Roland Maw, a former short-time member of the Alaska Board of Fisheries/Craig Medred photo
After six years of legal maneuverings in the Alaska court system and who knows how many tens of thousands of dollars spent on attorney fees, former Alaska Gov. Bill Walker’s best-known appointee to the state Board of Fisheries has finally admitted to being a big, fat liar.
As part of a plea agreement with the state Department of Law, Roland Maw on Friday dropped his claim that someone masquerading as him – or a ghost in his computer – electronically filed for Permanent Fund Dividends (PFD) for years while Maw was claiming to be a resident of the state of Montana.
In return, the state dropped 12 felony PFD charges that had been filed against Maw and accepted a plea of guilty on one count of “unsworn falsification in the second degree,” a misdemeanor.
Juneau Superior Court Judge Amy Mead then ordered Maw pay a $500 fine plus $9,582 in restitution to the state for the illegally collected PFDs and to cover the difference in costs between resident and nonresident hunting and fishing licenses.
The total of $10,352 is $3,107 more than the state of Montana fined Maw seven years ago for lying about his residency there to illegally obtain “resident conservation/fish, deer, elk, migratory and/or upland bird licenses” for a span of seven years.
The biggest penalty Maw paid for his lying ways might have come in the loss of a profitable relationship with the state of Alaska that ended after he was discovered to be Montanan. State records show that Maw pocketed $120,002 in 2013, $154,657 in 2014, and $164,090 in 2015 to run the state “test boat” operation used to make in-season determinations on the size of sockeye returns to the Kenai and Kasilof rivers.
Discovery of his claim to be a Montanan would have cost him the 5 percent Alaska-resident preference for bidding on state contracts, though it is unknown at this time whether he had been claiming it when submitting bids.
More importantly, the state decided to stop doing business with the Montana-Alaskan and former director of the United Cook Inlet Drifters Association (UCIDA) despite the cozy arrangement between UCIDA and the state agency. They share office space in the same building at 43961 Kalifornsky Beach Road in Soldotna.
Mead did prohibit Maw from filing for future PFDS and made an effort to convince him that he’d been handed a meaningful punishment in Alaska “because (this) is a crime of dishonesty, and I use that in the legal sense.
“I think the fact that you’re walking away with a conviction is very significant.”
Dishonesty, unfortunately, has never seemed a major concern of the former Canadian university professor who in a bid to become the Alaska Commissioner of Fish and Game once claimed to be one of those rare individuals who discover an endangered species.
A history of dishonesty
The Fisheries Society has never made any such reference. The 1978 identification of the bull trout, a cousin of the Dolly Varden char, is credited by all sources to Ted Cavender of Ohio State University. Maw in that 2015 interview also said he’d never heard of Cavender and went on to assert that if Cavender had discovered the Dolly Varden-like species the Fisheries Society in 1980 officially recognized as the bull trout, it must have been different from the bull trout Maw discovered in Canada in 1985.
“He (Cavender) may have described it,” Maw said at the time, “but ‘bull trout’ is a common name.
“That far south, knowing something about bull trout, that could be an entirely different species. … Did I or Jim (Butler) check with someone in California? I didn’t check with anyone in California. I don’t know what they’re calling a bull trout down there.”
Caught in a web of bull-trout lies, Maw’s next response was to double down and lie some more. He launched an attack on the Anchorage Dispatch News (ADN), which published the bull trout story, with the assistance of the newspaper’s former and disgruntled executive editor, Pat Dougherty.
Dougherty then composed a letter for Maw that called the now author of this website various names and included the bizarre claim that the only way Maw could have said the things he was quoted as saying is if the reporter failed to identify himself before conducting the interview
Dougherty, channeling Maw, wrote that “Medred said he called me during the preparation of his column. That surprised me because while I did receive a call from someone, the caller ID was blocked and the caller never identified himself as Craig Medred. Had he so identified himself, I never would have talked to him. I know better.”
Maw can thank Dougherty for all that followed. Dougherty’s attack led to more digging to find out just how big a liar Maw might be. That digging led to the discovery that Maw, while claiming to be a resident of Alaska, was also claiming to be a resident of Montana in order to obtain residency benefits in both states.
Friends like that
By the time this discovery was made, Maw was among the powerful who Dougherty thought it the duty of journalists to “challenge…on behalf of the public.”
Walker had just appointed Maw to the Fish Board, the state entity that oversees the regulation of the state fisheries worth hundreds of millions of dollars. When an Alaska State Trooper was asked to investigate Maw’s apparent claims to residency in Montana, word got back to Walker that his appointee had a potentially big public relations problem in that he was claiming to be an Alaskan while also claiming to be a Montanan.
The next morning, Maw, who was then attending confirmation hearings before the Alaska Legislature, withdrew his name for consideration, and the ADN, then owned by Walker buddy Alice Rogoff, tried to cover up the reason why.
