The Great Lakes’ sea lamprey control program has the OK to rehire three dozen federal employees it needs to combat the eel-like, invasive fish species.
That’s after staffing cuts and hiring freezes from the Trump administration last month threatened the work, which the Great Lakes Fishery Commission said would have led to more than $200 million in lost fishing potential.
The Great Lakes Fishery Commission is a Canadian-American commission which coordinates lamprey control across the Great Lakes region.
Each year, the commission contracts workers with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to set traps and apply lampricide in rivers, stopping lamprey before they enter the Great Lakes.
But the Trump administration’s firing of probationary workers and freeze on season hiring jeopardized the program’s operation, which typically runs from April to October.
Greg McClinchey, director of policy and legislative affairs for the Great Lakes Fishery Commission, says the organization now has permission to hire back all those workers: 12 probationary and 25 seasonal.
“It's good news. There is positive momentum there,” McClinchey said. “We're five or six weeks behind schedule, but everybody's working hard to see if we can't get things as much back on track as is possible.”
Despite the OK, McClinchey said it’s still unclear how many of those workers will actually choose to return. He said some may have already taken other jobs and training new workers takes time, which could set things back even more.
But it’s not yet clear what impact those hurdles could have on lamprey numbers.
“We're still in the process of assessing what, if any, impact [there] will be. Even if they all came back, like if 100% of the staff came back, the impact will be a delay in the start,” he said. “The hope is still very much that we will commence as early as possible. The plan is to model the program as closely as we can after what we have done traditionally.”
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