By Jenny Neyman
Redoubt Reporter
There isn’t much agreement between differing perspectives on a set-net fishery operated in June by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game to generate money to support a test fishery in July that helps estimate the Upper Cook Inlet sockeye run. Even the terminology is debated.
Fish and Game calls it a cost-recovery fishery.
“You mean, a fundraiser?” said Ricky Gease, executive director of the Kenai River Sportfishing Association, which sent a strongly worded letter June 16 to Board of Fisheries members, Gov. Sean Parnell and Fish and Game Commissioner Denby Lloyd, expressing multiple concerns and objections to the annual revenue-generating fishery after becoming aware of its existence for the first time June 15.
One of the few areas of consensus about the cost-recovery fishery seems to be that no one much likes it. Commercial fishermen have objected to it for several reasons. When it was held in July, sandwiched between commercial openers, fishermen complained that the cost-recovery fishery was taking salmon out of their nets.
“It would be a crime if the (cost-recovery) fishery by set-netters went on during the regular commercial fishery,” said Brent Johnson, one of the two fishermen who participated in the cost-recovery fishery this year, which was operated by Icicle Seafoods through a bid process with Fish and Game. “If you have a (cost-recovery) fishery adjacent to your site the day before you’re fishing, fish swim back and forth, so the fish are taken right out of your fishery.”
It’s now held in June, typically starting June 15, but that causes concern among commercial fishermen that the cost-recovery fishery could delay the start of the commercial season. If 50,000 sockeye make it past the sonar counter in the Kasilof River between June 15, when the counter starts recording data, and June 20, the season can open anytime after June 20. With the cost-recovery fishery, thousands of sockeye that could count toward that 50,000 are instead caught and sold before they reach the river.
“Some of them (commercial fishermen) are even opposed to the cost recovery, they just don’t like other people out fishing early,” said Pat Shields, Fish and Game assistant manager of Upper Cook Inlet commercial fisheries.
Johnson said he’d like state money to fund the Upper Cook Inlet July test fishery, as was done in the late 1970s when the test fishery started, rather than Fish and Game paying for it through cost-recovery means. Speaker of the House Mike Chenault, R-Nikiski, has said he expects the matter to be discussed in the upcoming session.
“Ideally, I think the Legislature should fund the fishery. That’s what I always thought. If they need to raise more taxes, then tax people more,” Johnson said. “Those allocation battles are old and have deep angst on both sides. I can’t think of any constructive thing that I can say about it. It’s one of those social issues where government and people need to work together to solve a problem. If you’re going to have that test boat, it needs to be funded. If you don’t like this way of funding it, come up with a different one.”
Fish and Game also would rather have the test fishery funded through the Legislature.
“Those funding requests I’m sure will go in for the 2011 (legislative) season, and with the new awareness of the cost-recovery fishery, hopefully that’s something that could be funded,” Shields said. “It might help allay a lot of people’s fears, that we would have general funds to run the test fishery rather than having to run the cost-recovery fishery to do it,” Shields said.
That’s about where agreement ends, especially with sportfishing interests opposed to the cost-recovery fishery. KRSA has several questions and points of contention with the program. Some of which were answered, and some not, Gease said, in the resulting uproar when people noticed set nets in Cook Inlet near the mouth of the Kenai River outside the commercial fishing season. The cost-recovery fishery was closed at midnight the evening of June 17.
“We want to thank the Legislature and Board of Fisheries and the senior department staff for taking prompt action on the issue, which resulted in the closure of the most egregious element of the program, which was the set-net fishing at the mouth of the Kenai River. We want to thank the commissioner and senior staff, who took time to make themselves accessible and provided answers to most, but not all, of the questions we had regarding the activity,” Gease said.
Shields said that a higher price per pound this year allowed Fish and Game to raise the money needed for the test boat — $50,000 — from less fish in the cost-recovery fishery. The fishery wasn’t ended in direct response to complaints, he said, but they were certainly heard.
“There was some concern raised about it. We wanted to make sure that we didn’t exceed the goal, especially with the concerns that were raised, but we thought that we would be near the goal by the end of the third day and that would be a good time to bring it to an end, and that’s exactly what happened,” Shields said. “Anytime we make decisions here we usually get user-group feedback and the department doesn’t want user groups of any flavor to believe that they make the decisions, in other words that we stopped the fishery because they were unhappy. There’s no doubt about it we heard the calls, but the fishery came to an end primarily because we thought we’d be near our cost-recovery goal.”
Whatever reason Fish and Game wants to credit for the closure, Gease said he was happy for the result. KRSA still has four areas of concern with the fishery. One is the practice of holding a cost-recovery fishery outside of designated commercial fishing seasons and areas.