“Kenai River fish wars have claimed another Fish Board nominee,” the newspaper erroneously reported in a story that has never been corrected even though then ADN reporter Nat Hertz shortly after the original story hit the press did what journalists are supposed to do and reported what was really going on.
Maw was under investigation in Montana for his fraudulent claims to citizenship. It is illegal to claim residency benefits in two states at the same time because it is impossible to live in two states at the same time.
Maw fairly quickly accepted his guilt in Montana, where he was fined Maw $7,245 and lost his hunting and fishing privileges for 18 months. His problems were just starting in Alaska, however, where fraudulent claims of residency in order to obtain resident hunting fish and licenses were just the tip of the iceberg.
In Alaska, Maw had also made fraudulent claims in order to collect PFDs – checks for a portion of earnings from the state wealth fund shared with Alaskans every year as their portion of the income on investments from the oil-fueled Permanent Fund. The payments were born of a state constitutional stipulation that public resources, like the oil beneath state lands, are owned collectively by all Alaska citizens and are to be used “for the maximum benefit of its people.”
The state subsequently charged Maw with 12 felonies related to theft from the Fund. Maw’s response was to lie some more with a defense against the charges that argued someone other than him must have been electronically filing for those PFDs in his name.
What followed was one of the longest court cases in Alaska criminal history followed. Polasky twice managed to get a sympathetic judge to toss the indictments against Maw, but in winning these battles he was only prolonging the war.
Dragging out the case for years did, however, allow the now 79-year-old Maw to remain active in Alaska fishery politics where he told others he’d been wrongly accused, and to get back into the commercial fishing business from which he claimed to have retired before being named to the Fish Board.
Whether his latest admission of lying will see him step out of that area or do anything to change his behavior remains to be seen, given that the truth seems to matter far less in today’s post-truth society than it did a decade ago.
Indications are that it won’t.
Maw’s attorney told Kenai Peninsula radio station KDLL that his client got a good deal from the state, which might be a bit of an understatement.
Maw added that he is no longer a paid employee of the UCIDA, the region’s most powerful commercial fishing lobby which he once served as executive director. But he still works as a volunteer there and plans to continue doing so.
Returns of sockeye to the Kenai have been below the peak numbers of the 1980s and ’90s for a couple of decades, but scientists studying the salmon say this is true of runs all around the Gulf of Alaska. They are suspicious sockeye abundance has been pushed down by competition for food with pink salmon which have reached levels of abundance never before seen.
Despite this, there is no indication of a crash that would require closing the Kenai to all dipnetting, sportfishing and commercial harvests. State fishery managers are expecting a return of just shy of 3 million late-run sockeye to the Kenai River this summer, which just happens to be a “couple of years” on from when Maw predicted drastic fishing closures.
The personal-use dipnet fishery now harvests between 250,000 and 350,000 sockeye per year to feed Alaskan families. State management plans call for getting another 1.1 million to 1`.4 million past commercial nets and into the river to meet spawning and angling needs.
Those goals account for about 1.35 to 1.75 million sockeye, well shy of the 2.9 million expected to return this year. Returns would have to drop significantly under 2 million sockeye before managers were forced to consider dipnet and sport fish closures.
The lowest total returns to the river in the last 40 years have been in the range of 2 million fish, according to Fish and Game data. Annual returns haven’t dropped significantly below that since the 1970s when Alaska salmon runs were depressed due to cold water in the North Pacific Ocean and overfishing in the commercial fisheries.
Editor’s note: This is a revised version of the original story. It was updated to include more specifics of why Maw’s dragged out so long in the Alaska court system.
Thanks for your thorough coverage, Craig. Thinking if Maw lied to steal PFD money from Alaskan residents who knows what other scams he’s been up to. Wondering if anyone has checked to see if he’s been illegally voting in both Montana and Alaska?
Whoa…let’s go back to the headline… After several years of deliberate fraud, the net loss to Maw, after he gave the money back, is only a $500 fine? With a downside as cushy as that, why wouldn’t more people be willing to take the gamble?
Now let’s go back and examine and invalidate everything he did when on the board since we now know he is full of shit and a liar. How many subsistence fisheries have been destroyed by his policies?
Steve, As he wasn’t confirmed by the legislature, he was never actually on the board . No need for your concerns, he didn’t get to vote on any proposals. And Craig- as to your concerns about what you referred to as the ( cozy arrangement between ucida and the department sharing office space, this is an absolute lie. They do both rent office spaces (separately) in the same building. Would you speculate that krsa has a cozy relationship with our current governor who appointed bob, I mean doug as commisioner, since the krsa office in soldotna was dunleavys kenai p. campaign headquarters?
Gunner:
You are mistaken about Maw’s participation as a BOF member. He in fact participated in one meeting. I think it was the SEAK meeting in Ketchikan or Sitka. It was shortly after that it was discovered that he illegally claimed residency in Montana at the same time claiming residency in Alaska. He then pulled his name from consideration. His term went from 1/28/2015 until 2/20/2015. Check the BOF website. You might want to get your facts straight before calling others liars.
