Fishing Law Violators Off Hook : Prosecution: Game wardens are upset because lack of funds means most misdemeanor cases will not be tried.

Twice in the last two months, state Department of Fish and Game wardens have caught the same commercial fisherman with a load of under-sized sea urchins as he pulled into Ventura Harbor.

Wardens confiscated the sea urchins, but the man will not be prosecuted--even though the offense is a misdemeanor violation, punishable by a fine up to $1,000 and as much as six months in jail.

Since mid-1991, the district attorney’s office has refused to prosecute most misdemeanor cases, citing a lack of funds. The ban affects a number of agencies from the Sheriff’s Department to the Animal Regulation Department.

But fish and game officials say it has gutted their program because nearly all the policing done by wardens involves offenses that are misdemeanors.

“The wardens are totally demoralized,” said Lt. Chris Long, who supervises five of them. “Resources are not being protected. People come to Ventura County and they are allowed to do what they want.”

The county’s Fish and Game Commission, worried about the situation, asked county officials earlier in December to reconsider the policy. And Special Assistant Dist. Atty. Don Coleman said last week that he may have a funding solution that will enable his office to resume prosecution of their cases.

Legislation passed in 1990 allows county fish and wildlife funds--collected in the form of fines from violators--to be used for prosecution. Coleman said he and Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury will meet with fish and game officials in January to talk about possibly using the fund, a move that would require approval from the Board of Supervisors. Those funds are now used for various fish and game projects.

“We’ve never liked it,” Coleman said of the non-prosecution policy. “We agree that prolonged inattention will harm resources.” His office, he said, has been looking for some time for a way to finance prosecution of those cases.

Heavy budget cuts made it necessary to quit prosecuting many misdemeanor cases, Bradbury said in a letter to agencies in the county in August, 1991. He was starting the 1991-92 fiscal year with a deficit of more than half a million dollars, he said.

It is simply a matter of priorities, according to Coleman. “The protection of people is more important than the protection of clams,” he said.

There are exceptions to the misdemeanor policy. For instance, driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs is prosecuted. And some other serious misdemeanor cases that involve “significant public safety” threats are still prosecuted.

If prosecutors dislike the policy, the wardens loathe it. It affects nearly all the offenses they look for, such as shooting deer out of season, hunting without a license and taking fish over the limit. Some of those offenses carry fines of $250 to $2,000 and as much as a year in jail.

It is frustrating, Long said, to work with laws that have no teeth. And most worrisome of all is the fear that the lack of prosecution in Ventura County will invite outsiders to violate the law.

“Commercial fishermen already are very aware there is no prosecution,” Long said.

In the case of the sea urchin fisherman, Long said the man had moved to fishing waters off the coast of Ventura County after fish and game officials in Northern California cited him for loads of undersized urchins and abalone.

For the wardens, the absence of clout also has been humiliating at times. One warden came across a hunter illegally driving with a loaded gun in his vehicle in Los Padres National Forest.

“The guy just laughed,” Long said. “He said he knew the D.A. didn’t prosecute in Ventura County.”

The inability to back up a citation with prosecution creates an inequity when violators are prosecuted elsewhere, fish and game officials say. That was evident a year ago when fish and game investigators, flying surveillance at night, found hunters spotlighting deer near Alamo Mountain in Los Padres National Forest, Long said.

A warden was dispatched to the scene and caught five hunters shining big spotlights to blind the deer. The hunters were cited, but the case was never prosecuted. That same night, wardens nabbed hunters in Los Angeles and Kern counties who were doing the same thing; they were prosecuted, Long said.

The wardens normally file 700 to 900 misdemeanors and infractions a year in Ventura County, according to Gordon Cribbs, regional patrol chief for Fish and Game in Long Beach. During 1992, that number dropped to about 100, he said.

The cases that are not prosecuted have fallen into a sort of limbo. Citations are still issued to the violators and the paperwork on the cases is done.

Those cases are sent to Fish and Game Department officials in Sacramento. Technically, the department has the ability to pursue the cases administratively and impose fines, Cribbs said. However, he added, the state lacks the staff to do that.

Cribbs estimates he has sent about 400 cases that route since the district attorney’s policy went into effect. “None have been handled,” he said.

He said he knows of no other county in the state with a similar policy. He is galled by the situation here and doesn’t think economics should stand in the way of prosecuting cases.

“There’s no deterrent,” he said. “They’ve taken away the hammer that comes with getting a ticket.”

Many of the cases that are being filed are minor infractions, such as fishing without a license, which carries a fine of $250 to $1,000. But the district attorney’s office has prosecuted some fish and game cases that have affected the environment.

Earlier this month, for instance, Newhall Land & Farming Co. agreed to pay a $95,000 fine in the settlement of a case involving the improper alteration of a stream bed on the Santa Clara River.

The district attorney’s office still has a case involving a Unocal oil platform four miles off the coast of Oxnard that accidentally spilled between 420 and 2,100 gallons of crude oil in 1991.

But there is some question about whether the case can be prosecuted because the spill was outside state waters, according to Deputy Dist. Atty. Greg Brose, who supervises the consumer and environmental protection division.

In a letter to the Board of Supervisors earlier this month, Drew Madrigal, chairman of the Fish and Game Commission, said he is not unsympathetic to the county’s budget problems.

But Madrigal said he is worried about depleting the county’s wildlife resources. Besides, he said, the drop in prosecuted cases means that less money flows into the fish and wildlife fund. That money is used for projects such as repopulating salmon and sea bass and abalone transplantation. The commission recommends to the supervisors how the fund is to be spent.

It is this fund that Coleman thinks could be used to pay for a prosecutor to handle fish and game cases. Madrigal agrees that it is a possible solution, even though it means less money for other projects.

“We’re more concerned with the resources,” he said, “and having the deterrent effect operative again.”