Alaska’s potential state money fish/Craig Medred photo

Why not make money instead?

Some Alaska lawmakers are once again upset about reports of a few snowbirds who claim Alaska residency so they can come north each summer to catch loads of fish, and as a result, said lawmakers are proposing even stiffer requirements for obtaining and retaining resident fishing licenses in the 49th state.

You can read all about this at MustReadAlaska. Suffice it to say, the state already has the nation’s toughest standards for obtaining fishing licenses. It is one of only four states –  Maine, Wyoming and Hawaii are the others – that require new arrivals spend a full year in-state before qualifying for resident licenses to fish, hunt or trap.

Most of the other 46 state states require 30 to 90 days, though some require six months and others allow you to become a resident angler or hunter as soon as you obtain an in-state driver’s license. All the states do, however, share one thing in common: If you claim residency in one, you can’t claim residency in another.

Or, simply put, it’s illegal to be a resident of two states at the same time for hunting, fishing, taxes or anything else. So any snowbird claiming residency anywhere other than Alaska for any reason already is subject to prosecution.

This is what landed Sitka fishing guide Tom Olhaus in trouble with Alaska Wildlife Troopers a decade ago. The state decided that he forfeited his residency when he signed a mortgage on a Massachusetts house that contained credits available only to Massachusetts residents.

Roland Maw, a member of the regulation-setting Alaska Board of Fisheries and a Cook Inlet commercial fisherman, found himself in a somewhat similar situation in 2015 when it was discovered that he’d tried to save a few bucks on license fees by claiming to be a resident of both Montana and Alaska at the same time.

As it later turned out, he was also claiming to be a resident of Alaska eligible for permanent fund dividends when he was actually a resident of Montana. That got him in even bigger trouble after his attorney failed to produce the phantom who Maw claimed snuck onto his computer and maliciously filed for the dividends in Maw’s name.

One has to give Maw credit for moxie in suggesting he was the victim of the greatest Alaska frame-up of the new millennium. But then state records would indicate he was long claiming to be an Alaska resident while living Outside.

It was all about money big or small, and so too the latest resident/nonresident dustup.

Some lawmakers have decided the existing law isn’t stringent enough, and they want to amend the law to apply Permanent Fund Dividend standards to the regulations so anyone who is out of the state for more than 180 days in a year will lose their resident hunting, fishing or trapping license.

Apparenlty they are of the view the state can make a lot of money by squeezing $100 out of these folks for a nonresident fishing license – fishing seemingly the big issue here – rather than the $20 for the resident fishing license.

It’s complicated

Whether the costs of trying to catch and prosecute a few fishermen for being out of state more than 180 days will be less than the $80 difference and whatever fines the state might be able to collect is hard to know, and surely if this is applied to Alaksa hunting, fishing and trapping licenses, it should be applied to all other Alaska licenses shouldn’t it?

But that would, of course, prove a problem for guys like commercial fishermen Davig Negus from Yaktutat who engaged in a long and costly battle with the state about his residency after the Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission ruled him a resident but Alaska State Troopers, decided he wasn’t.

And in today’s economy, which is vastly different from that of 2012 when Negus was charged, what happens when remote workers who spend time working in a variety of states chose to maintain their residency in the state of Alaska no matter how much or little time they spend here?

Negus was something of the model for today’s remote worker. He and his wife, Shannon, maintained a home in Yakutat where they every summer fished commercially and processed salmon for their business – Mystic Salmon. 

But, as CFEC hearing officer Frank Glass concluded in 2012, “they spent most of the off-season months away from Yakutat, usually at the house owned by David Negus’s mother in Dexter, Oregon, and on trips to develop and support their direct marketing seafood business.”

Still, Glass added, Yakutat was where the Neguses had been registered to vote since 2004. It was where their boats and motor vehicles were registered. It was the address given on their Alaska driver’s licenses since 2004. It was the address used when they filed their federal income tax. It was where they did business. And it was where the Commercial Fishery Entry Commission mailed their limited entry permits.

