By Blair Miller Daily Montanan
Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Director Dustin Temple will retire at the end of this year, Gov. Greg Gianforte announced Friday.
Gianforte appointed Temple to be director in June 2023 following the retirement of longtime FWP Director Hank Worsech, who had been on medical leave for months prior to his departure.
Temple had served as Worsech’s deputy director prior to his appointment, and previously had served as the chief of administration in the director’s office during his 20-year tenure with FWP.
“I’m incredibly proud of the work FWP has accomplished with Governor Gianforte leading our state,” Temple said in a statement. “I promised to deliver on FWP’s vision for Montanans, serving them well and protecting our Montana way of life for generations to come. In retirement, I look forward to continuing to watch FWP succeed under Governor Gianforte’s strong, clear-eyed leadership.”
The governor’s office said FWP chief operating officer Marina Yoshioka would be acting director of the agency. Temple said in the statement he was confident she “will continue building on our outstanding progress.” The agency’s staff directory listed 21 vacancies as of Sept. 30.
Temple’s upcoming departure will be the latest high-profile exit at FWP since he took over. Chief of operations Mike Volesky was fired this summer, the Montana Free Press reported, several months after the Lewis and Clark County District Attorney’s Office dropped a citation he was issued for hunting without permission on his former brother-in-law’s property.
Volesky told the Free Press he believed his termination was politically motivated. He had been on paid leave for months after receiving the citation before it was dismissed.
And Eileen Ryce, the head of FWP’s fisheries department, resigned in August months after being placed on administrative leave over what she told the Montana Free Press were baseless allegations that were not investigated thoroughly enough by Temple’s office.
Temple’s leadership of FWP during the Gianforte administration has been sharply criticized by some conservation groups in Montana – one group said this summer the administration had committed a “systematic evisceration” of the storied agency.
And an audit released in September 2023 of FWP’s Enforcement Division showed more than half of game wardens who completed the survey feared retaliation from FWP leadership and that human resources files were incomplete and at times had been leaked to the public. Temple took responsibility for the culture and said he would fix it.
“The failure belongs to agency leadership and leadership alone,” he told the Legislative Audit Committee.
Temple and Gianforte hosted a meeting of anglers and water users in Wise River during the summer of 2023 to respond to pressure from people in southwestern Montana for the state to act on declining trout populations in several rivers in the Jefferson River basin, and FWP kicked off a project to study why those populations were declining and why rivers are running warmer each summer that is still underway.
Under Temple, the Gianforte administration and FWP have also pushed hard to get grizzly bears delisted from the Endangered Species Act in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem, most recently translocating two grizzlies from northwestern Montana to Wyoming. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is expected to issue a decision by the end of January.
Temple and Gianforte also were highly critical of Yellowstone National Park’s bison management plan through its development and adoption, at one point threatening to pull out of an agreement from 2015 to allow park bison into tolerance zones in Montana over their concerns of brucellosis being transmitted from bison to Montana cattle, which has never been documented.
A spokesperson for FWP referred questions about Temple’s retirement to the governor’s office. A spokesperson for the governor did not immediately return a phone message seeking more information about Temple’s decision to retire.
Gianforte in a statement thanked Temple for his 20 years at FWP and said he’d made “outstanding progress” there.
“Thanks to Dustin’s strong leadership, FWP has been focused on its core mission and improving customer service,” Gianforte said, adding that they had worked together to increase public lands access and move toward getting the grizzly delisted. “I wish him great success in his well-earned retirement.”
