Welcome to Save Our Stripers (SOS) - For Businesses

This petition site allows businesses to express opposition to Assembly Bill 1253 (Fuller-Striped Bass). By signing your business to the following letter, you will join numerous other businesses, organizations and individuals that wish to preserve the West Coast striped bass fishery. Immediately before AB 1253 is debated in the Assembly, we will compile the list of signatories and submit the letter to key Assembly members. Your participation will be key to stopping AB 1253 - THE ASSEMBLY LISTENS TO BUSINESSES!

Background. Assemblywoman Jean Fuller, (R) Bakersfield, introduced AB 1253 to take gamefish status away from California’s striped bass. AB 1253 will remove all protections that striped bass currently enjoy and will allow unlimited harvest in all waters, fresh or salt, throughout the entire state. Even commercial harvest of striped bass will be legal if this bill becomes law.

AB 1253 is the brainchild of large water districts that receive taxpayer subsidized irrigation water from California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. AB 1253 represents a cynical attempt to destroy the will of our striped bass advocates by decimating the fishery, eliminating the fishermen, and starving the related businesses. However the water districts would never admit this publicly; instead they claim that striped bass should be eliminated so that threatened and endangered delta smelt, salmon and steelhead will be free from striped bass predation. The water districts will have you believe that striped bass predation is, in fact, significant. The problem is that the science does not support their claim. Scientists with the California Department of Fish and Game, the US Fish & Wildlife Service, the National Marine Fisheries Service, the California Department of Water Resources, and our State’s colleges and universities are in agreement: striped bass predation is not, nor has ever been, a significant contributor to the decline in smelt, salmon and steelhead.

As a business, you have a unique opportunity to help tell the assembly that proper water management and wise water allocation are needed, not the destruction of one of California's most enjoyed and economically-important fisheries.

Please read and sign the following letter on behalf of your company.