Former Fish Chief: ‘We need a change at the top’

KALISPELL, Mont. — A high-profile ex-employee of Greg Gianforte’s disastrous administration is calling for a “change at the top” after witnessing the unpopular governor’s “steady dismantling” of the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks (FWP).

Dr. Eileen Ryce resigned in August after serving nearly 21 years as FWP’s lead fish scientist.

“Under Greg Gianforte, there’s been a lot of damage done to this state,” Ryce says in a new social media video shared by former firearms executive and candidate for Governor Ryan Busse.

“As a result of the toxic work environment that’s been created under Greg Gianforte and the staff that he’s put in place to run the Department,” Ryce adds, “there’s been a gradual shift away from stewarding the resources of the state for the people of the state to more pandering toward political whim, rich landowners, or for economic gain instead of resource protection.”

Offering no reason, Gianforte’s FWP put Ryce on administrative leave in May. Ryce wrote that she was “verbally threatened with immediate termination and escorted from the office within view of the public and staff.”

“With sadness, but no reservations, I am declining your offer to return to my position,” she added in her resignation letter.

“I hate what this leadership has turned [FWP] into,” Ryce says in her new video. “We need a change at the polls in November. Ryan Busse needs to be elected in order to save all of our natural resources.”

Busse, an avid outdoorsman and a champion of public lands and wildlife, has made Gianforte’s dismantling of FWP a centerpiece of his campaign to become Montana’s next governor.

“This is an agency that we the people built,” Busse, standing in front of the weed-ridden FWP headquarters in Helena, says in a separate video. “Greg Gianforte is taking it apart. Why? Because the way we decided to manage our wildlife doesn’t match up with him. He thinks that the biggest bidders should get our wildlife. He thinks that his Texas friends should get our wildlife. He thinks that bajillionaires should only have access.”

Busse and his lieutenant governor running mate Raph Graybill have been endorsed by the Montana Sportsmen’s Alliance and Montana Conservation Voters.