The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has issued a report outlining fiscal challenges for 70 federal fish hatcheries, including the one at Creston, although the agency announced there will be no hatchery closures in the coming fiscal year.

However, Creston hatchery manager Mark Maskill says he expects program changes that could lead to reduced fish propagation for recreational fisheries and increased efforts to restore native fisheries in the future.

“This report sounds the alarm on a hatchery system unable to meet its mission responsibilities in the current budget climate,” Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe said in a press release about the Nov. 15 report. “In the coming months through the 2015 budgeting process, I have directed the Service to work with all of our partners to determine whether the options identified in the report, or others, are necessary and appropriate to put the system on a more sustainable financial footing.”

The hatchery system has been impacted by congressional sequestration curbs on spending. If continued into 2014, the agency estimates it will have lost about $6 million in hatchery operations funding since the 2012 fiscal year. Over that period, operational costs have continued to rise.

To maximize limited resources, the report proposes five priorities for the hatchery system: recovery of species listed as threatened or endangered; restoration of imperiled aquatic species; living up to tribal trust responsibilities; propagation programs for native species; and finally, propagation programs for non-native species.

“The Service is moving away from rainbow trout production,” Maskill said, elaborating on how the Creston Hatchery’s mission could change.

“I certainly think our program will change,” he said. “If they go to the priorities for recovery and restoration, we will produce less fish for recreational fisheries.”

The Service’s report acknowledges drawbacks in moving away from recreational fish rearing.

“A reduction in Service efforts to support recreational fisheries would have substantial impacts on the states in which those fisheries occur,” the report states.

An economic analysis conducted in 2006 found that the agency stocked a estimated 123 million recreational fish, generating more than 13 million angling days, $554 million in retail sales, $903 million in total angler expenditures, $256 million in job income and 8,000 jobs.

This year, the Creston Hatchery produced 1,109,576 fish, and of those 838,909 were rainbow trout. The balance of fish raised were westslope cutthroat trout. Over 13 years, the hatchery has produced 11 million fish, including more than 7 million rainbows.

Maskill said the hatchery could move toward raising bull trout, which are listed as a threatened species, but doing so is more complicated than one might think.

The hatchery raised bull trout for about 15 years as an experimental project that was retired in 2006 and 2007, largely because of resistance from Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks and a lawsuit filed by Friends of the Wild Swan prior to bull trout being listed in 1998, according to Wade Fredenberg, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s bull trout recovery coordinator who is based at the Creston Hatchery.

“Basically, the concern was that we would jump into some kind of program that would ignore the real problems,” which include habitat issues and competition from non-native lake trout, Fredenberg said.

The lawsuit raised concerns that a bull trout stocking program would be used in a way to avoid protecting bull trout under the Endangered Species Act, but the Fish and Wildlife Service was successful in demonstrating that it was an experimental project aimed at seeing if bull trout could be raised in a hatchery.

The program succeeded “beyond our wildest expectations,” Fredenberg said.

Partly because of that, the question of whether to raise bull trout still comes up.

For example, in its official comments on a proposal to suppress the walleye population in the Clark Fork River for the benefit of bull trout, a Flathead Valley rod and gun club called Flathead Wildlife Inc. asserts that bull trout should be assisted through a fish stocking program.

“An appropriate application of [bull trout] hatchery stock could have some benefits,” Fredenberg said. “We’re kind of investigating some ideas about doing some of this up in Glacier National Park.”

There have been discussions about pursuing a lake trout removal effort in Glacier’s Logging Lake, where bull trout have been almost entirely displaced by lake trout. That would be followed by a bull trout stocking program that Fredenberg describes as being a “genetic rescue” effort.

But such an endeavor will require a public review process, and using any federal hatchery to raise bull trout for restoration purposes would require planning under the National Environmental Policy Act, Fredenberg said.

“The bottom line from our perspective is that hatcheries could still have a role in bull trout recovery, but it will have to be developed with some strong planning and rationale for what we intend to do,” Fredenberg said.

However its fish rearing programs might change, Maskill said he is confident that the Creston Hatchery will remain viable and avoid outright closure due to budget constraints.

That’s largely because the hatchery is fed by clean, cold water, and because the Service has made extensive investments in the facility over the last decade.

“They’ve pumped a lot of money into his facility, so it’s situated well to handle fish production in the future,” he said.

Reporter Jim Mann may be reached at 758-4407 or by email at jmann@dailyinterlake.com.