went to the bottom because it didn't have a voice.

The number one game species in the state arguably is the walleye and there's not, there wasn't before we started, a walleye or a lobbyist at the capital, there wasn't a walleye at the capital, but that was as rare as a lobbyist representing the walleye.

So that's why we initially formed it, and as we've gotten much deeper into issues we're looking at, you know, campaigns to keep lakes clean from ice fishing, we're looking at an invasive carp barrier in southern Minnesota, stop carp moving forward in Minnesota.

We're looking at a lot of youth type things.

So there's the amount of things we thought and the amount of things there actually is a greater role than what we thought.

We're going to have to keep going back for fish hatcheries and public accesses.

They have a lot of them throughout the state that really need some money.

I am, full disclosure, I am a life member of MN-FISH, so I'm very proud to be a part of this organization and I think when you look at an average fisherman, let's just say on Gull Lake, you go to Gull Lake and they got a beautiful ramp, nice concrete there, they don't see the issues that you folks are looking at statewide where so many lakes have access that are it's almost risky backing into them with the dirt and the mud and I think that's really important that you've identified areas that have been ignored probably for all of our lives for the most part.

The thing on the boat access is it's commonly viewed that it's just, you know, transient anglers or boaters using the ramps.

That's not true.

Every fall, to winterize a boat, how do most, you know, the bulk of people on the lake get their boat out of the water to winterize it and all these storage sheds, storage buildings are building everywhere.

They're using the public access.

And we've heard stories of damaged boats and, you know, where there's drop offs.

And we kind of did a little social media campaign which was let us know where the worst public access is in the state and we had a lot of responses to it.

It was really quite comical.

We did the opposite, you know, kind of and they was instantaneous.

I think we got a pretty good response on anglers and public boat access users.

I laugh because I wrote a book about the Nisswa Guides League and I know Garry you've read it.

There is a photo in there of Fritz Potoff who used to be one of the Nisswa guides with his tractor driving out into the lake to recover a boat that got away from them cuz the landing was so bad they couldn't get a trailer on it.

Yeah.

And that's in this area, this Brainerd area, it's not far away.

Well Hubbard County, I think it was, has something, I can't recall the exact number, but it's in the hundreds of public boat accesses and it's not just the access itself.

One big issue for anglers is parking spaces.

You know as boats have got gotten bigger, they certainly haven't gotten smaller, you know that people aren't using 14-16t Lunds with a 20 horse anymore, they're getting bigger boats of all types.

Pontoon boats are way beyond anything I envisioned.

Fishing boats are certainly bigger than they, you know, even bigger, you know, keep growing.

That means that puts more stress and strain on the parking spaces as well as the ramps.

So, you know, we're working with the marine manufacturers and a bunch of other partners and, you know, on that issue.

So historically the legislature valued and wanted to make sure the public were able to access our lakes and our rivers and so the legislature invested in building public accesses and maintaining them.

Something happened about 20 some years ago where that just stopped and the legislature quit making those Investments.

And so we've done our homework, kind of shows us that fishing and boating generates about 4.4 billion dollars into our state economy and it's actually higher than that today.

Their new numbers have just come out but we're still kind of just using last year's numbers.

But it's about a $4.4 billion economic impact and as Gary said that generates hundreds of millions of dollars to the state in general fund tax revenues, and so when the legislature stepped away from public accesses, funding those, building new ones or maintaining them, a shelf life of a boat access is only about 15 to 20 years.

That's about how long just because of the weather conditions, changing water levels, and the boats are different than they were 20 years ago, they're bigger, they're stronger, more power and so that just puts a lot more pressure on that infrastructure.

So when the legislature steps away from it for over 20 years that creates a massive backlog of deferred maintenance and repair needs into our public access system.

The DNR is managing about 1,500 public accesses.

There are totally over 3,000 public accesses in the state of Minnesota that your city may be doing it, the county, federal government's doing some.

So there's just kind of this mismatch out there of all these public accesses.

