Has a new don wannabe

What a way to end the week.

No sooner had I finished a commentary on the ‘Big Lie’ propaganda suggesting that the 49 sockeye killed as trawl bycatch in an average year somehow led to bad fishing for Kenai dipnetters this season than a gubernatorial contender for governor went all in on how those Kenai fisher folk need to be slapped down.

The candidate in question would be Democrat Jonathon Kreiss-Tomkins, who was described in the bycatch story as a “usually intelligent guy,” only to have him act dumber than a post.

Why in the world would any Democrat candidate for governor want to give the middle finger to 160,000 Alaska resident fishing license holders and tens of thousands of resident dipnetters, and pee all over the legacy of former Gov. Tony Knowles, the last true Democrat to claim the governor’s office?

Especially when commercial fishermen already knew you were the guy they had in their pocket?

Knowles, for those who weren’t in Alaska back in the last century, is the governor who reformed the Alaska Board of Fisheries, the agency that sets state fishing regulations. Prior to his election in 1994, Board actions were pretty much directed by the commercial fishing interests that had largely dictated Alaska fishing policy since before statehood.

Kreiss-Tomkins now wants a return to the good old days when commercial fishermen ran the show.

Good old days

It was then that the state’s commercial fishing industry sold Alaskans on the idea that fish traps were bad in the lead-up to statehood. Fish traps are not bad. In fact, the Wild Fish Conservancy is trying to bring them back because “far too often threatened and endangered salmon and steelhead are harvested or die needlessly due to the limitations of today’s conventional fishing methods.”

Properly used, fish traps are the most efficient and environmentally friendly way to harvest salmon. But the state’s commercial fishermen didn’t like them because they were competition, and because many of them were controlled by Seattle interests.

These are the same competition-hating commercial fishermen who after statehood convinced Alaska voters to amend the constitution to create a “limited entry” system that restricted the number of commercial salmon fishermen in Alaska to reduce competition and make sure every fisherman made more money.

That the limited-entry permits the state gave away at the time became the property of the fishermen to whom the state gave them was a big added benefit in that when a fisherman retired, he (or she) could sell the permit to someone else and pocket the cash.

It was the state’s commercial fishing industry that also convinced the Alaska income-taxpaying voters of the 1970s to fund a massive hatchery program that was to provide fish for all Alaskans, but ended up producing almost no fish for anyone other than commercial fishermen.

Were this not enough, the hatcheries themselves were later turned over to commercial fishermen-controlled associations to run after the state decided the facilities were too costly for it to operate.

After that, it was the state’s commercial fishing industry – led by folks from Kreiss-Tomkins’ hometown of Sitka – who convinced the Alaska Legislature to ban net-pen salmon farming, which was destined to prove highly profitable for Norwegians, Chileans and others – in favor of farming the sea with fish from the hatcheries given the commerical fishermen.

At least fears about farmed salmon escaping their pens were eliminated by instead dumping the fish into the ocean by the billions in the hope that large numbers would come back. And anyone who tells you that these “free-ranged salmon” are any less of an environmental issue than those in net pens simply doesn’t know anything about ecology, or how Alaska hatchery fish are fattened in net pens so as to better compete with their wild brethrenbefore they are released into the ocean.

A lot of those net pens are poorly sited and present the same problems of net pens anywhere.

Lastly, until Knowles took office, it was the state’s commercial fishing industry that did its best to pound Alaska sport fishing into the ground even though it was clearly evident by the 1990s that the state economy witnessed a much bigger benefit from selling tourists the opportunity to catch an Alaska salmon than shipping non-residents a dead fish.

Knowles recognized this and set about reforming the Board of Fish. Now, Kreiss-Tomkins wants to undo what was done by the former governor. One has to wonder if the now 83-year-old Knowles had any clue this was in the works when he endorsed the young fella from Sitka back in May.

He must know now since Kreiss-Tomkins, or JKT as he prefers to be known, this week unleashed “An Open Letter to Alaska’s Commercial Fishermen” on the internet.

He therein outlined his commitment to lead the commercial fishing business, and first on the list of things he said he would do if elected is “restore balance to the Board of Fish. All user groups will be fairly represented, and no one organization will dominate the process. Science, data, and reasoned testimony will guide decisions. Once again, commercial fishermen, as well as all user groups, will receive a fair hearing.”

This sounds all well and good as long as you are unaware that commercial fishermen already get a more than fair hearing before the Board, which is why they are allowed to harvest more than 98 percent of the fish killed in Alaska state waters, according to Alaska Department of Fish and Game numbers.

But commercial fishermen would be happier if this number was 100 percent. Why?

Because commercial fishermen are businessmen, and like all businessmen, they are in business to make money.

Forget all the glorification of Alaska’s commercial fishermen as the last of the American cowboys. The business isn’t home to a bunch of modern-day Santiagos heading to sea in sailing skiffs in a spiritual quest to catch a marlin to prove they’re not over the hill, even though a lot of them are over the hill.

Still, they head to sea in high-speed powerboats equipped with radar, sonar, GPS and more with one simple goal in mind: making money. And if they can save money by heading to the waters around a hatchery to make money hauling in those “wild-caught” salmon for which Alaska has become known, all the better.

