Washington Fish and Wildlife Commissioner Victor Garcia Dies After 16 Months on a Divided Panel

Victor Garcia, a retired teacher and commercial fisherman who spent barely 16 months on Washington's Fish and Wildlife Commission, died this week, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife announced Monday. The agency gave no cause of death. Garcia held one of the commission's western Washington seats after Gov. Bob Ferguson appointed him in April 2025 in a shake-up that hunting and fishing groups called a long-overdue correction and conservation advocates called a betrayal.

His death removes a vote from a nine-member, governor-appointed panel that sets the state's hunting, fishing and wildlife-management rules and that has spent the past two years absorbing a lawsuit, a governor-ordered misconduct investigation and public testimony described by reporters as unusually bitter. Garcia was, by his own description, an odd fit for either faction fighting over the seat: a hunter who also birded for the Audubon Society, and a former commercial fisherman who taught Advanced Placement environmental science for two decades. Now Ferguson has to fill the vacancy on a commission where every recent appointment has become a fight.

A Late-Career Turn From Classroom to Commission

Garcia grew up in Anacortes digging razor clams, dip-netting for smelt, crabbing, and hunting deer and elk, according to a Northwest Sportsman profile published after his appointment. He carried those habits into adulthood as a hiker and kayaker, and later as a husband who spent his outdoor time with his family, friends and dogs. He earned a bachelor's degree in zoology from the University of Washington, then spent part of the 1990s as a commercial fisherman in the Bering Sea before starting a family pulled him back to shore.

He went on to earn a master's in science education from Vanderbilt University and taught math and science in Washington public schools for the rest of his career, with AP Environmental Science as his signature course, built, he said, around habitat, clean water and conservation. Outside the classroom, he worked as a biologist for the National Marine Fisheries Service and volunteered on citizen-science projects mapping eelgrass beds and counting salmon on their spawning runs. He was also an avid birder who had traveled to every continent except Antarctica chasing new species, and a member of the Audubon Society.

That resume — hunter, commercial fisherman, wildlife biologist, birder — is unusual for a commission whose members are typically drawn from one camp or the other. It is also, according to people who worked with him, exactly why Ferguson's office wanted him on the panel.

How Garcia Won the Seat Ragen Lost

Garcia's appointment was never a routine vacancy fill. He replaced Tim Ragen, a retired marine-mammal expert and the commission's own vice chair, who held a Ph.D. in conservation science, had previously directed the U.S. Marine Mammal Commission, and held strong backing from environmental groups. Then-Gov. Jay Inslee had appointed Ragen and a Ferry County pick, Lynn O'Connor, to the commission in mid-January 2025, just before leaving office. Weeks into his own term, Ferguson had the Senate return both nominations to his desk rather than confirm them, a move his office attributed to hearing from "individuals, tribes, and other entities expressing a desire for a more extensive process." He then ran his own search and named his own slate instead.

The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife's official announcement, dated April 8, 2025, named Garcia alongside Jim Anderson and Molly Linville. All three began serving immediately while awaiting confirmation by the state Senate, a step that never came. Anderson's and Linville's nominations reached the Senate's confirmation calendar in late February 2026, then were pulled and returned to the Rules Committee weeks later, meaning no floor vote that session. Garcia's own confirmation was tracked alongside theirs and never advanced either; he was still an unconfirmed, serving commissioner when he died.

The appointment shakeup didn't come out of nowhere. A December 2024 report from the William D. Ruckelshaus Center, commissioned to study the panel, found that observers widely viewed the commission as "dysfunctional" and raised concerns about the appointment process itself. Critics of Ferguson's move read it differently anyway: as a governor barely in office moving fast to reshape a body that had angered hunting and fishing interests with a series of restrictive votes.

Anglers and Tribes Cheered; Conservationists Called It a Betrayal

The reaction split almost exactly along the lines that have defined Washington wildlife politics for years. Ron Garner, state board president of Puget Sound Anglers, told OPB the new lineup meant "we're going to have people that we can work with again." Four western Washington tribes (the Lummi Nation, Tulalip Tribes, Upper Skagit Indian Tribe and Squaxin Island Tribe), along with the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission, representing 20 member tribes, also backed the appointments.

