Cash rewards for bad behavior

For decades, commercial setnet fishermen working the beaches on the east side of Cook Inlet fought efforts to alter their fishery to reduce the bycatch of king salmon bound for the Kenai River.

As a result, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game was forced to shut the fishery down in total as returns of the big fish otherwise known as Chinook declined to record lows in 2023.

And now the fishermen are getting a nearly $5.8 million reward for their intransigence.

Welcome to fishery politics Alaska style or what some simply call Alaska “fishtics.”

The political games here is such that Alaska Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan are actually bragging about rewarding people who put themselves out of work by being stubborn and stupid when the environmental handwriting was on the wall for years. 

Granted, the money split between 440 permit holders isn’t exactly a bonanza. On a per capita basis, it works out to little more than $13,000 per permit.  But what Alaskan whose lost a job for whatever reason wouldn’t appreciate getting an unemployment check like that in the mail?

What is really wrong with this government handout, however, is the fact that the money could have been put to better use in the eyes of the permit holders themselves. The Eastside Coalition Association, a group organized by the setnetters, has agreed that there are way too many permits to fish the beaches and that at least 200 of them should be bought out.

Five-point-eight million dollars could be used to buy 200 permits at about $29,000 each. Cook Inlet setnet permits now available for sale on the Alaska Boats & Permits website go for $12,000 to $12,500.  You can consider this the “free-market” value.

A $29,000 buyout would give 200 permits holders about two and a half times what the market indicates their permits are worth.

Sadly, politics in Alaska ceased to be about solving problems decades ago, and every year became more and more about placating special interest groups of which commercial fishermen became one of the most vocal in the wake of the state’s implementation o f limited entry in 1972. 

Some commercial fishermen believed limited entry entitled them to a guaranteed share of the state’s salmon despite an Alaska Constitution that clearly says the state’s “fish, wildlife, and waters are reserved to the people for common use” with the Legislature assigned the duty of managing them for “for the maximum benefit of its (the state’s) people.”

Some still believe this.

The entitled Eastside Coalition is lobbying for a buyout program pegged at $260,000 per permit or more than 20 times the price for which permits are now selling. They think they are due this because spending time on the beaches in the summer is their “lifestyle,” and because they “feeding the world.”

This is nonsense. And if the fish were managed per the constitutional mandate of “maximum benefit of…the people,” they wouldn’t be going into commercial nets.

Both Cook Inlet sockeye and Chinook are now far more valuable when caught by visiting tourists, who spend way more money in Alaska to catch a sockeye or two than they would spend to simply buy the fish back in their home states, and sockeye have become a staple of “food security for thousands of Alaska dipnetters.

Feel free to argue with your friends and neighbors which of these harvests maximizes the benefit of the resource, but recognize that they now both trump the commercial fishery. If the world wants to eat salmon, there’s plenty of it available. The salmon farmers in Norway, Chile and elsewhere have made sure of that.

But wait, there’s more

The funding for the so-called East Side Setnet Fishery is, of course, but a small piece of the $99 million in federal aid Murkowski and Sullivan managed to pull out of the federal budget to help the state’s ocean-cruising welfare queens.

The bulk of the money – more than $75 million – is earmarked for the Bering Sea Snow Crab fishery. The collapse of that fishery has been largely blamed on a series of marine heat waves that arrived “after a period of historically high crab abundance,” according to fishery scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

But the weather-related crash was exacerbated by the “high density of mature crab” in the Bering Sea when the heat waves began, according to Gordon Kruse, a University of Alaska ecologist. 

The density was high because the crab fishery had for years been managed for maximum profitability. And it was hugely profitable.

When it collapsed, the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) in Washington state reported large impacts there due to the $62.6 mllion in snow crab revenue flowing into “King, Pierce and Snohomish counties,” which received the bulk of the $69.4 mllion in revenue flowing into that state.

