News Analysis
As the Alaska Board of Fisheries prepares to take up the always heated issue of who gets to catch what salmon and how many in Cook Inlet, the Kenai Peninsula Borough assembly is lobbying to give state fishery biologists the authority to make these contentious and highly political socio-economic decisions.
And the Matanuska-Susitna Borough is trying to mobilize an army.
Tired of playing second fiddle to Kenai interests, the Mat-Su hopes to swarm the board with average Alaskans angry at an allocation process long dominated by the commercial interests that catch most of the fish.
There is no argument but that the 568 commercial operators who hold permits to drift gillnet in Cook Inlet plus the 735 with set gillnet permits – together a thin slice of the 1.5 percent who control the harvest of Alaska salmon – have punched above their weight for decades in the arena of Alaska fishery politics or what has come to be called simply “fishtics.”
Commercial fishermen well understand how the process works, and they work it. They put asses in the seats at Board meetings, and they keep them there. Commercial fishermen don’t testify, depart and expect the Board to be driven solely by the testimony.
Commercial fishermen hang around to talk up Board members and confer with other commercial fishermen to see how they might help each other’s interests. And it doesn’t end there.
Commercial fishermen stay active on local fish and game advisory committees and lobby board members and legislators year-round. The United Cook Inlet Drift Association (UCIDA) and the Kenai Peninsula Fishermen’s Association even share an office building with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game on the Kenai.
Commercial fishermen work the media, too. They have convinced many a journalist they are a small and embattled, rural minority pursuing a lifestyle threatened by sportsmen and sportwomen in an ever-growing Alaska. The reality is somewhat different.
The 1,303 Cook Inlet gillnet permits have changed hands nearly 5,000 times since the state imposed a limited entry system in the 1970s, according to the records of the Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission, and most of the people who hold the permits today are businessmen, doctors, lawyers, plumbers, contractors, politicians and others whose lifestyles are defined by their day jobs.
Identity politics
Long before identity politics became a national currency in the U.S., however, commercial fishermen understood the value and honed an image of the last cowboys of the sea stalked by the modern world.
The understood as well that politics, as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Commission preaches, is “all about relationships,” or at least it was until Donald Trump titled the stage toward the strategy of “monopolizing the microphone” as columnist and critic Virginia Heffernan has observed.
But the relationship value remains, and commercial fishermen work at it. Though sometimes accused of strong-arming the opposition, they far more often find success by making friends.
Against that backdrop came Kenai Borough Assemblyman Brent Johnson, an old commercial set gillnet fisherman from Clam Gulch, lobbying his fellow assembly members to pass a resolution urging the Board to follow the advice of state fishery biologists when deciding how many fish to allow into Inlet rivers and how to distribute the surplus among various fisheries.
Johnson got what he wanted. But what is most notable about this is that if you are a commercial fisherman, you don’t lobby for biologists to make the political decisions if you believe they are going to take a significant number of fish out of your nets and thus money out of your pocket.
Johnson’s belief state fishery biologists will do the most to maintain the status quo reflects the fear of commercial fishermen, who had former Gov. Bill Walker in their pocket, that a Fish Board with some new members appointed by Gov. Mike Dunleavy, a Mat-Su sport fishermen, might be inclined to listen more seriously to the “fair share” demands of non-commercial fishermen.
In explaining the thinking behind the resolution, in fact, Johnson skipped over the well-defined role of the Fish Board in developing guidelines for state fisheries management and told Kenai’s KSRM News this:
Level playing field?
Johnson was referring to a decision by the Mat-Su to retain a respected, former state fisheries biologist now living in Montana to advise it on how to get more salmon through the Inlet’s commercial fishery and into the Susitna River drainage two years ago.
Sitting at the north end of the Inlet, the MatSu is at the mercy of commercial fisheries that intercept prized sockeye, coho (silver), and Chinook (king) salmon as they move toward the dozens of spawning tributaries that drain the 313-mile long, glacier-fed Susitna.
