Report: Billions at stake with sport fishing industry

MAT-SU — More than two years in the making, a state-funded study of the sport fishing industry is ready for review.

The issue is one of particular concern to the Valley, where commercial fishing is rare but sport fishing common; especially now since in the summer, once-popular streams are closed due to diminishing salmon runs.

Representative Mark Neuman R-Willow, said cobbling together $500,000 for the report was a joint effort between him, Bill Stoltze R-Chugiak, Carl Gatton, R-Palmer and state senator Charlie Huggins R-Mat-Su. The money came in the 2006 state budget and the report was commissioned from Southwick Associates Inc. in 2007.

“This is literally hundreds of millions of dollars that are at stake here,” he said. “This is a huge study and piece of information.”

The report, available on the Department of Fish and Game’s Web page, looks at industry numbers circa 2007.

According to the study, $1.385 billion were spent in the state on sport fishing that year, Southcentral took in 73 percent of that, according to the study.

“Just in the Cook Inlet region it’s three quarters of a billion,” Neuman said. “It creates over 11,000 jobs here locally in the Cook Inlet.”

Though sport fishermen often blame the commercial guys for their diminishing salmon runs, Neuman didn’t take a position one way or the other on why escapements had been down in area streams or how many fish should be allocated to each group.

“I don’t want to get into the allocation issues. That’s something certainly for the board of fish to look into,” he said. “They were established to keep politics out of it.”

But, he said, the study will be helpful to folks making those decisions.

“This is a real tool for them and it’s something that is part of a puzzle,” he said.

Which means, he said, that it’s not the definitive document for allocation issues.

The next step, Neuman said, is to give the came treatment to commercial fishing. That industry is conducting its own study, but Neuman thinks it would be better to put together a survey of commercial fishing using the same questions and matrix used in this report.

That way, he said, the board of fish will be able to make direct comparisons between the two industries.

The first hearing on the document was Thursday. Neuman said it went very well, an assessment he gauges by the amount of participation at the meeting.

“Probably 75 percent of the people there asked questions,” he said.

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