Many thanks

Members of the Mat-Su Borough Fish and Wildlife Commission and key borough staff were honored at the Mat-Su Borough Assembly meeting this past Tuesday for our efforts at the recently completed Alaska Board of Fisheries (BOF) meeting in securing changes aimed at improving the health of our Northern District salmon stocks.

I’ve written extensively about what happened at the BOF meeting and won’t repeat it here. While honored by the assembly’s gesture, I want to point out the other folks who helped bring about these significant changes.

The commission is an authorized and recognized agency of the Mat-Su Borough. Without the borough assembly’s full support, along with the mayor and borough manager, we would not have been in the position we were to work with the BOF in explaining our conservation concerns in the Northern District.

With this support, we were able to hire a professional biologist/consultant who is very familiar with Cook Inlet issues and is a great organizer and strategist in how we presented our testimony. We received further testimony support from the cities of Houston, Palmer and Wasilla about the negative impacts being felt from lack of healthy salmon stocks. Several of our Valley legislators also submitted written statements about our conservation issues.

Members from the Mat Valley Fish and Game Advisory Committee and the Anchorage Advisory Committee presented testimony and served on committees to further press home our concerns during the meeting. Hundreds of Valley residents submitted written and/or oral testimony during the meeting about the poor condition of our Valley salmon populations. This level of public support from the Northern District hasn’t been seen in decades, if ever, at a BOF meeting.

Two of our key borough staff are specialists in public relations and played a major part in publicizing BOF happenings and “getting the word out” to the public about submitting comments and arranging both TV and radio interviews for commission members and our consultant. Another borough staffer was instrumental in defusing the various habitat issues being portrayed as the only reason why there are no salmon in the Northern District.

And let us not forget our friends to the south, the Kenai River Sportfishing Association and Kenai River Professional Guide Association, for their support as well. While our areas and specific issues were different, KRSA and the KRPGA both aided us in their testimony and in arguing similar issues in their area. Getting kings into the Kenai is, in many ways, similar to getting salmon into the Northern District. Those points were not lost on BOF members.

KRSA had two biologist/consultants representing that organization, along with staff and officers, at the meeting. Both these consultants are well known to us, familiar with our issues and were very supportive of our efforts during the meeting as well.

While the MSBFWC might have been the tip of the spear, there were a bunch of other folks who played very important and key roles in our efforts. To all of them, I say a heartfelt “thank you.”

That’s not the end of the story, however. The BOF members were the folks who actually made the requested changes to dictate a new approach in managing the commercial fisheries of Cook Inlet. They did this in the face of heavy lobbying from “the other side” that commercial interception of northern-bound fish was not an issue. The BOF took into account that we came asking for conservation measures while the other side came looking for restrictions of the in-river users while relaxing control of their commercial fisheries. That point was not lost either.

We did not get everything we would have liked. But what we got from the BOF, after the northern stocks are given the necessary breathing room to rebuild and become healthy, is the beginning of a new and more equitable sharing of our Cook Inlet salmon resource among all user groups. This approach will benefit not only the Cook Inlet salmon resource, but all user groups down the road as well.

I was raised to thank a person when helped out in some manner. It would be very appropriate for Valley anglers and those interested in healthy Cook Inlet salmon stocks to thank the BOF for its efforts in changing the basic approach to how salmon will be managed in Cook Inlet. Send your thanks to Board Support, P.O. Box 115526, Juneau, AK 99811-5526, or email the ADF&G website.

Howard Delo is a retired fisheries biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. You can leave him a message by emailing sports@frontiersman.com.