Commissioner, the FWAC Is Appointed by You. That's the Problem.

Commissioner Strommen's recent column in Outdoor News is worth reading carefully — not because it argues against the Citizens' Conservation Advisory Council, but because it inadvertently explains, in precise institutional language, exactly why we need one.

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Her piece is gracious and well-intentioned. She acknowledges that Minnesotans should have a meaningful voice in fish and wildlife management. She points with pride to the Fish and Wildlife Advisory Committee — the FWAC — as the vehicle for that voice. And she invites advocates like us to "engage with the Fish and Wildlife Advisory Committee, attend its public meeting, and consider serving as members." I want to take her at her word and explain, respectfully, why we can't accept that invitation.

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The FWAC is appointed by the DNR Commissioner. Commissioner Strommen's own column says it plainly: FWAC members go through "an open application process and [are] appointed by the DNR Commissioner." Let that sit for a moment. The body designed to provide independent citizen input on DNR management is appointed by — and reports its recommendations to — the head of the DNR. If the Commissioner is the subject of citizen accountability, she cannot also be the one who selects the citizens providing that accountability. This is not a criticism of Commissioner Strommen personally. It is a description of a structural problem that no individual commissioner, no matter how well-intentioned, can solve from inside that structure.

 

"Members are solicited through an open application process and appointed by the DNR Commissioner."

— Commissioner Sarah Strommen, Outdoor News, September 2026

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The Legislature has acted on zero FWAC recommendations. The Commissioner acknowledges this herself: "Although the Legislature hasn't yet acted on any of the recommendations..." The FWAC completed its first annual report last year — covering land acquisition, moose management, wolf management, and conservation funding. Important topics. Thoughtful work by the volunteers who serve on it. And the Legislature moved on none of it. The CCAC, by design, reports directly to the Governor's office — not only to the Legislature — because a governor can act in ways a divided legislature cannot. A citizen advisory body that produces recommendations that go nowhere is not accountability. It is the appearance of accountability.

 

"Although the Legislature hasn't yet acted on any of the recommendations, some recommendations have resulted in DNR action, while others remain part of ongoing discussion."

— Commissioner Sarah Strommen, Outdoor News, September 2026

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One webinar per year is not citizen engagement. The FWAC's statutory public meeting requirement was fulfilled last year by a single webinar on September 10, 2025. One meeting. One day. Statewide, via video call. Minnesota has five distinct ecological regions — prairie pothole country in the southwest, the Driftless bluffs in the southeast, the boreal forest in the northeast, the transition forest in the north-central, the lakes and hardwoods in the center. The issues a duck hunter in Willmar faces are not the issues a brook trout angler in Cook County faces. A single annual webinar cannot hear all of them. The CCAC's Year-One agenda calls for ten regional listening sessions — two per region, held on Saturdays, open to the public in person and via livestream, with citizen findings published within two weeks of every meeting.

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The invitation to 'join the FWAC' is the tell. Commissioner Strommen closes her piece by inviting those of us advocating for the CCAC to attend FWAC meetings and apply to serve as members. I understand why she wrote that. It is the institutional answer to citizen pressure: engage with the existing structure. But the point of the CCAC is not that we lack a structure to join — it's that the existing structure reports to the agency whose work is being reviewed. The CCAC exists outside that chain. It reports to the Governor. It sets its own agenda. It is not folded into the DNR's ecosystem. Joining the FWAC does not produce the CCAC. It produces more FWAC.

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None of this is about the FWAC's members. The 21 Minnesotans who serve on the FWAC are doing serious, volunteer work on behalf of the public. They deserve credit for it. The Commissioner is right to be grateful for them. Our argument is not that they are doing their jobs badly. Our argument is that the job, as structured, cannot produce what citizens need: an independent, geographically representative, governor-accountable citizen voice that does not depend on the DNR Commissioner's good graces to exist or to be heard.

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Eighty-seven-point-two percent of the more than 310 hunters and anglers we polled at the Minnesota Game Fair and Prairie Pothole Days in Willmar said yes to the CCAC. These are the people who buy the licenses. They walk the fields, put out the decoys, sit in the deer stands and fish. They fund the system. They are telling us — in overwhelming numbers — that they want something the FWAC, for structural reasons, cannot give them.

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Both candidates for governor — U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar and Speaker of the House Lisa Demuth — have made government accountability a centerpiece of their campaigns. The CCAC is what that accountability looks like for Minnesota's 1.1 million hunters and anglers: ten citizen members, two per region, reporting directly to the Governor, with public records published within two weeks of every meeting and an annual report released publicly on the same day it is delivered to officials.

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We share Commissioner Strommen's belief that Minnesotans should have a meaningful voice in the management of their fish and wildlife. We simply believe that voice needs to be structurally independent of the agency it is meant to inform — and that the difference between those two things is not a technicality. It is the whole point.

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Brian Myres is a member of the Duck Summit Group organizing committee and a lifelong Minnesota waterfowl hunter and fisherman. The Duck Summit Group and Minnesotans United for Conservation can be reached at brian.myres@gmail.com or at minnucon.com.