Alaska salmon management under fire
A law-school student now clerking for an Alaska judge has penned the outline for a Constitutional challenge to the way Alaska has for decades managed its salmon fisheries.
The conflict identified by Dodd stems from two state constitutional requirements. The first stipulates that “all natural resources belonging to the state” be managed “for the maximum benefit of its people. The second mandates that “fish, forests, wildlife, grasslands, and all other replenishable resources belonging to the state shall be utilized, developed, and maintained on the sustained yield principle.”
Dodd argues that ADF&G has embraced “policies that result in the long-term decline of wild salmon populations and violate the constitutional public trust. First, ADF&G overlooks highly accessible and widely accepted scientific evidence that hatchery programs, like those in Prince William Sound (PWS), reduce wild salmon genetic and phenotypic diversity.
“ADF&G further breaches its trust obligations by permitting and subsidizing these hatcheries in PWS.8 Second, ADF&G allows for salmon harvest beyond sustainable yield by promulgating regulations that permit overharvest and cause depletion of wild salmon at unsustainable rates.”
Dodd does not get into the general economics of the Alaska salmon fishing industry or the subsidization of the entire operation, but anyone who has spent much time observing how the salmon industry operates in the 49th state knows full well that it is not managed “for the maximum benefit of (Alaska’s) people.”
Maximum benefit
There are, obviously, various ways to define “maximum benefit,” and Dodd, who has some obvious social-justice inclinations, leans toward the lack of attention paid “food security” fisheries and the ultimate protection of wild fish in her paper.
But in a capitalist society, maximum benefit to the people of any state is arguably best defined as the economic return to the state as a whole, and in that regard, modern Alaska fisheries management has been a huge failure.
One need only look at the history here.
Commercial salmon fisheries that provided 80 percent of the revenue to fund the Territory of Alaska, according to the Alaska Historical Society, are now state-supported enterprises the costs of which are subsidized by Alaska oil and Permanent Fund dollars and propped up by federal “disaster” relief.
All of those taxes combined came up just shy of the $235 million envisioned as coming from other state businesses required to pay corporate income tax. But even the corporate income tax combined with the fishery taxes, the insurance taxes, the mining-license taxes, the large passenger vessel gambling taxes and the so-called “sin taxes,” amounted to little compared to the state’s petroleum and investment revenue.
All of these taxes combined represent $600.8 million in non-restricted revenue or a little more than a third of $1.6 billion in projected petroleum revenue, and less than a sixth of the nearly $3.9 billion in Alaska Permanent Fund “investment revenue” now helping to keep the state afloat with a lot of assistance from Uncle Sam.
“Federal revenue” was expected to account for 40.9 percent of the state’s $17.4 billion in funding for FY2026, followed by the investment revenue at 36.7 percent, oil and gas at 13.7 percent, tourism (the state’s now-largest business) at 0.8 percent and fisheries at 0.6 percent.
Against this backdrop, the 0.6 percent amounts to what might be called a “loss leader” in the business world. A loss leader is a product sold below its minimum profit margin for marketing reasons. In this case, the state takes a loss on what it costs to manage and police the salmon fishery in order to prop up the state’s commercial salmon industry.
Though 21st-century Alaska salmon harvests have reached levels never imagined in territorial days – thanks in part to state-funded, commercial hatcheries that farm the sea – modern fishery taxes don’t begin to provide enough revenue to fund the $90.6 million budget of the Commercial Fisheries Division of ADF&G, let alone the agency’s entire budget of about $260 million.
Blessed tourists
Alaskans should be thankful, though they’re not, that about half of ADF&G’s budget is funded by hunters and fishermen living in the Lower 48 states. The state gets almost $100 million a year in grants from the hidden taxes the federal government imposes on the sale of sport fishing and hunting-related equipment sold in all 50 states.
The budgets of ADF&G’s divisions of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife Conservation are almost entirely funded by these grants along with a match from revenue coming from the sale of Alaska hunting and sport-fishing licenses. Federal law requires the states provide a 25 percent match to collect the 75 percent of revenue available from the feds.
Alaska is lucky that a lot of tourists who come to the state in the summer buy fishing licenses that provide the majority of the funds to meet this matching requirement. This is, of course, not something commercial fishermen like to hear.
They generally hate the idea of tourists competing for a portion of the salmon harvest and like to make the commercial fishing business out as doing great things for the people of Alaska while “feeding the world.”
The United Fishermen of Alaska (UFA), a lobbying group for those commercial fishermen, claims tax payments of nearly $80 million to the state, but doesn’t mention that a big chunk of this is kicked back to the industry to help support the hatcheries that farm the ocean and to promote the sale of Alaska seafood.
And half of what is left in tax revenue, as UFA does admit, is “shared with communities and
boroughs,” but that isn’t quite accurate, either. The shared funds go to only a dozen of the state’s 18 boroughs and incorporated municipalities, plus about a third of the state’s more than 300 communities.
The bulk of the money, more than $1 million per year, goes to eight boroughs and/or cities – Bristol Bay, Aleutians East, Sitka, Ketchikan, Cordova, Kodiak, Saint Paul, and Unalaska. Unalaska is the biggest port in Western Alaska, and the biggest winner in this revenue-sharing game.
