Sure.
On the registration, when you register your vessel in Washington State, you get a registration sticker that you're required to put on the bow of your vessel or on the window of your vessel. Through that system, which is administered by the Washington State Department of Licensing, we're able to go back and look at owner history. If we do find an orphaned boat or an abandoned boat that hasn't been registered for many years, we can go back in that system to determine who was the last registered owner. Our statute allows us to go after that last registered owner. Even if the vessel hasn't been registered for five years, we can go back to the last person who registered it and try to work our way forward. We ask if that person sold it and if they have documentation of who they sold it to. It's a bit of an investigative process to determine who the owners are. It's all tied to the state-wide registration system that lets us know who the last registered owner was.
In terms of the funding, the biggest source of funding of those three sources is the $3 recreational fee, which gives us almost $700,000 per biennium on average. The visitor fee is a very small part of it. The fee on commercial vessels is about a quarter of a million dollars per biennium.
I believe the fee really came about as a recommendation from the boating community. Before the program was in place, there was this problem with derelict vessels—frankly, there still is—being abandoned in marinas and at port facilities, so it was an issue that was affecting the boating community. They really supported a way for that problem to be addressed. They also really supported the money that they pay into their registration going to a program that supports their community and their use of the environment. They've been very supportive all along. Even when we bumped it from a dollar up to three dollars, they were still supportive and didn't oppose that increase in the registration. The key is that they see it as a program that directly affects their boating lifestyle and their boating enjoyment.