And it was common knowledge that UCIDA and ADFG had offices along side of each other in the same building. The commercial fish managers and biologists and UCIDA leadership were often seen together. As the saying goes, the Optics were not good.
And how was KRSA support of Dunleavy any different than UCIDA’s support of Walker. You may recall
All the fund raisers UCIDA put on for Walker and the many many thousands in contributions from the hundreds of Comm fishers. And how once elected Walker kept his promise and fired the BOF Chairman that UCIDA feared. Ostensibly because the BOF wanted nothing to do with your dishonest friend, Roland Maw. Talk about a “cozy “ relationship!
Would I “speculate” our current governor has a cozy relationship with KSRA? No.
I’d simply say he has a cozy relationship with KSRA because that is what it is just as Bill Walker had a cozy relationship with UCIDA, and a cozier relationship – all things considered – than that of Dunleavy with KSRA. I haven’t seen them teaming up to try to subvert the Board process as happened with Walker and UCIDA.
But the biggest difference here is that Alaska voters get the chance to toss governor’s out every four years and thus end cozy relationships. That isn’t the case with bureaucrats. It is there possible to cement cozy relationships for long periods of time. And if you don’t think being exposed to the same people day after day doesn’t influence how you think, I can only guess you’re living in a cabin deep in the Brooks Range.
The human animal is a “get along” species. Few want to confront people in their office building every day. Have you not noticed the wide disparity in how humans interact face-to-face and how they interact online? This is due to the moderating influences of face-to-face meetings.
That is generally a good thing, but it can also be a bad thing.
Thanks Craig for covering this story. Hopefully, Maw will go quietly into the sunset and you’ll never have to cover his exploits again.
Well done, Craig. Only thing missing is a comment from your former ADN boss.
In case you missed it: Dougherty called 4 conservatives running for assembly “fascists” in his invite to the “fight the fascists” rally today at Cuddy Park.
“Conservatives fascists”??. Clearly someone that uses words that they don’t even know their meaning.. Embarrassing…
In fairness to Dougherty, he often uses words rather loosely. His definition of Fascist might be different than yours. I know that on a couple of occasions when I worked for him we had disagreements over word usage, and they were not settled by the primary dictionary definition of the meaning of the word.
He could here be referencing the secondary definition of Fascist, ie. “a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic” control with the definition of autocratic likewise reverting to its secondary definition: “taking no account of other people’s wishes or opinions; domineering.”
Of course, by this definition, he’s the only Fascist I ever worked for, but introspection was never his strong suit. And let me be clear that I’m not calling him a Fascist although he would, from my observations, be highly susceptible to fraternizing with some Facists. He is largely driven by what one of his former employees called his “massive self-involvement.”
He did, for instance, take a big role in trying to organize a union at the Anchorage Times when he was a worker bee there only to become aggressively anti-union after becoming a manager for The McClatchy Company. I remember him once lecturing me on what a wonderful company McClatchy was and how a unionized newsroom would destroy all the peace, harmony and ability for good works.
Given this, it is sometimes hard to tell what Dougherty believes, and thus I wouldn’t take his use of “Fascist” literally. His favorite word for me these days is “hack.” I don’t take it personally. A name-caller is just part of what he has become. It’s a lot like Donald Trump going off on Rosie O’Donnell as a fat, little loser.
If you don’t like somebody’s ideas, find a way to personally attack them. Rosie has a net worth of $120 million; she might be a lot of things, but by American standards, you can hardly call her a “loser.” She’s a rather successful capitalist, which is by far the biggest standard we use to judge people in this country.
“In fairness to Dougherty, he often uses words rather loosely. His definition of Fascist might be different than yours.”
Well, then he only has a reckless disregard for how other people interpret the word. Does he have more words that he has his own definition for?
Seeing how a class A misdemeanor carries up to a year in jail, and after defrauding ALL Alaskans, Maw seems to have gotten off very lightly by simply admitted to being a liar. His reputation was already tarnished, if anything this slap on the wrist will be sure to bolster his apparent and ongoing belief that he’s above reproach by avoiding 12 felonies, jail time, and anything that resembles actual punishment.
Even the “reality” TV actors who called themselves the Alaskan Bush people received actual punishment for defrauding ALL Alaskans when they lied about being residents.
Maw will forever be known as a liar. Anytime he speaks up in a public setting advocating for UCIDA or for any commercial fisheries issue, the first thing that will come to mind is that he cannot be trusted to tell the truth. That kind of legacy will follow him forever. And it is far more consequential than the punitive effects of his sentence for lying.
Commercial fishing organizations would be well advised to avoid Maw like the plaque. But they won’t and their credibility will similarly be questioned.
And should Walker be elected, Maw will be appointed to the BoF once again. Cheers –
Maybe he will once again. But his chances of being confirmed are nil and none.
Roland “Clinton” Maw…. It’s tough at the top…