That Unalaska and other coastal communities benefit from state revenue sharing is wonderful for them, but it means communities elsewhere, and the Alaskans living in them, must sacrifice other state-funded services to help fund the budget of ADF&G, which manages the state fisheries, and partially fund the budget of the Alaska Department of Public Safety, which polices the fisheries.
All of this because, basically, despite the heavily promoted and romanticized image of Alaska’s commercial fisheries as the last of the American cowboys, the commercial fisheries, under state management, have become home to a bunch of welfare queens and kings.
But these are politically powerful welfare queens and kings aggressively engaged in promoting the commercial salmon fishery as a great thing for Alaska because of the jobs it provides.
“As Alaska’s largest private‐sector employer, commercial fishing is a major contributor to employment and wages,” UFA claims. But that’s a lie.
“Leisure and hospitality” comes in second with 35,700 jobs. Fisheries are harder to quantify, but Labor reports the industry provides about two-thirds of the state’s 11,800 manufacturing job, and the agency has estimated around 6,000 people are involved in harvesting fish, plus some smaller numbers employed in transportation and warehousing.
The Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute (ASMI) claims the industry provides 41,800 jobs, but concedes that the business is highly seasonal, and these amount to only “24,100 average annual jobs,” or slightly more than half the numbers of jobs as provided by health care.
The dollar drain
What ASMI doesn’t mention, but what the state Labor Department notes, is that more than 80 percent of the jobs in seafood processing are now held by nonresidents.
The agency also records “the difficulty U.S. employers, and Alaska employers in
particular, have had finding enough workers to fill” processing jobs. As a result, many workers are recruited from Eastern Europe and Latin America.
The radio station covers Bristol Bay, site of the state’s most valuable salmon fishery, and was reporting on “these tough but essential jobs.”
“Our mantra for that is to ‘work, earn and return.’ Come in, work, and go home,” Gannon said. “And our people enjoy that. You know, and we have a large group of people that want to come in, they want to work, and they want to return to their home countries.”
Work and go home also means these workers contribute almost nothing to the Alaska economy because they save almost every penny they earn rather than spending it in the 49th state. Gannon said his company began actively recruiting workers in Ukraine after the Russians invaded that country.
“….Finding Ukrainian workers has been a priority for us to help provide economic opportunities for Ukrainians,” he said. “And I think we’re succeeding…. It’s nice to see so many that will be able to earn and provide for their extended family in Ukraine and outside of Ukraine.”
Most Alaskans long ago gave up on short, low-paying, seasonal jobs processing salmon, and the state lost out on the opportunity for year-round salmon processing jobs when it banned net-pen salmon farming in 1990 in favor of open-ocean farming of salmon.
Net-pen farmed salmon was then in it infancy. It now dominates salmon markets, but the industry is under fire for depleting the ocean of anchovies, sardines, herring and other so-called “forage fish.”
Since Alaska farms its fish at sea, where they can deplete forage on their own, the state has managed to avoid this farming controversy, although the Alaska version of salmon farming might actually create more problems than net-pen farming.
The Alaska program allows for the free-intermixing of farmed and wild fish, which can create both health and genetic problems, and is highly inefficient when it comes to feed conversion. The net-pen farmers end up harvesting about 95 percent of the fish they put in their pens.
Alaska’s open-ocean farmers are happy to get back 3 percent of the fish they send to sea, most of which are now also fed in net pens before release to make them bigger and stronger and better able to survive than wild salmon.
At that rate, the more than 120 million small, low-value pink salmon that returned to Alaska last year would have consumed 1.06 billion to 1.58 billion pounds of forage at sea. No one has ever attempted to calculate how much forage would be consumed by the approximately 4 billion young pinks needing to go to sea to produce that return of 120 million.
But if they ate even a third as much as the fish that survived to return, the forage removal would amount to something in the neighborhood of 20 billion pounds. Norway is now estimated to be feeding about 4.5 billion pounds of ocean-caught forage fish annually to produce about 250 million, high-value Atlantic salmon two or three times the size of an Alaska pink.
The state of Alaska contends that no one can definitively prove that its ocean farming is causing environmental harm, despite some pretty good science documenting declines in size of high-value sockeye salmon.
The view that there is an ecological free lunch to be found at sea defies logic, but is wholly embraced by a small group of Alaska commercial fishermen benefiting – in most years – from the tens of millions of pinks, or humpies as Alaskans call them, produced by the state’s highly inefficient salmon farming business.
One might be tempted to ask why anyone would want to get into the inefficient business of farming low-value salmon at sea when there is more money to be made in farming high-value salmon in pens.
But the more appropriate question might be to ask why someone wouldn’t adopt this model when the state props it up, and it pleases fishermen who want to believe they’re still doing things the old-fashioned way, like aging Santiago in Ernest Hemingway’s famous 1952 novella, “The Old Man and the Sea.”