He eventually decided the Neguses were legally Alaska residents; Troopers later decided otherwise; and the Neguses case became a shit show. One can only guess what further shit shows could arise from trying to hold fishermen, hunters and trappers to the PFD standards for residency especially given the mobility of the 21st Century population.

We are now so mobile that the state of Alaska has decided people need spend only 30 days here to know enough about what is going on to form valid opinions on which politicians should get their votes. The voter roles might undergo some serious shrinkage if the PFD standards were applied to voting.

But never mind that. All real Alaskans know fishing is a hell of a lot more important than voting.

And clearly some Alaska lawmakers don’t like quasi-residents taking advantage of Alaska’s fishing any more than they like nonresidents taking advantage of Alaska fishing, and thus the latest go-round about a $100 fee for a nonresident license versus the $20 fee for residents, the differential being the greatest in licensing fees in the nation.

Nothing wrong with that. There is a good argument to be made that even with the jacked up nonresident fee Alaska isn’t getting its full value out of its salmon and halibut resources, which can now be considered globally rare. And there is an even better argument to be made that the Legislature should be trying to maximize the value of those resources instead of fiddling around with trying to catch license fudgers who’ve already served their year in Alaska to get a resident license.

So maybe we should consider a more sensible and effective way to milk the snowbirds, most of whom are as honest and upright as your average Alaskan or maybe more.

But before we get to that, let’s also recognize that the largest rip-off of state fishery resources is not nonresident anglers posing as residents, but nonresident, commercial fishermen being nonresident commercial fishermen.

They are the reason why the Alaska commercial fishing business is worth more to outside interests than to Alaska.

Commercial fishing accounts for 99 percent of the seafood harvested in Alaska, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, and 72 percent of the catch is taken by commercial fishing permit holders from the states of Washington, Oregon and California. 

There is unfortunately little the state can do about this because the U.S. Constitution protects interstate trade.

And that, according to the Alaska Law Review, means the state cannot charge “nonresident commercial fishermen more for commercial fishing fees than resident commercial fishermen” unless “the fee differential merely compensate(s) the state for the added expense of the nonresidents or balance(s)-out expenses borne by residents to which nonresidents do not contribute.”

This has been read to limit the fees imposed on nonresident commercial fishermen to no more than three times the fees charged resident commercial fishermen, who pay a maximum $250 for their permits. A similar fee differential has generally been applied to non-commercial licenses for fishing, hunting and trapping Outside although a few states, Alaska included, have been able to get away with an up to five-fold increase for nonresident licenses.

The courts have, however, held that there is a limit to how much states can gouge nonresidents to pursue their cultural fishing and hunting activities in places other than their home state.

The unprotected

Still, recreational hunting and fishing aren’t protected by the U.S. Constitution in exactly the same way as commercial fishing because recreational hunting and fishing aren’t business activities.

Thus, Alaska can legally allow a state resident to kill a moose, some caribou, a bunch of Sitka blacktail deer and other big game animals for the $45 cost of a resident hunting license while at the same time charging nonresidents $160 for a nonresident hunting license plus $650 for a caribou tag, if he or she wants to kill a caribou; $800 for a moose tag, if she or he wants to kill a moose; $300 for a deer tag to kill a deer and so on.

The nonresident permit fees top out at $2,200 for a musk ox, $1,000 for a brown/’grizzly bear and $850 for a Dall sheep on top of the $160 fee for a nonresident hunting license.

These fees set a precedent for making nonresidents pay more for certain fish. There is no reason the state can’t declare some fish – say salmon and halibut – “big-game fish” and charge permit fees to catch them. Some southern states already do this.

Both Florida and Alabama consider tarpon “big-game fish” and charge for tags, in addition to the standard state fishing license, to catch and keep these species.

The Florida fee is $51.50. The Alabama fee is $61, and it only allows an angler to keep one tarpon 60 inches or longer in length. Oregon also charges for tags for the harvest of salmon, steelhead, sturgeon and halibut, though it doesn’t declare them big game.

How far states can go in setting resident and nonresident fees for big-game fishing tags is unclear, but there are obvious precedents in place for declaring some fish “big game” and for differentiating such species from economically less-valuable fish in the same way “big game” has long been separated from “small game” in setting fees for hunting licenses all across the country.