“We generally object to the department authorizing fundraising efforts designed to pay for commercial fishing assessment projects if those programs take place outside of the normal seasonal dates and locations of commercial fishing,” Gease said.
Fishing in the Kasilof subdistrict starting June 15 isn’t an issue, Gease said.
“That is within the boundaries of an identified commercial fishing season in a specific time in a specific place, and that’s fine. We didn’t necessarily have any issues with that, but we did when you’re outside of an area and place where it should take place,” he said.
Meaning, nets near the Kenai. There is no commercial fishery designated for that area in mid-June, and some of those fish caught were sockeyes bound for the Russian River, which are allocated for sportfishing use.
Shields said that the fishery primarily targets Kasilof River sockeye, as evidenced by the catch totals — with the majority of the 3,899 sockeye and 48 kings coming from nets south of the Kasilof River, and only about 1,000 sockeye and three kings coming from the nets about 2.5 miles south of the Kenai River. The processor that Fish and Game awards the cost-recovery bid to contracts separately with fishermen, so Fish and Game doesn’t choose who fishes or where their site is located. But Russian River sockeye aren’t the intended target, Shields said.
“I’m not going to insinuate that Russian River fish were not being harvested during the cost-recovery program, but we weren’t targeting Russian River stocks,” Shields said. “The Kasilof fisherman in this case caught almost three-to-one harvest over the fisherman in the Kenai section. We did understand that some Russian River fish would be caught. We knew that prior to letting the fisherman go in the water. We felt that the harvest would be low enough that it wouldn’t have a significant impact on any of the in-river fisheries there.”
KRSA also questions Fish and Game’s authority to operate a cost-recovery fishery separately from the test fishery it’s meant to support.
“The regulation basically provides the department with the authority to sell fish caught during commercial fisheries test-fishing operations. But it doesn’t explicitly allow the type of fundraising that’s been occurring in recent years in Upper Cook Inlet. There’s no testing going on, this is strictly the state fishing to raise funds to cover the money needed for test-fishing operations,” Gease said.
From that perspective, selling the fish caught by the test boat in July is fine. Harvesting fish in June to pay for the July test fishery is not.
Gease said the lack of readily available information about the cost-recovery fishery is also a problem. Fish and Game says the fishery isn’t a secret, but Gease and others who are well-informed about area fisheries hadn’t heard about it. Gease said that, in his discussions with Fish and Game department staff, they didn’t even seem very familiar with the fishery.
“There’s been no public process on that, so this has been kind of under-the-rug, under-the-cover-of-night-type operation,” Gease said. “There’s a general lack of communication from the department about the fundraising efforts leading up to their commencement.”
KRSA requested all available information on the fishery. What they received contains little specific information about it. A fiscal year 2009 Test Fish Red Book, a Fish and Game report, provides a description of the Upper Cook Inlet test fishery, including dates and location of operations and terms under which fish will be sold. That page contains this sentence: “In conjunction with this project efforts have been made to contract a processor solely for the purpose of harvesting fish to generate revenue.” No additional information is given about that fishery effort.
“It doesn’t say to whom, when, where, how,” Gease said. “There’s nothing in here. And from that one sentence, in a report that’s not readily available to the public … we’re all supposed to know from that one little sentence that we’re going to have set nets at the mouth of the Kenai?”
Fish and Game’s Test Fish Fund standard operating procedure document, from 1999, says that test-fish projects fall into two categories — those that are able to pay for themselves with sale of the fish or shellfish that are harvested as part of the test project, and those that don’t generate enough revenue on their own. For the latter, the SOP says “the Director will review the project to determine if the project; 1) is important to the sustained yield management of the resource, 2) has substantial public support, and 3) there is no other practical means of funding the project.” It goes on to say, “The need for and objectives of the project must be explained to the public and their support measured using existing structures such as local Fish and Game Advisory Committees and industry organizations using public meetings, surveys, or other similar means.”
The specifics of the Upper Cook Inlet test fishery may have gone through public discussions, but the specifics of the cost-recovery fishery in June have not, Gease said.
“What they’re basically saying is these types of commercial test-fishing projects, if they’re not generating enough revenue, are going to be reviewed. We’re going to go through public processes, including local Fish and Game Advisory Board members up to the Board of Fish to review and check all this stuff, and it’s going to come up to the department level,” Gease said.
Rather than the cost-recovery fishery coming as a surprise, Gease said KRSA would rather it go through the public process, so issues like kings and Russian River sockeye being netted can be discussed and commented on.
“That’s a clear breakdown of communication with the public, with budget makers in the state Legislature and even with senior department staff. … I think there was a clear breakdown of communication and that needs to be examined and adjusted,” Gease said. “There should be some form of public process around that specific conduct of fundraising. I think the most appropriate method is the Board of Fisheries process.”