‘Stakeholders’
What Alaska now provides is an illustration of what happens when a political entity creates what ADF&G describes as a “stakeholder-driven” resource management system. Thankfully the state didn’t let stakeholders manage its oil resource, or the state would now be broke.
Historically, Alaska’s stakeholder-driven management meant commercial fishermen and salmon processors largely ran the show, but the state in 1978 granted rural fishermen some role in the process in response to federal government plans to create an Alaska-only priority for so-called “subsistence” fishing and hunting on the vast federal land holdings in the 49th state.
As the National Park Service notes, the unique federal subsistence priority became law in 1980 with the passage of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act…nowhere else in the United States is there a federally mandated program to manage traditional subsistence harvests of fish and wildlife on federal lands, including national parks, monuments and preserves.”
A lot of litigation followed in the years after ANILCA as the state and federal government, along with private citizens, battled over who could manage what. When the state in 1986 amended its 1978 subsistence law to mimic the federal law and limit subsistence to rural residents only, the late Sam McDowell, a conservation activist, and others sued.
“Although the ramifications of these clauses are varied, they share at least one meaning: exclusive or special privileges to take fish and wildlife are prohibited. Section 15 states this explicitly with respect to fisheries,” the justices wrote at that time. “The proceedings of our Constitutional Convention show that the same meaning was intended with respect to sections 3 and 17.”
Commercial fishermen, particularly those with Cook Inlet permits, recoiled at the idea of a harvest priority might be created for the two-thirds to three-quarters of Alaskans living in the urban areas.
Fearful that dipnetters from the Anchorage metro area, in particular, might gain a priority to most of the salmon returning to the Inlet, commercial fishing groups quickly began pushing the Alaska Legislature to create “non-subsistence” zones to eliminate what are now often-called “food security fisheries.”
As a result, the Legislature in 1992 passed a law directing the Boards of Fisheries and Game to identify areas or communities “where dependence upon subsistence is not a principal characteristic of the economy, culture, and way of life of the area or community.” The Boards that same fall declared an area more than three times the size of Rhode Island off limits to subsistence.
It included the nearly 2,000-square-mile Municipality of Anchorage, the more than 25,000- square-mile Matanuska and Susitna Borough, and the 25,000-square-mile Kenai Peninsula Borough. And it ended the fears of commercial fishermen that the more than half of all Alaska residents living in those areas would be given a priority on the harvest of Inlet salmon.
Kenai River late-run sockeyes support the state’s largest sport fishery – which annually attracts 150,000 to more than 180,000 anglers, according to Fish and Game – and an Alaska-only, personal-use dipnet fishery, that was created as a compromise for food-security fishing when state subsistence fishing was banned in the broad Kenai-Anchorage-MatSu area.
The sport fishery is comprised largely of non-residents who make Kenai tourism explode in the summer. The dipnet fishery attracts up to 30,000 Alaskans from all across the state.
All of them wait in line behind the commercial fishery for salmon, and because there is no allocation provided for their harvests, they take the leftovers from the commercial fishery. When the sockeyes return in such numbers that commercial fishermen have difficulty slowing the flow, the dipnetters and anglers are awash in salmon as was the case in 2025, and then there are years like this one when the story is the opposite.
The Kenai River Sportfishing Association, the only representative of average Alaskans that has managed to gain at least among the ‘stakeholders’, has battled for years to allow more sockeye to escape commercial nets to enter the river and improve the fishing for dipnetters and anglers.
As a result, it has come under fire from the man now judged to be most likely to to become the state’s governor. Democrat Jonathon Kreiss Tomkins from Sitka sent commercial fishermen an “Open Letter” proclaiming that if elected he would “restore balance to the Board of Fish” by ridding it of “anti-commercial fishing majority heavily influenced by Kenai River Sportfishing Association.”
“I am running,” he wrote, “to be a champion for the commercial fishing industry.”
One might be tempted to believe JKT, as he likes to call himself, has been bought and paid for by the state’s commercial fishermen, but it appears more likely he drank the Kool-Aid while growing up in Sitka, home to the late Sen. Dick Eliason, the commercial fisherman who led the fight to ban net-pen salmon farming in Alaska in favor of open-ocean farming.
Eliason wasn’t shy about his motive.
“I fished all my life. We didn’t want to see it go down the tube,” he told Sitka public radio station KCAW prior to his death. “Eliason,” the station reported after his death, “wanted salmon farming banned completely in Alaska to protect wild stocks and the people who earned a living off of them.”
But that was only half true. Alaska was by 1990 already deep into trying to farm salmon at sea. What Eliason really wanted to do was protect the people who earned a living killing salmon the old-fashioned way, and though Eliason paid lip service to the idea of protecting “wild stocks,” his Sitka legacy was to help create a community surrounded by hatcheries that appear to be slowly, but steadily replacing some wild stocks.
But then, the prime interest of the stakeholders involved in the modern management of Alaska salmon isn’t about saving wild fish; it’s about making money because businesses that don’t make money are destined to die.
And this is the biggest fact commercial fishing interests want to keep hidden from Alaskans, that fact that commercial fishing is, at the end of the day, a business like any other.
Categories: Commentary, Outdoors
