The Minnesota DNR recently announced cutbacks to trout stocking in lakes and streams and the partial shuttering of the French River Hatchery as the Kamloops rainbows formerly raised there are moved to another facility. To learn how stocking cutbacks may affect the average angler, I called Steve Persons, the DNR fisheries manager in Grand Marais. Within his work area are dozens of lakes stocked with stream trout. I wondered if the stocking reductions would reduce fishing opportunities.

“We are trying to maintain as much of the resource as we can with less stocking,” Persons explained, then detailed where the stocking reductions will occur.

In brook trout and splake lakes, stockings will be reduced to every other year rather than annually. Persons said the upside is this stocking regimen may allow fish managers to add more fish to a given lake. The downside is if a stocking fails, the lake will have poor fishing until it is stocked again and the trout grow to catchable size. This means when you try a lake, you may find lots of small trout from a recent stocking or a few fish (or none) remaining from earlier plantings.

“Anglers will have to keep an eye on the annual stocking reports,” Persons advised.

Other stream trout lakes are stocked with rainbow trout. Trout Lake, just a few miles outside of Grand Marais, will have yearly stockings of catchable rainbows replaced with plants of higher numbers of fingerlings. Persons says this may lead to better survival for the stockers.

However, it may be difficult to monitor the effects of the stocking changes here and on other lakes, because lake assessments have been already reduced and further cuts are planned. Persons’ field staff was slashed and can only do half as many lake surveys as they did 10 years ago. The Grand Marais fisheries office lost all of its seasonal crew except one individual and has been short one full time staff person for two years. Where there were once four field crews working on hundreds of fishing waters in Lake and Cook County during the summer, there are now only one or two.

“We’re trying to deliver as much services as we can,” Persons said, adding, “We haven’t done stream surveys for years. They’re too time intensive.”

The stocking reductions will continue. Next on the list are lakes managed for trophy trout fishing using restrictive bag limits. Several such lakes exist in remote areas, but Persons can’t establish whether anyone is fishing them. He’d like to hear fishing reports from Kraut, Peanut and Squash lakes, among others. With the cutbacks in lake surveys, angler reports are about the only information available for making the decision to stock or not to stock some lakes.

While the current stocking cuts won’t end the stream trout lakes program as we know it, anglers shouldn’t be surprised if the fishing going forward isn’t as good as it used to be. However, trout stocking regimes have fluctuated in the past and it is not uncommon for a lake to be planted with one species of trout and then another if the first doesn’t work out. Also, over the years lakes have been added to or dropped from the stream trout stocking program based on their suitability to support trout.

The difference this time around is the cuts are driven less by fisheries science than by the realities of a dwindling fisheries budget. And currently, for fisheries there is no light at the end of the financial tunnel. Even if fishing license fees increase in the future (not likely to happen in this legislative session), perhaps the best we can hope for is a continuation of the status quo of reduced programs, not a resumption of past efforts.

This suggests we are at a fisheries crossroads. For years, DNR officials told us maintaining fisheries staffing was more important than stocking fish, because the staff were needed to monitor the status of our natural fisheries. Now we’re finding out that unbeknownst to one million anglers, the DNR is tossing out the baby and the bath water. Not only are we stocking fewer fish, we also have too few staff to adequately monitor our fishing waters.

This is not a symptom of a weak economy—fishing license revenues have been short of expenditures for several years. Instead it’s a leadership issue. Why has our fisheries program fallen into such a deep financial hole? More importantly, how and when will we crawl out of it?