Washington Wildlife First, the conservation group that had championed Ragen's reappointment, said it felt "betrayed" by Ferguson's decision, arguing in public statements that he had "tilted it away from the values of Washingtonians, and toward the powerful special interests." The group went further than statements: it sued Ferguson in Thurston County Superior Court on April 22, 2025, though that suit targeted Linville's simultaneous service on the Palisades School Board rather than Garcia's appointment specifically. Linville resigned her school board seat two days later, writing that she'd rather step down than "drag the school through the mud."

Garcia himself seemed aware he was stepping into a fight that predated him and would outlast him. Leading orca and salmon researchers had warned that removing Ragen specifically endangered the species he'd spent his career protecting, a warning that had nothing to do with Garcia's own record, but one that attached to his seat the moment he took it.

"I Have Something for Everyone to Hate"

Garcia was candid, in interviews after his appointment, about not fitting neatly into either camp. "I do both. I don't see them as mutually exclusive," he said of hunting and conservation work, according to the Northwest Sportsman profile. He was blunter about the politics of it: "I have something for everyone to hate. You might describe me as a redneck liberal."

That self-description captures something the coalition framing on both sides missed. Hunting and fishing groups celebrated his appointment as a win against the conservation bloc, and conservation groups treated the loss of Ragen's seat as a defeat. But Garcia's own eelgrass-mapping and salmon-survey volunteer work put him closer to habitat-focused conservation science than either side's talking points suggested. His death removes a commissioner whose voting record, sixteen months into a term that never received Senate confirmation, was still being tested against either narrative.

Commission Chair Jim Anderson, who was appointed alongside Garcia and later elected chair, said in a statement Monday that "Commissioner Garcia loved this state, and cared deeply for fish and wildlife. He was ready to do the hard work." WDFW Director Kelly Susewind said Garcia "leaves a lasting legacy from his work on the commission." The Sportsmen's Alliance, a national hunting-advocacy group that had closely tracked the commission's makeup, called him "a steady presence."

A Commission Already Under Investigation

Garcia's death lands on a commission that was already under outside scrutiny before he joined it and has stayed there since. In May 2025, records obtained by the Sportsmen's Alliance showed four commissioners (Barbara Baker, John Lehmkuhl, Lorna Smith and Melanie Rowland) had exchanged communications ahead of a November 2022 vote halting spring recreational black bear hunting, communications the group argued violated the state's open-meetings and public-records laws.

WDFW Director Susewind asked Ferguson's office to investigate in early August 2025, and Ferguson authorized a formal state Human Resources inquiry on August 16, 2025, the same day the commission elected Anderson to replace Baker as chair, with Lehmkuhl, one of the commissioners named in the complaint, narrowly elected vice chair. Ferguson's office said at the time that "the governor takes concerns from an agency director very seriously." The inquiry examined the four commissioners' actions and communications around the bear-hunting vote, with removal from office among the possible outcomes if investigators found misconduct. No public resolution of that inquiry had been announced as of Garcia's death.

Garcia was not implicated in that investigation; the bear-hunting vote it examines predates his appointment by more than two years. But he sat on the commission throughout the inquiry, in a body where the ordinary business of managing salmon runs, deer seasons and shellfish beds has repeatedly been overshadowed by fights over who gets to sit at the table at all.

Ferguson Faces Another Appointment Fight

Garcia's term was set to run through December 2030. Governor Ferguson is now responsible for naming a replacement for the remainder of that term, and the governor's own track record on this commission means the pick will draw scrutiny from both directions before it is even announced. Whoever he selects will inherit not just Garcia's western Washington seat but the specific, unresolved question of whether that seat leans toward the fishing and hunting coalition or toward habitat conservation — a question Garcia's mixed record never fully settled.

The vacancy also arrives while the commission's confirmation status remains unresolved: Anderson, Linville and Garcia were all serving on interim appointments, never confirmed by the state Senate more than a year after Ferguson named them. That leaves Ferguson choosing a new commissioner for a body where the legal status of two of the three sitting members he already appointed has never been formally settled — a governance gap that a commissioner's death does nothing to close and a replacement appointment will not resolve on its own.

Every appointment Ferguson has made to this commission since taking office, Garcia's included, has drawn a fight from one advocacy camp or the other, and the December 2024 Ruckelshaus Center report that first labeled the panel "dysfunctional" is now more than a year and a half old. Whether Ferguson's next pick eases that pattern or extends it will be the clearest signal yet of how his administration intends to referee a fight over Washington's fish and wildlife policy that has now outlasted one commissioner entirely.