Daily Sitka Sentinel

State Fisheries Board Gathering in Sitka

By Sentinel Staff

The Alaska Board of Fisheries opens its nine-day meeting here on Monday to take up Southeast and finfish proposals, including proposed regulation changes on herring and groundfish as well as on subsistence, sport and commercial salmon.

The meeting, scheduled to last through March 3, will be held at Centennial Hall, and will be open to the public. Public testimony on all of the proposals is to start Monday afternoon and continue through Tuesday. 

The schedule is subject to change. A list of staff reports and a road map will be available at the meeting, and updates will be posted. A real-time audio feed of the meeting should be available at the Board of Fisheries webpage, www.adfg.alaska.gov, during periods when the board is on the record.

The meeting will open at 8:30 a.m. Monday with board business items, followed by staff reports and public testimony. Board deliberations will take place throughout the course of the meeting, rather than having all decisions made at the end of the meeting.

The board is to first take up a total of 16 proposals on herring, including three on regionwide management plans, 10 on Sitka Sound sac roe herring, and three on spawn on kelp. Among them:

– The Sitka Tribe of Alaska has submitted a proposal to require the department to establish minimum spawning biomass thresholds below which fishing may not occur. “These thresholds are a measure of biomass available, but care needs to be taken when harvesting stocks that have not recently met the threshold limit in place for that stock ... current thresholds do not allow for stocks to rebuild to pre-fishery biomasses and are managed under a shifted baseline.”

– Jeff Feldpausch, who is resource protection director for STA, submitted a proposal related to Sitka Sound herring, calling for distributing the commercial harvest by allowing the first 50 percent of the quota to be taken, then allowing 25 percent of the estimated nautical miles of spawning to occur before the remainder of the quota is taken. “The proposal will force the distribution of the fishery over time to ensure a more reasonable opportunity exists for subsistence needs to be met,” Feldpausch wrote in his proposal.

– The Southeast Herring Conservation Alliance has submitted two proposals to re-open the “core area” north of town currently closed to commercial fishing in order to protect the subsistence herring egg harvest. “The closed waters .... referred to as the Core Area, is not necessary and should be repealed,” the proposal states. 

– In another proposal by STA, the core area closed to commercial herring fishing would be expanded.

Commercial salmon regulation for all gear groups is at the end of the agenda.

The schedule may change, depending on how quickly items are addressed, but currently is as follows:

– 8:30 a.m. Monday – opening business, including introductions, board ethics disclosure and election of officers. This will be followed by staff reports, scheduled to last through the afternoon, followed by public testimony on any proposal.

– 1:30 p.m. Monday – staff reports and public testimony, including local advisory committee reports.

–  8:30 a.m. Tuesday – continued public testimony.

Once public testimony – scheduled to last through Wednesday afternoon – is concluded, the agenda moves on to a presentation of the “committee of the whole” on the 16 proposals covering herring issues, and then on groundfish issues. The board will deliberate following the presentations.

Later in the week, the committee of the whole will give presentations on 10 subsistence salmon proposals, and 17 sport fish and resident species proposals. The board will again deliberate following the committee’s work.

The final items on the agenda include four committee presentations on commercial salmon issues, including new management plans and Taku River king salmon season, special and terminal harvest area allocations, purse seining, set gillnet, drift gillnet and troll proposals.

Public testimony is limited to three minutes for individuals and groups and 10 for advisory committees and regional advisory councils. It will continue until members of the public who signed up before the deadline and are present have been given an opportunity to testify. The tentative deadline for signing up is 2 p.m. Monday, Feb. 23. All portions of the meeting are open to the public.

Meeting materials, including the agenda and road map, are available from Boards Support Section, 907-465-4110, or online at: http://www.adfg.alaska.gov. Written comments will also be accepted, with strict rules on the length of comments depending on when they are submitted. More information is available on the board of fish website.