And not all coordinated and not.

Well, no, there's a good coordination but when you take away investments, that deterioration that's what we've been experiencing as anglers and that's where MN-FISH has stepped in and try to say, okay, this is got to stop, we've got to get some of that reinvestment, some of that tax revenue that we generate every year, that's got to get started to be reinvested back in.

I know, Ron Schara is the president of the organization, and you have boards of 18 is it.

Eighteen members.

How do you select the board of members and could you give us some idea who some of them are.

I was going to look at Mark, have him answer that question.

It's well we've got when we first started out I think we maybe had eight, maybe less than that, something like that, and then we started, you know, asking the question what kind of industry people do we need and what kind of people with experience and influence that we would need.

But also a big part of it is where they believe they want to spend some time of their own time to figure out how do we get kids involved and how do we reinvest in the sport and so, you know, some of the people like John Peterson of Northland Fishing Tackle or Jeff Arnold with Reeds, you know a number of these people, Dave Osborne of Clam, a lot of these people have really, you know, decided that yeah, this is what we need to do and we need to figure out how do we make a difference and give back to what the sport gave them.

Or, you know, and the opportunities everybody got.

So we have on the board, it's kind of a mix of people.

So we got industry people like Garry has talked about.

Garry's on the board.

We got fishermen like Babe Winkleman, Tom Neustrom who's a guide out of Grand Rapids, Danny Suggs from down in the metro area.

We have other people like Craig Wilson's coming out of Duluth, Kristen Merwin who was former president of WAM, Women Anglers of Minnesota, she's on our board.

Steve Pennaz, as you've mentioned.

Trying to think who else is on the board.

So you have a really good balance of individuals and industry folks.

Yes.

And how often do you meet?

Well during, you know, roughly we try to meet once every month and a half, something like that.

And you know the other piece that we have, that's a major piece on the tip of the spear for us, basically is we have lobbyists over there.

We have four lobbyists over there all the time and they then funnel the information to us and then set up meetings.

So then, you know, like this week I'll be going to a meeting that they have set up with some industry people and, you know, some legislators and try to give them some idea on what we're thinking about.

And the really big thing with fishing versus all other forms of natural resource stuff is that there's a strong interest in the metro area and a lot of metro area anglers.

We got some of our best comments by legislators in districts you'd never think of that are really interested in fishing.

It's very hard to do it on some other stuff like hunting, you know, they're not in Minneapolis, they're not going to be, but everybody's really thankful you know for the Lakes we have, the fishing we have, and then they also want to try to get how do we get our kids, you know, involved in fishing like we were involved in fishing.

We can't do it the same way.

It's a different world now, but you know, there's ways to create opportunities like the high school fishing leagues.

There's a program in the metro area called FiN, that is they manage a small two, three, four acre body of water, just like they would one of the big lakes.

They stock it, they manage it, and the kids flock to it.

And what I say on that is that we're in a battle against the smartphone.

I mean all the kids are glued to the phone and they're missing a lot of experiences we think that they'll value by participating in the outdoors and in particular in fishing.

Just talk a little bit Mark about the hatcheries.

Sure, because I remember talking with Ron Schara and reading his articles about the state of the conditions of the hatcheries before you guys got involved.

You know I venture to guess most anglers don't realize that we have hatcheries in the state, but there are 15 hatcheries spread throughout the state and most of those hatcheries were built in the 50's and the 60's.

They're old.

I mean they're in the basements of some of the old, think about your old high school, this is the old science lab down in the basement.

Or what was there before the old high school.

Exactly.

No I mean it.

So they're kind of archaic structures and facilities because we haven't been making this routine investment over the last 20- 30 years.

They're in really dire shape and when we kind of talk about saying well you got to get the duct tape and the bailing wire out, literally, they do.

It's that old where they have to go around and they've got boxes, somebody goes to Menards or Home Depot and they've just got the box of scrap stuff to go on the piping to keep the pipes going.

