Plenty on work session agenda

As you read this, the Alaska Board of Fisheries will be meeting in Anchorage in their annual work session to lay out and plan this year’s set of meetings and decide when and where to hold next year’s sessions.

As meetings go, these work sessions are not generally barnburners, but stuff does come up which can be quite interesting to specific groups of stakeholders in fisheries across the state. If there are some “sticky” issues between, say, the BOF and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, the work session is a good time to work through and resolve whatever the particular issue might be.

So, if you decide to attend all or part of this work session being held at the Hilton Hotel, what sorts of things can you expect to hear?

This is the meeting where ADF&G presents their lists of recommended escapement goal changes and stocks of concern for the fisheries to be discussed that cycle. This year’s cycle involves Bristol Bay, the Arctic-Yukon-Kuskokwim Region, the Alaska Peninsula and Aleutian Islands Management Area, and the Statewide Finfish meeting.

The BOF will also look at several restructuring proposals. These are proposals which, if adopted, would tend to change or have a significant effect on the specific fishery they target. For instance, a proposal which will be deliberated during the Bristol Bay meeting involves eliminating the 32-foot limit for the drift gill net boats which operate in that fishery.

Generally, when a proposal has been identified as a restructuring proposal, the board asks the proposer to fill out an additional form which requests much more detail than the standard proposal form. During this work session, the BOF will determine if all the pertinent information necessary to deliberate the various proposals has been provided by the respective proposer.

Another item the board addresses is what is called an agenda change request or ACR. These are usually proposals which are out of cycle, but which the proposers feel are important enough to warrant the board’s review during this set of meetings. The board will decide whether or not to accept the ACR’s and, if so, which meeting to schedule them into.

Some of the ACR’s the board will be reviewing involve fisheries most residents of the Mat-Su probably would not be too concerned with, for instance, changing the boundaries for king and Tanner crab fishing in the Bering Sea District or a summer commercial Dungeness crab fishery in Southeast Alaska.

Other ACR’s will be quite interesting to local residents. One ACR involves asking the board to develop a process which allows the Kenai dip net fishery to be closed in times when there is a concern about making the escapement for sockeye in the Kenai River. There are procedures to deal with the commercial and sports fisheries under these conditions, but not the personal use dip net fishery.

A second ACR which could be of interest to valley residents in a broader context involves tying the commercial harvest levels of black cod in Southeast to the sports fishery bag and annual limits for the same species. If the commercial harvest quota is reduced, the sports fish bag limit would also be reduced by a similar margin.

If adopted, this general concept could be applied in reverse to the Northern District commercial king salmon set gill net fishery in times when the forecasted king returns are bad, as they have been for the past few years, and significant restrictions are placed on the in-river users.

As I wrote in this column a few weeks ago, just choosing the location of a BOF regulatory meeting can become quite contentious. The dates and locations for next year’s slate of meetings will be determined at this work session.

The Upper Cook Inlet BOF meeting is part of next year’s cycle. This meeting always has contentious issues argued between the various Cook Inlet user groups. For the past several meetings, the meeting location has been in Anchorage, which is considered to be accessible for all interested parties.

However, the Kenai Peninsula folks do incur more costs to attend a meeting in Anchorage than, say, folks from the valley. We can commute while the folks from the Peninsula are forced to rent a hotel room. This can become a burden to the “average” person wanting to have their input considered in the board process.

The City of Kenai has requested that the BOF hold the next Upper Cook Inlet meeting in Kenai. That should spark some interesting discussion!

As I understand things, the reason the board has not held a meeting in either Kenai or Soldotna for the past several cycles was because the last meeting held in that area resulted in physical threats against board members.

According to the stories I’ve heard, troopers were called in and essentially ended up having to maintain a heavy presence to keep the remaining portions of the meeting civil.

Have the residents of the Kenai Peninsula progressed beyond that “bullying” stage to where a meeting on contentious issues can happen without threats and physical violence? I don’t know. They may have an uphill battle to convince the board they have changed.

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