SPECTRUM: Halter sends salmon conservation message to governor

Dear Governor, we need your help. The established State channels for fisheries management are deaf to our salmon conservation plight.

Few cohos are making it past the commercial nets to northern waters. On Sunday, an emergency order closed our Little Susitna River to bait fishing, while more than 50 miles to the south, commercial drift gillnetters hauled in 88,000 cohos in just two days. Add another 18,000 that were commercially caught on Monday. There very well may be a large coho run, but whether the salmon make it here, that’s the question.

Last March, the Alaska Board of Fisheries, a conservation steward for Alaska fish, voted to allow commercial fishermen more fishing time in a protected corridor that was designed to allow fish to pass north to our struggling Mat-Su rivers. For too long the Alaska Fish & Game Department has managed the failing northern fish escapement based on the lucrative commercial catches farther south. When there’s lots of salmon harvest in Kenai, conservation in the north is sacrificed.

The recent Fish Board vote permitted, 38,000 cohos to be intercepted in Upper Cook Inlet in a day, not 5,000 as an ADFG biologist had suggested at the time. That’s eight times higher. What the Fish Board Chair described then as “miniscule” could be devastating to northern fish guides whose livelihoods rely on the arrival of salmon.

What’s more disturbing than low fish returns is the apparent sleight of hand of fisheries management.

The department is operating within its regulations but is not following the spirit of the law. The Central Drift Gillnet Fishery Management Plan ensures “adequate escapement of salmon into the Northern District drainages” and the drift gillnet fishery is managed “to minimize the harvest of Northern District and Kenai River coho salmon in order to provide sport and guided sport fishermen a reasonable opportunity to harvest these salmon stocks over the entire run…”

That’s not what’s happening. Allowing the commercial harvest of 106,000 coho before the Mat-Su has enough cohos to sustain its fishery is managing with bias not science.

There’s three fishing periods with triggers intended to enforce conservation, which are based on a forecast. More often than not, the forecast is wrong and ADF&G knows in-season that it’s wrong yet does nothing to fix it. The forecast triggers allow more commercial fishing in the sweet spot: our Conservation Corridor at a time when the area is thick with coho. Last year’s trigger calculation wound up being wrong by two million fish. Cohos that were supposed to be managed for reasonable opportunity for northern sport fisherman are instead shrugged off as “bycatch” for the commercial fisherman, all based on a miscalculated forecast.

Also unnerving, is when managers pretend to invoke tools. Escapement goals are the cornerstone of fisheries management. In the Kenai region, sockeye escapement goals have increased by a million more fish since the start. But in the north, it’s the reverse. Escapement goals continue to decrease, while our fish struggle. ADF&G has responded by reducing the goals and removing some counters to make it appear as though the fish returns are healthy. That’s the opposite methodology for an ailing fishery, says Larry Engel, one of our Mat-Su Fish & Wildlife Commissioners. The Commission fought with science to get the Conservation Corridor established in State regulations.

It takes fish to make fish. The Conservation Corridor has succeeded in delivering fish north, but the management of the Corridor is upside down. Governor, the resource needs your intervention.

Vern Halter is the Mayor of the Matanuska-Susitna Borough.