It reduces their fuel bill.

Who benefits?

Most of these hatcheries, it should be noted, were supposed to provide fish for all the Alaskans who voted to pay for them. And last year a state report credited the hatcheries with producing just shy of 71 million salmon.

Rod and reel fishermen, combined with dipnetters and subsistence fishermen using dipnets and/or gillnets, were reported to have caught 260,000 of these salmon or 0.37 percent. The bulk of the catch – 49.7 million pink salmon – went to a few hundred seiners and to the hatcheries that produced the fish.

The original promise to Alaska voters that the hatcheries would pump out 8 million sockeye, 1.5 million coho, and 300,000 Chinook salmon per year along with a bunch of pinks and chums proved to be a joke. The total rod and reel, personal-use and subsistence catch of hatchery coho (silver) salmon last year was 91,285; of sockeye salmon, 43,793; and of Chinook salmon, the big fish Alaskans call kings, 21,950.

And the king catch is misleading in that about 10,000 of those fish were produced by one of two still state-owned hatcheries, which does no “cost-recovery” fishing but is instead funded by fishing license revenues and mainly by federal, Dingell-Johnson funds that come from a largely unnoticed excise taxes on sport fishing equipment, import duties on fishing tackle and pleasure boats, and the portion of the gasoline fuel tax attributable to small engines and motorboats.

Meanwhile, hatchery-only, cost-recovery fishing is how the still-state-owned hatcheries on loan to commercial fishermen’s associations, along with a privately owned hatchery in Juneau and one in Valdez owned by no one and run by a volunteer board of directors, however that works, pay the bills.

Cost-recovery fisheries essentially made these hatcheries into new Alaska salmon fishing businesses that didn’t need to obtain limited entry permits to fish. The Board of Fish has maintained precious little oversight over the operations of these hatcheries, and has basically stood by as they have magnified the boom and bust, odd-even year cycle of salmon returns in the 49th state. 

The Board could use some more reform all right, but not because of an “anti-commercial fishing majority heavily influenced by Kenai River Sportfishing Association” as JKT claims.  But because the Board is still too deep in the pocket of the commercial fishing industry, as it has been since I started covering the fishing business in 1975 as a reporter for the Juneau Empire.

I later covered it for the Associated Press, on a radio broadcast for the United Fishermen of Alaska (UFA), the political mouthpiece for Alaska commercial fishermen, and for the UFA’s in-house newspaper, for the National Fishermen tabloid and the now-defunct Seafood Business magazine, and for decades for the Anchorage Daily News.

I watched the business evolve from canning salmon in dozens of Alaska communities for decades to managing a smaller number of cold-storage operations to the head-gut-and-ship the carcasses to Asia for processing business that it is today.

With each step in that transition, the business took more from Alaska and gave back less.

As a result, the commercial fishing industry – or at least the salmon connnected part of it – is  today a business that costs the state more to manage and police than it pays in taxes, a business that provides decent-paying jobs for only a few thousand commercial fishermen, and a business that survives, as it is, on the backs of chea, seasonal labor imported largely from Eastern Europe and Latin America to do the work still being done in-state and even cheaper labor, some of it allegedly slave labor, to finish processing the fish in China and elswhere in Asia.

The Alaska Department of Labor now reports that 81 percent of the in-state workforce is comprised of non-residents. That is up from 62 percent at the start of the new millennium. Most of these workers contribute almost nothing to the Alaska economy.

They live in company housing. They eat in company dining rooms. And they save almost every penny they earn to take home with them when they leave.

The people involved in catching the fish aren’t that much better. Labor reports that 41 percent of them are non-residents, and the research done for the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute indicates they leave the state with about half the revenue generated by commercially harvesting salmon in Alaska. 

JKT can claim all he wants that “commercial fishing is the backbone of Alaska,” but that is not a reality. That is what the industry once was in the 20th Century history, and we are now in the 21st Century.

Today the commercial fishing industry is more like a rib than a backbone.

The 21st Century, like it or not, already belongs to the net-pen salmon farmers, not Alaska’s free-range salmon farmers who are now, in some cases, watching returns in freefall, possibly due to their overstuffing of the ocean with hatchery salmon.

Hatchery-filled Prince William Sound, which last year recorded a harvest of about 44.5 million pink salmon, is at this time reporting a harvest to date of 1.6 million with the fishing season speeding towards its end.

It’s quite possible, likely probable, that the harvest for the year will fall short of the 5 million of 2024. That season was called a disaster, and a federal bailout was requested. These disaster requests have become a norm.

Meanwhile, the farmed salmon that took over the salmon business decades ago are part of a   $19 billion per year industry that is spreading into “bluehouses” on  land, where the environmental issues are less, and where salmon can be raised in clean, filtered water so consumers know exactly what they are getting. 

Admittedly,  there are issues with the pen-rearing of salmon both in recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS) on land and in net pens in the ocean. The industry has faced hurdles and continues to face more. Feed is now a key problem.

Since net pen farmers don’t turn small salmon loose to pillage the ocean as if the food supply for salmon there were endless,  they have to buy forage fish, which has raised environmental concerns about overfishing of anchovies, sardines, herring, mackerel, menhaden and more.