But we've learned a lot and our hatchery system has changed dramatically, the needs of them.

So when they were first created back in the, you know, the 50's and the 60's, you know, they could take the eggs, fertilize them, grow the fry, grow the fingerlings, and put them out.

But now they're dealing with water quality issues, water temperature issues, invasive species, disease.

So our fisheries managers are dealing with a whole lot of really complicated things to manage these fisheries or these hatcheries that they didn't have to 30,40,50 years ago and that just creates a whole lot of technology that they have to start incorporating in.

So we're looking at the system and looked at what the, you know, knowing what I did as commissioner and what we did when I was in the legislature, you know, you deal with what you have and you fix what you can, when you can.

What we've come to the conclusion of is that we should stop the basic maintenance and basic fixing of our hatcheries, we should start looking at what the needs are in the future.

So let's start not fixing them, let's rebuild them.

Let's rebuild them, let's modernize so that we can meet the future next 30,40 years of fishing hatchery needs here in the state.

So that's what our approach is.

We're systematically going through our hatchery system, working with the legislature to get the funds to start the rebuilding of those hatcheries.

What are those hatcheries raising?

I know walleye is one of them, but what else.

Well we've got, there's two hatcheries down in the southeast that they're doing trout, they're doing brook trout, brown trout, lake trout they're doing for the stocking of the streams and the lakes.

But then there are obviously walleye.

A lot of people don't realize but we stock Northern Pike in southern Minnesota.

So there's Northern Pike hatchery stocking going on.

Obviously the walleye.

Then there's muskie, muskie throughout the state.

They're moving, they're growing those fish and moving them where they need to stock them.

They do occasionally they've done bass in the past, catfish to get things started and reestablished.

So they've been involved in stocking a lot of different species over time and based upon the needs that are going on throughout the state.

So it is multi-species that they're dealing with but it ebbs and flows depending upon what the plan is.

And I know this past couple winters have been hard on rearing ponds, lots of freeze outs.

We've lost a lot of the bait fish in the business I'm in just because they froze out.

So it's interesting.

Bait has been a big issue for us that we weren't really thinking about a couple years ago when we were getting started.

But we've really had to step into that issue, ease into that issue, and try to provide some support to the bait industry, work with the DNR to identify a very complex business system of getting bait out of ponds or out of lakes and getting them into the bait shops.

You would think it's that simple, but there's a lot of moving parts and a lot of things have changed over the last 20 years that's created some problems that we're working on trying to provide some relief from regulation changes.

The DNR has been very helpful on that but there are a whole lot of other issues.

I mean these last two years have been real rough on with drought as you said.

We need, freeze out is good, but you can't freeze out every year, right, and so water levels that's been an issue.

Competition for ponds is increased dramatically for the bait industry.

But you were going to say... Yeah a couple things on that one is for example, when we started doing the research on it, yeah was like the St. Paul Fish Hatchery was established in 1877.

What does that raise?

That one raises walleyes.

So if there's a walleye caught in the metro area, its origins are out of that hatchery.

Interesting.

So we at first we had a hard time finding it.

Then we got the governor went over there, legislators went over there and they couldn't believe it, that this thing was operational, you know.

So this goes back, that was the first hatchery, that goes back.

But the way we structured it with fish hatcheries, and what they do and a lot of legislators didn't know what they did.

A fish hatchery, what's that?

You know they just assume this and that.

Then public boat access ultimately led to the largest investment in fisheries by a state, certainly within maybe ever, and within the last year or two for sure.

More than Michigan, more than Wisconsin.

There won't be any other state we've looked at that put more money, reinvested more money in fish.

So we went from nothing, negative, nothing, whatever that is, zero but back very little where hatcheries were sitting there for years and just got, you know, some money for duct tape, sat there for years, you know, waiting on an order of bailing wire, and they're literally, like you said, that's how they're holding them together.

We went from nothing to getting this large investment.

What's the total, it's well over 100 million.

