Fisheries meetings dominate the sportfishing offseason

Even though sportfishing has been over in the Valley for the past several weeks, things have still been busy on the fisheries front. I wrote in a previous column about the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council (NPFMC) meeting attended by four Matanuska-Susitna Borough Fish and Wildlife (MSBFWC) commissioners and the testimony we gave to them.

I spent three days at the Board of Fisheries (BOF) workshop to learn the status of three Cook Inlet agenda change requests (ACRs) and a fourth regarding Kodiak commercial fisheries. I also detailed some information on these four ACRs in a previous column. The short version is that all four ACRs were not accepted by the BOF.

The Kodiak ACR, as I mentioned before, would have essentially created a full-blown Kodiak area meeting as well as an Upper Cook Inlet (UCI) meeting. While the topic of the ACR merits discussion and possible action according to at least two board members, the vote to accept the ACR was defeated 0-7. The ACR submitters were encouraged to submit the topic as a regular proposal during the normal board cycle for the appropriate area.

What has come to be a perennial item at these workshops is the Kenai Peninsula petitioning the BOF to hold the UCI regulatory meeting in the Kenai/Soldotna area. To counter that effort, a letter to the board from the four Mat-Su Borough cities’ mayors asked that the meeting be held in the Wasilla-Palmer area. While it has been almost 20 years since a regulatory meeting was held in Kenai-Soldotna, the Mat-Su has never hosted a BOF UCI regulatory meeting.

The board voted 4-3 to hold the next Upper Cook Inlet meeting in Anchorage. However, this isn’t necessarily a final done deal. The Department of Law attorney who advises the board told them that the actions taken by one board don’t prohibit a new board from changing things in the future. In other words, expect to see the Kenai folks asking for the UCI meeting during every cycle of the board.

Another item of interest to us at the BOF meeting was a report from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G) about developing criteria necessary to delist a stock of salmon from the statewide Stock of Concern listings. Actually, ADF&G gave two reports on this topic. The first was an in-depth discussion of all the factors entering the decision to recommend a salmon stock to be listed as a stock of concern by the BOF. The second report went into some general suggestions to be considered to delist a salmon stock, but was totally lacking in specifics.

Since the MSBFWC was the group which raised this question a year ago at the BOF workshop in Kenai, we were interested in what the department had to say. I understand that each salmon stock needs to be treated as a unique entity, so generalizations might not be appropriate, but a few specific guidelines could have been mentioned.

For instance, if a stock fails to make minimum escapements for four out of five years and is placed on the stock of concern list, the solution isn’t to lower the escapement goals to where the returns make goal and then proclaim the stock has recovered. Use the same numbers to delist as were used to make the stock one of concern to begin with. This level of detail didn’t exist in the report given to the board.

Finally, the Governor had asked for a meeting with the MSBFWC to discuss how to reach some level of accord in the management of Cook Inlet salmon stocks. We met with him for an hour in his Anchorage office conference room. Larry Engle presented a PowerPoint presentation identifying our concerns and included a strategy to resolve how to get enough salmon through the Central District commercial fisheries and into the Northern District for both broodstock and inriver user needs.

The Governor followed the presentation closely, asked some questions, and thanked us, more than once, for offering some solutions to the situation. He said he hears all kinds of problems from people but rarely hears possible solutions.

The Governor told us he plans to issue an executive order creating a workgroup composed of user groups of Cook Inlet salmon populations to attempt to find some common ground in the management of Cook Inlet salmon stocks. This will come on top of the NPFMC working group and a probable BOF workgroup to deal with the Kodiak interception of Cook Inlet salmon stocks.