Borough ponders how to spend state fish money

PALMER — The Mat-Su Borough has accepted $2.5 million appropriation from the Legislature for use in helping to alleviate salmon fisheries problems, but isn’t quite sure how to spend it.

“With this money coming forward and additional money coming a little bit at a time through this budget year, it seems we have gotten the attention of the fish community,” borough manager John Moosey said at a Nov. 15 assembly meeting.

It had been hard until now to get that attention in Mat-Su, Moosey said. He arrived at the meeting with a plan to use $1.6 million to gathering data about where fish go after they leave Cook Inlet. The other $900,000 would go to improving culverts that impede fish progress through borough streams.

But not all of the assembly was onboard with that proposal.

“The public wants fish in the creek,” Arvin said. “(We put) $1.6 million of a $2.5 million grant and the result is possibly fish in the creek when? Ten years from now?”

The recommendation to study fish in Cook Inlet came from the borough’s fisheries commission, Moosey said.

Borough Mayor Larry DeVilbiss said the split of the money had been “very well vetted.”

“I’ve not heard a lot of controversy about this,” he said. “The one thing I’ve questioned is whether we shouldn’t be promoting our tourists to fish pike and just fish them into extinction and that would be a big help to our salmon business.”

Pike in the borough are considered an invasive species.

Arvin mentioned that there had been talk of stocking local streams with hatchery fish. Assemblyman Steve Colligan said that it’s important for the borough to know what’s happening to fish in the inlet.

“I think the commercial fishermen would love it if we just dumped more fish from a hatchery in a river,” he said. “Our commission has kind of advised that their top priority is the tagging and tracking of those fish because we have huge gaps in our data.”

Without data to show what is happening in the inlet, it is hard to justify to the people who make those decisions why fewer fish should go to commercial fishermen and more to sport fishermen.

“To give to someone else we are taking from someone else and that is the heated discussion at the end of the day,” Colligan said.

Arvin said that if hatchery stocking isn’t on the table, he’d at least like to see more of the money spent fixing the culverts.

“Then there should be at least an equal amount of money allocated to fish passage improvements,” Arvin said.

The assembly voted to accept the money, but voted down a resolution approving that $1.6 million/$900,000 split. Moosey said he’d be back at a future meeting with another resolution about how to use the money.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.