Conflicts continue to surround Upper Cook Inlet meeting

In case you haven’t heard, the Board of Fisheries made some date changes at their workshop meeting last week which would accommodate holding the 2017 Upper Cook Inlet meeting in Anchorage. They also voted to discuss where to hold the meeting, again, during the miscellaneous agenda section of the upcoming Bristol Bay meeting. The Kenai folks want the meeting to be moved there and convinced two board members to push for that change.

As I mentioned previously, the last UCI regulatory meeting held in Kenai happened in 1999. The Valley has never hosted such a meeting, ever. If anybody has a gripe about how long it’s been since a meeting was held locally, the Mat-Su is in a far stronger position. If the board decides to move the UCI meeting from Anchorage, then it should be to the Mat-Su. If you agree, you can send a written statement to that effect to the Board Support Section in Juneau. Call the Palmer Fish and Game office to learn how.

On a different, but related, note, I had an interesting “confrontation,” (read: attempted intimidation) with three current or former drifters at the BOF workshop.

During the first meeting break, all three individuals got in my face and accused me, personally, of being responsible for their “poor” fishing success during the 2015 season. One told me I was lying in my columns about how well the season went, dollar-wise, for them. A second chanted that the “one percent rule” was the death of the drift fishery and needed to go. The third wanted to know how I planned to replace the seven million dollars in lost tax revenues due to foregone harvest opportunities based on the plan used to manage the 2015 commercial drift season.

These “gentlemen” were agitated, so I mostly listened and didn’t say a whole lot — they were not of a mind to listen anyway. Had this been more of a formal debate rather than a verbal “accosting,” here are some of the points I would have made. First, nobody made them choose fishing as their livelihood; that was their free choice. Second, most folks know there are no guarantees for income when commercial fishing — my wife’s parents knew that all too well as they pursued setnetting on the West side.

Third, duh, one of the biggest factors affecting commercial fishing income is the price per pound paid for the fish. The 2015 season saw the lowest per pound price payout to fishermen since 2006. The low prices are a direct result of processors having large inventories of last year’s fish sitting in cans in their warehouses or frozen in their freezers. Fourth, because of recent changes to Cook Inlet commercial fisheries management plans, the setnetters were allowed to fish more time during the season than in the last several years, thus reducing the need to use the drifters to primarily control the numbers of fish escaping into the Kenai and Kasilof Rivers.

Fifth, the run return timing was later in 2015, causing some problems in managing the fisheries to harvest surplus fish. In fact, the “gentleman” saying the “one percent rule” must go apparently was not aware that the one percent rule was not invoked in 2015 and the drifters were allowed to fish multiple periods well into the month of August. Sixth, the prospect of foregoing some sockeye harvest to allow king salmon escapements was thoroughly discussed before changes were made to several Cook Inlet management plans in 2014. The board felt losing some sockeye harvest to ensure adequate king escapements was a fair conservation-oriented tradeoff. The “gentleman” claiming lost tax revenues and foregone harvest dollars apparently didn’t agree.

The third “gentleman” who said I was lying was told to send me his information and I would write it up in this column. I offered my email address but he didn’t write it down. We all look at the same numbers supplied by Fish and Game. If he thinks I’m wrong, he needs to send me the rational why. If he has access to information through the commercial industry that I don’t, that also should be forwarded if the commercial side thinks they have valid arguments.

Here are a couple of last thoughts: media reports say the commercial salmon catch in Cook Inlet was valued at $30 million in 2015. That’s down from last year but is still a lot of money. And finally, I never realized I personally controlled so many economic and social situations!

Howard Delo is a retired fisheries biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. This column is the opinion of the writer and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman or its parent company, Wick Communications. You can leave Delo a message by emailing sports@frontiersman.com.