The last time the Board considered Inlet salmon allocations, the Mat-Su went into the meetings with the reasoned approach. It hired Southwick Associates, a respected economics consulting firm, to calculate the value of Cook Inlet-dependent sport fisheries, and it asked former state fisheries biologists to come up with a plan to pass the maximum number of Susitna fish through the commercial fisheries with the least loss to commercial fishermen.
The latter task is not an easy one. Commercial fishery management decisions for the Inlet are driven by the huge returns of sockeye salmon to the Kenai River and nearby Kasilof River. The difficulty for fishery managers is that much of the commercial fishing takes place far out in the Inlet where hundreds of thousands of Susitna fish intermingle with millions of Kenai-Kasilof fish.
Mat-Su tourism businesses have often paid the price when managers tried to maximize the harvest of the Kenai-Kasilof sockeye and cutoff Mat-Su coho in particular.
Dozens of people involved with Mat-Su tourism trooped before the Board two years ago to make the case that current management efforts were hurting their businesses and to argue that letting more salmon escape into Susitna streams was a better economic strategy for the state than putting the fish in the nets of a commercial fishery that has long claimed the bulk of the harvest.
The businessmen were backed by the Southwick study that concluded anglers in the Cook Inlet region in 2017 “spent $716.5 million on trip-related goods and services, pre-purchased packages, equipment and real estate used for fishing” and produced $31.7 million in state and local tax revenue.
When adjusted for salmon volume – the commercial fishery regularly catches more than twice as many salmon as all other fisheries combined – the per-fish catch value leaned heavily toward the non-commercial fisheries.
Trade-offs
All economists agree that on a per-fish basis, there is more money to be made in enticing a tourist to fly to Alaska to catch his or her own salmon and fly it home than to have the same person buy a commercially caught Alaska salmon at the grocery. It’s a simple matter of efficiency with the commercial fishery being far more efficient at producing fish and thus far less efficient in producing jobs and revenue in Alaska.
But the non-commercial fisheries in the Inlet can’t begin to harvest the number of surplus salmon returning to the region’s streams, which makes the commercial fishery a vital part of the picture from both economic and salmon management standpoints.
Economics, however, tend to get little consideration in the Board process. As former Board member Robert Ruffner from Kenai recently observed, it’s hard for Board members to get a handle on the economic numbers given the lack of an objective source of information.
Other state fish and wildlife agencies have economists on staff. Alaska doesn’t.
The Southwick report carried little weight with the Board two years ago. The body ignored the report’s conclusion that spending in the Mat-Su was down almost $150 million from the $864.9 million anglers spent in 2007 as well as the pleas from guides, businessmen and Mat-Su anglers who said the reason for the big monetary loss was obvious:
No fish, no fishermen.
To the barricades!
Having failed to move the Board with reasoned arguments, the Mat-Su is this year trying for the first time a radically new attack.
The municipally sanctioned MSB Fish and Wildlife Commission has been actively soliciting and training fishermen and fishing interests for appearances before the Board. The Commission held a meeting in the Mat-Su Assembly chambers on Wednesday night to explain to borough residents “how to navigate the complex subject of salmon management as it relates to Upper Cook Inlet and give you the tools to make a difference
for salmon at the BOF meeting.”
The issues really aren’t that hard to navigate: Show up at the Board meeting, tell Board members you want fish; and then hang around through their days and days of discussions to make sure they get the point that you mean it.
Borough spokesman Stefan Hinman admitted the Mat-Su’s latest approach is new, and no one knows whether it will make a difference.
In the past, he emailed, the Borough has “created a ton of presentations, press releases, videos, newspaper columns and much more,” but then just “pushed out the information.”
In other words, the Borough provided the ammunition and hoped the troops would find it. This time around, it is making a more concerted effort to organize the troops to go to the Board meeting fully loaded.
“The stand-alone fisheries informational meeting…(Wednesday) is new,” he said, “as is the online testimony sign-up. Those are good things for sure, and we hope to see results.”