“Since 2006, 57 percent of snow crab fleet vessels have been registered to Washington addresses,” PBS reported. “During the 2020-2021 season, 27 of that 60-boat fleet were registered in the Seattle metropolitan area.”

This has long been the case, and thus it’s obvious where a lof of the $75 million in crab money is going. It’s headin’ south.

While proclaiming that “our fishing industry is part of the beating heart of coastal Alaska,” and identifiying this latest bailout as “one step in the process, but one step closer to ensuring fishermen, their crews, seafood processors, and communities impacted by these fishery disasters receive the funding they need,” Murkowski somehow managed to overlook the fact that much of the money – if not most – will be flowing to non-resident fishermen.

Some of the money will, however, flow back to Alaska in the form of contributions to political candidates. The website Open Secrets, which tracks campaign contributions, says Sullivan, who is running for re-election, is now leading the parade of elected officials receiving funds from people linked to Trident Seafoods, the nation’s biggest seafood business.

The website notes that “the organization itself did not donate, rather the money came from the organization’s PACs, their individual members or employees or owners, and those individuals’ immediate family members.”

The donations for 2024, the latest year for which numbers are available, totaled more than $41,000 or about three times what was donated to Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., who was second on the list. All but $5,000 of what Sullivan received was reported to have come from individuals in some way associated with Trident. The other $5,000 came from a Trident-lined PAC.

The cash flow to Sullivan has likely gone up since 2024. His campaign in April of this year reported that it received “$2.1 million in the first quarter of 2026 across all of Sullivan’s authorized campaign committees, bringing cash-on-hand to $7.5 million.”

Sullivan is headed into a battle with Mary Peltola,  the former Alaska Congresswoman for all of Bethel, who has been flooded with money from Democrat groups hoping to buy her the Senate seat now held by Sullivan.

Peltola “raked in nearly $9 million across her authorized committees over the first three months of the year, a staggering sum for Alaska that reflects how critical national Democrats believe the race is to their chances of retaking the Senate majority,” Politico reported in April.

“Peltola’s $8.9 million haul represents the largest first-quarter raise of any Senate candidate in the state’s history, according to her campaign.”

Most of the money appears to have come from outside of Alaska. When then Rep. Peltola ran against now Rep. Nick Begich in 2024, Open Secrets reported she collected more than $13 million – almost five times as much as Begich raised – with more than $11 million of that, or about 84 percent, coming from Outside donors.

Contributions from residents of California and New York alone topped the contributions to Petltola from Alaskans by almost a quarter million dollars. Alaska is a place where a lot of Outside political players now believe they can buy influence.

The state’s commercial fishing interests recognized this decades ago and, as a result, have long punched above their weight in a state where the commercial fishing industry has been in decline for several decades. It in 1990 convinced the Alaska Legislature to ban commercial salmon farming, a move that ensured the price of salmon remained high, and in the process undercut the industry’s profitability.

By keeping salmon prices sky high, Alaska ensured that Norwegian fish farmers could survive the high startup costs of the net-pen salmon farming business, which they did. And the years that followed the ever-increasing efficiency with which they produced domestic salmon served to drive down the global price of the fish to its affordable state today. 

To try to compete with the net-pen salmon farming that spread from Norway to,Chile, Scotland, Canada and elsewhere, the state’s commercial fishermen pioneered minimal Alaska processing with headed and gutted carcasses sent to China to be fully process and shipped back to the U.S.

That worked great for some fishermen, at least for a time, but continued a decades-long decline in the contribution of salmon to the state’s economy

And yet, despite this, the industry has managed to hang onto enough influence to get the U.S. Department of Commerce to put cash in the pockets of crab fishermen who were feasting on their profits in the good-old days rather than saving for the inevitable rainy day and reward the eastside set fishery for refusing to solve its bycatch problem.

And the latter in a state where “bycatch” has become a four-letter word. Of course, the setnetters never saw it that way. For years, they protested they had a ‘right’ to harvest Inlet kings because, well, their special, and their “lifestyle” needs to be preserved.