So let’s say, Alaska charges nonresidents $100 for a Chinook harvest tag, in those rare places where king (Chinook) salmon can still be harvested, and $50 for a halibut harvest tag, and maybe $20 for a tag good for three red (sockeye) salmon with a limit of five or six of these sockeye-package tags per year on top of the standard license fee.

Twenty dollars for three sockeye does not seem an unreasonable fee. It might instead be viewed as a good deal for nonresident anglers.

Three sockeye salmon would produce six sockeye salmon filets at a cost of $3.33 per filet and never mind the fun of catching the fish, which is thrown in for free. An average sockeye filet will weigh about a pound and a half or so, meaning each filet would cost about a third of the rock-bottom price of $6.99 a pound Alaska sockeye was going for at some Costco outlets this summer with processors trying to dump leftover inventory from 2022 with the 2023 Alaska commercial harvest getting underway.

Now, let’s consider that in a good year anglers on Alaska’s Kenai River harvest somewhere around 500,000 sockeye. And let’s assume that at least half of these are caught by nonresident anglers given how the resident harvest has in modern times shifted away from the rod-and-reel fishery toward the dipnet fishery.

In this scenario, a harvest of 250,000 sockeye would require the sale of approximately 83,333 nonresident sockeye tags at $20 which would net the state nearly $1.7 million in tag fee to add to the already nearly $12 million per year nonresidents spend statewide on standard Alaska fishing licenses, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

Real money

For comparison sake here, consider that Cook Inlet commercial sockeye fishery last year caught 1.93 million sockeye salmon worth an average price of $1.89 per pound. With these sockeye averaging $1.54 dockside, the catch was valued at almost $16 million.

The state collects a 3 percent tax on these fish, meaning the 2023 harvest netted the state about $480,000 or less than a third of the revenue the state could collect by selling a lot fewer fish direct to tourists.

And if marketing salmon this way encourages a few more nonresidents to come north and illegally buy nonresident licenses without having served their year in Alaska, all the better.

In these days of the internet, it is incredibly easy to find out where someone was claiming legal residence six months or a year ago. The Troopers could probably set up a computer program, if they haven’t already done so, to scan all new resident licenses for people who haven’t served their year in Alaska.

But most nonresidents aren’t going to try to cheat the licensing scheme anyway. They’re going to buy their permit and go fishing, which could provide a nice, new revenue stream for the state.

Throw in tag fees for nonresident coho in the Susitna Valley; sockeye and Chinook in Copper River basin; halibut in Cook Inlet; halibut; Chinook, coho salmon and halibut in Southeast Alaska, and pink salmon statewide, and who knows how much revenue could be generated.

Pink salmon, the fish most Alaskans sneeringly call “humpies,” are now worth less than 50 cents per pound in the commercial fishery, according to Alaska Department of Fish and Game data. At an average weight of 3.5 pounds last year, again according to state data, that made the average commercially caught humpy worth $1.75 or, more accurately, $1.50 at the 2022 average price of 43 cents per pound. 

So if Alaska gave non-residents a real deal and sold them a package of five humpy tags for $5 to harvest the salmon most salmon-spoiled Alaskans don’t want to harvest, the state might generate a significant amount of revenue off its lowest-value fish.

State records show an angler catch of just shy of 155,000 humpies in 2022. Since most Alaskans don’t want these fish, let’s figure tourists caught half of them or approximately 77,500.

If they’d been caught on five bucks for five humpy permits, that’s another $77,500 for the state, which doesn’t sound like much until you figure the state tax on the same number of fish caught in the commercial fishery would come to just over $4,000.

There is money to be had in selling tags to harvest Alaska resources.

State records make this very clear. The sale of hunting tags is already a very profitable state operation. Approximately 15,290 non-resident hunters paid the state just shy of $8.5 million for big-game tags in 2022. They spent only about $4 million less than the 232,844 people – about 22 times as many – who bought nonresident fishing licenses.