Commercial interests are worried about the possibility of those results. Commercial interests actively opposed Dunleavy in the election, and his appointment of a Mat-Su angler and former aide to the Fish Board hasn’t made commercial interests any less fearful the Board might become more receptive to the arguments of non-commercial fishermen.
Some have privately admitted to second thoughts about how heavily the industry went after Dunleavy.
Industry advocate and fisheries publicist Laine Welch, who the Anchorage Daily News bills as a “Kodiak journalist,” before the election sent an “action alert” to her Facebook followers urging them to change their voter registrations if necessary to get into the Republican primary and stop Dunleavy.
Must Read Alaska described the pitch as “going after Mike Dunleavy with a fillet knife.”
Welch proclaimed Dunleavy “would be a disaster for Alaska fishing communities and the fishing industry!! Any AK voter who is registered as Undeclared or Nonpartisan can vote in the August 21 primary where voters will choose between Dunleavy and Mead Treadwell as the candidate who will run against Walker (Independent) and Begich (Democrat).
“If you want to vote in the Republican primary (even if you do not intend to vote for a Republican in the Nov. general election) you must change your registration to U or N by July 20.”
Urging people to cross party lines to swing a primary election is generally considered a low-ball political tactic. It cannot have helped the Inlet’s commercial fishermen going into this meeting. The Board process is supposed to be apolitical, but people are inherently political animals.
Jensen, for instance, voted to take some Inlet catch away from commercial fishermen after being reappointed to the Board by Republican Gov. Sean Parnell, and then voted to do the exact opposite after being reappointed to the Board by Walker.
A commercial fisherman from Petersburg first appointed to the Board by Gov. Frank Murkowski in 2003, Jensen is the ultimate survivor. With his latest term due to expire in June of this year and with Dunleavy now in control of his future on the Board, there is no telling how Jensen might vote this time around.
All of this has advocates of Mat-Su fisheries thinking they might see a shift in Board direction, but they’ve thought that before only to come away disappointed. The Board starts meeting in Anchorage on Friday.
Categories: Commentary, News
In Medred’s simple world all will be good if we replace one consumptive industry ( commercial fishermen ) with another consumptive industry ( sportfishing guides & lodges ). How’s that worked out for the Kenai King salmon runs so far, Craig?
Thanks for the comment. It gives me a chance to make a few things clear:
1.) I don’t give a shit who catches the fish. I do believe the fish should be managed in a way that best benefits all Alaskans. All of it, even subsistence, is consumptive and can depress salmon runs.
2.) Kenai kings are a prime example of the easier manageability of sport fisheries. The sport fishery for early run Kenai kings can and has been closed to all sport fishing for conservation reasons with barely a squeak from the fishermen. You, I know, are well aware of the screaming and stomping whenever the state tries to restrict, let alone close, a commercial fishery for conservation reasons.
3.) Some fisheries are clean; they catch select species of fish bound for specific spawning grounds or allow those caught accidentally to be released unharmed. Some fisheries are dirty; they catch anything that passes by and often maims the unwanted fish so even if released they die. From a conservation standpoint, clean fisheries are better than dirty fisheries.
I would say that using a single hook to target a single species of fish is therefore extremely “clean”…where as a continuous string of mesh netting across the Cook Inlet is rather “dirty”.
You would be incorrect in saying that using a mesh net is dirty Steve. The mesh net that setnetters and drifters use have a very specific mesh size, depth, and length which allows for targeting specific species of a specific size making them extremely clean. Could they be cleaner, absolutely, restricting mesh size, depth, and length further would make for a cleaner fishery. If we are talking about the sockeye vs king take as being dirty it’s worth looking at the facts. In UCI last year Fish and Game reported there were 1,720,295 sockeye caught in commercial fisheries using mesh nets and 3,148 kings or 0.18% of the sockeye catch, by any measure a net catching 99.82% is clean. Now if we account for all the other species of salmon that are caught those numbers change a little but not much, there were 2,087,159 salmon of all species caught in UCI last year and kings were only 0.15% of the overall take. If jacks were taken out of the 3,148 kings taken commercially these numbers would be roughly halved. Once again could UCI be a cleaner fishery, absolutely, and they should strive to be and apparently they are according to Fish and Game last year the commercial harvest of kings was down. That is partly due to there being less kings to catch, less fishing time, and some fishermen restricting their own gear to prevent catching kings.