Well the total package came out at about 98.1 million, almost $100 million.

We were asking for about 115 total, that was what our kind of our that's what our ask was.

We had it laid out.

And the legislature came in with 98.1.

Wow.

Good things can happen from that.

And we started with a small one to go on the other end, which was $3-400,000, a grant program going to the State High School Fishing Leagues so that they could apply and get money to grow their High School fishing leagues.

And then we've added on, you know, we're working on a whole bunch of other, you know, strategies and areas to invest in in this next year, including the hatcheries and the public accesses.

We'll be back for those, but then we have other areas we're going to be working on too.

You folks have done a really good job with the legislature and I know you had the governor on board and you had the DNR commissioner on board.

You did your homework.

Your experience in the legislature I'm sure has helped, as yours has, you both have spent a lot of time.

I'd like to say we're lucky rather than good.

You know we were very, very fortunate that they actually used the talking points, a lot of times themselves, and, you know, we just got into the right circumstance where we were able to get that investment into fisheries.

You know when you have the volume of people who angle in this state as we do, the passion that Minnesotans have for angling.

I mean we know we sell 1.4 million licenses every year, all right, and then you throw the kids in on top of that, you're up in that 25 to 30% of the state wets a line every year.

So that's a great starting point.

And talking to legislators, and this last election was a massive seat change at the capital.

There were so many new legislators.

I mean the change not Democrat, Republican, that's a different issue.

But this was just so many new legislators who knew nothing about the process, about the system, about what angling is or what angling isn't.

And so we've been spending a lot of time, at 15 minute increments, meeting with legislators for 15 minutes, that's all we get, and try to explain to them what fishing means to Minnesota and what we need from them to reinvest back into this.

So it's been a real heavy year and we've got another couple years of real heavy.

The thing is, if we do get 15 minutes per legislator, so we know how to do it, I've figured out how to do it in a lot less time than that, you know, to give them the main points of what we're doing, but if we don't ask for the money another interest group will, you know, and so the, you know, squeaky wheel gets the grease or whatever it is, is literally true.

And so you have to ask for it, you have to be over there.

And now they're coming to us saying well do you have any ideas for fishing or, you know, I have people in my district what do you think of that?

We're down to a couple minutes left, but could you tell people how to get involved with the organization, what does it cost to be a member.

The simplest way to get in there is go to mn-fish.com.

That will bring you right to our website and from there you can peruse through the information we have on there.

You can join by becoming an annual member.

$35 a year gets you an annual membership.

Or you can become a life member.

$250 gets you a life membership.

So that's the easiest way for us to do it.

And what do they get if they become a member, is there anything, any benefits, do they get a newsletter or.

We do, you know, we say quarterly newsletters.

We probably put a newsletter out probably once every six weeks.

We've been averaging doing that this year, so we actually over perform on the newsletter side than what we offer.

But that's really it.

It's about providing you the information, letting you know what we're trying to do on your behalf.

We're trying to keep fishing strong here in Minnesota and we can't do that without the anglers wanting to participate and support that voice at the capital.

And I know the current governor and the current DNR commissioner are very supportive of your organization.

I think they've, I know they came and spoke when we had our yearly meeting here.

That just shows again the work that you guys have been doing is making a difference.

Well it's fishing, you know, I mean if there's a, you know, it's a nonpartisan.

You know walleye, a walleye isn't a Republican or Democrat or whatever it is fortunately.

So far.

So far anyway that might get politicized.

I hope not.

So there's, you know, a broad range of just generalized interest by the legislators and it's an area that they can participate in too, you know.

So they're and they may be involved and we've been very fortunate with the legislative support, the governor's support, and DNR support on all different sides of the political spectrum.

Yeah, great.

Well, Garry and Mark, thank you very much for taking the time to come up here and share with us what's going on.

It's very interesting and exciting.

I think you guys are doing a great job.

Thanks a lot.

You've been watching Lakeland Currents.

I'm Ray Gildow.

So long until next time.