If the state wants to make money here, it would seem there are better ways than chasing the few scofflaws who someone thinks aren’t spending enough time in the state to qualify as residents even if they aren’t claiming residency in any other state in the nation.

Rumors and resentments

There were 155,241 resident fishing licenses sold in 2022, according to Fish and Game. If one figures 10 percent of them – 15,524 – were sold to cheaters (that number is probably high, but let’s go with it), the state lost about $1.25 million in revenue.

Now let’s assume that if the state spent a lot of money trying to catch these people, it might catch half, though that is probably high. Law enforcement puts its greatest effort into solving homicides, and only half of murderers get caught.

So realistically, the state could spend a big chunk of change trying to recoup, at best, less than $650,000 in lost license revenue if one assumes there are huge number of people continuing to claim residency here after having once spent a year in Alaska, leaving, returning regularly and refusing to declare residency in any other state since.

If this is about money, and that is what is about because nothing else makes sense other than maybe some pettiness on the part of some state lawmakers, there are better ways for the state to make money off its fishery resources, which would be a good thing because with the value of commercial caught Alaska salmon in a downward slide the 3 percent tax the state now imposes on the sale of those fish is shrinking every year.

The landing tax was in 2022 good for less than 5 cents for each humpy a commercial fishermen delivered to processors, or worth about 25 cents for five of the fish. Compared to that, selling a non-resident angler five humpy tags for $5 sounds like a bonanza.

Hell, with commercial caught Bristol Bay sockeye this year weighing 5.5 pounds and selling for 52 cents per pound, according to Fish and Game data, the tax paid the state on each of those salmon came in shy of 9 cents. So five of them put a whopping 45 cents into state coffers.

This is what you get in a state where commercial fishing interests have long dictated fishery policy and where politics sometimes seemed to be dominated by the ignorant as the author of the House version of the legislation, Rep. Rebecca Himshoot pretty much admitted to KCAW public radio in Sitka.

“On Prince of Wales (Island), everybody knows each other across the entire island,” Himschoot told the radio station. “And so they see people coming in who are claiming residency for hunting and fishing, and filling freezers and then leaving, or taking a lot of fish boxes with them. And not actually investing in the community. Sometimes – I’ve heard stories, I haven’t seen this – they even bring most of their groceries with them, so that they’re really not committing to the community and not really providing any sort of support for the community where they’re using the boat ramps and the roads and taking advantage of all the infrastructure that’s there, without really contributing in a meaningful way.”

“I’ve heard stories; I haven’t seen this….”

Of course, she hasn’t seen this because it’s a common Southeast belief more myth than reality. Maybe these “people” are barging in their own gas, too, to fuel the boats and trucks using those roads and boat ramps, and camping on the beach to avoid paying rent or investing in homes in island communities.

And how many of these people can there actually be on Prince of Wales Island? The Prince of Wales-Hyder Census area has 3,288 housing units, according to the U.S. Census, and 72.6 percent of them are occupied by their owners.

This would appear to leave about 900 rental units, at most, available to all the people who show up to game the system. But, of course, the minute they rent a property they’re committing to the community, so Himshoot must be talking about the people living on the beaches in tents or maybe in their motorhomes.

But then how do you fit a summer’s worth of supplies in a motorhome? This is smalltown Alaska nonsense.

One hears the same sort of argument about nonresident, seasonal homeowners on the Kenai Peninsula, homeowners who pay the Kenai Peninsula Borough millions of dollars in taxes every year while demanding almost nothing in services because they don’t have kids in the borough’s schools and aren’t needing winter road plowing and police services because they’re not on the Kenai in the winter.

In fact, if the state is subsidizing some of these people to the tune of $80 per year by letting them retain an Alaska resident sport fishing license because they are a legally a resident of no other state than Alaska and love to fish in the 49th state so much they’re willing to pay upkeep and taxes on a house that sits empty for much of the year, the Kenai Borough is getting a hell of a good deal.

The same might be said for Prince of Wales Island, but sometimes in the 49th state pettiness trumps even the idea of making the state’s resources truly produce monetary value for Alaskans.