Here is a snippet from the 2019 F&G UCI season summary:
“The 2019 UCI commercial harvest of all king salmon stocks was 3,148 fish, which was 58% less than the previous 10-year (2009–2018) average annual harvest of 7,408 fish (Table 1). Of this total, the ESSN fishery harvested 2,245 king salmon, or 71% of the harvest. The 2,245 king salmon harvested in the ESSN fishery included an estimated 1,024, or 46% that were large king salmon, and a total of 613, or 27% that were large Kenai River late-run origin fish. The drift gillnet fishery harvested 178 king salmon of all sizes and all stocks.”
https://www.adfg.alaska.gov/static/applications/dcfnewsrelease/1126687650.pdf
UCI is a clean fishery, it can be cleaner and the numbers above show the areas where it could be cleaned up. It is also worth noting that of the 2,245 kings caught by ESSN a majority 54% weren’t large kings, but were jacks that are closer in size to sockeye and F&G doesn’t count jacks towards the SEG.
Examples of dirty fisheries would be those that use single hooks on long lines even if they target a single species they indiscriminately catch anything that takes the bait, trawlers are an example of an extremely dirty.
Calling things clean or dirty with no understanding of what is clean or dirty only muddies these already muddied waters further. While some people have an interest in keeping the status quo others would prefer we move forward and protect our common resource while making the best use of it. Adopting a few minor and proven changes could do just that. Fishing mesh nets that aren’t as deep would allow more kings to make it up the river which would lead to more fishing time and potentially a bigger catch for commercial fishermen.
Marlin, I would guess that whoever would own the fish traps would make the money. So, who owns the fish traps?
Gern,in my thinking,permit holders.With the option of stacking permits,with the option to form co-ops.
Industry funded buy-outs for those who want the easy cash out.
Building traps probably wouldnt be cheap.
A couple of things are clear. Upper Cook Inlet is a very different place than most of the state when it comes to optimizing the benefit that can be generated through the wise use of the fishery resource. It is also clear that present management of salmon in Upper Cook Inlet falls short of generating the maximum benefit. In the form of a problem statement I would submit the following: The people of Alaska and the State of Alaska are suffering because the Alaska Board of Fisheries has not been fulfilling its Constitutional obligation to maximize the benefit of the fisheries resources to the people of the State by continuing to restrict personal use, sport and guided sport salmon fisheries in Upper Cook Inlet in favor of the commercial salmon fisheries.
I wonder how many of those 568 drift net permit holders are currently in debt to the state of Alaska?
I am a 19 year old drift permit holder who is in debt for college. Don’t talk like you’re informed about a life you don’t live.
I was a 19-year-old in debt for college once, too. With that I empathize.
Of course, there was no way at the time that I could have been able to obtain an Alaska driftnet permit. I couldn’t even get a loan for a car let alone a drift boat, and my parents weren’t in any position to gift me one.
But please don’t lecture me on what or what not to talk about. Trust me, it might seem tough now but compared to the real victims in the world, you are not a victim.
What gets little attention is that Dunleavy also made appointments to the North Pacific Fishery Management Council with full support of the big dogs of comm fish – the processors, with former ADFG commissioner Campbell, now of Silver Bay Seafoods, and former ADFG staff, Nicole Kimball, now of Pacific Seafood Processors Association.
It is hard to say this administration is a mortal enemy of the commercial fishing industry with those two appointments of experienced, competent members to the NPFMC.
Mav,
Just to be clear here, I didn’t report Dunleavy was the mortal enemy of the commercial fishing industry. I reported the views of others. That’s what journalism does although it can get awfully foggy these days.
Using fish traps at the mouths of rivers in Cook Inlet would allow salmon of sufficient numbers to return to their respective streams. All other methods take salmon indiscriminately and endanger the long term sustainability of many sports fisheries.