Wilkerson admitted, with brutal honesty, that the state had made mistakes. “I think we’ve made a lot of serious resource errors in preparation for the litigation. Because we’re preparing for court, we’re not focused on the resource. I think you are as concerned as I am about the conservation.”
At least three people on Ludlow Bay were sanguine. “The most optimistic people in the room were Billy Frank, Jim Waldo, and Bill Wilkerson, and it probably stopped there,” Wilkerson laughs, “but we were willing to give it a try. We first had to identify all the things that we had done over the last few years that had created the awful atmosphere. One of the top issues was a lack of respect.”
A cooperative spirit soon took hold. Eventually, onetime adversaries found common ground. Both groups recognized shared interests in conserving the resource and securing a treaty with Canada. Both groups acknowledged they’d be far better off working the issues out themselves. They agreed to leave attorneys out of the conversation.
“If I hadn’t been here and if you, as a news reporter, wrote everything that happened, I wouldn’t believe it when I read it,” said one shocked attendee.
“We don’t want nobody coming through that door that’s going to be negative,” Billy insisted. “We don’t have time to sit here and talk about the past. Some days it looks pretty gray. But there is always a little blue sky that opens up. You don’t expect giant steps, just little ones.”
“Billy was just the glue in a lot of ways,” Wilkerson says of the more collegial atmosphere that began at Port Ludlow. “He kept the tribes coming to those discussions. He was chair of the Commission [NWIFC]. If we were dealing with north Puget Sound, Billy was making sure that all of the tribal leaders that were involved in that, and the biologists, were in the room. I made sure that my north Puget Sound staff was in the room. We just kept working on it. We didn’t get to leave until we had agreement on the season.
“The bottom line was it was working. We went to the Fisheries Advisory Board three times that summer after being there eighty times, or seventy-eight times, the year before. We developed enough belief at Port Ludlow to try this. Then, we applied it to Puget Sound and we did it.”
An encore arrived that May when an agreement was reached on a joint plan to manage chinook salmon fishing in Puget Sound, a milestone hailed as the greatest fisheries management achievement in a decade.
Eventually, the pre-season meetings became known as the North of Falcon Process, since Washington manages salmon stocks from Cape Falcon, Oregon, north to the Canadian border. “Nobody leaves happy,” Billy says, “but it’s better than going to court.” Eventually, the Northwest Renewable Resources Center formed—a team of tribes, industry, and environmental and government interests that serves to mediate and problem solve. Eventually, the tribes and the state became allies in forming a U.S.-Canada coalition.
Washington’s congressional delegation noted monumental progress. “We weren’t bringing them the number of problems that we were always bringing them in the years before,” Wilkerson says. “So, they were [supportive], ‘Keep going. Keep going, Billy, keep doing what you’re doing.’ Governor Spellman was rock solid. He stood behind me all the time. The tribal leaders were standing behind Billy.”
But stalled negotiations and collapsing agreements with Canada over a much-needed U.S.-Canada salmon treaty worried everyone. The chinook, in particular, were in real trouble.
Next: Chapter Thirteen | Resilience
