Daily Sitka Sentinel

Fish Board Meeting’s Time, Place Reset

By GARLAND KENNEDY

Sentinel Staff Writer

Originally scheduled to take place this month in Ketchikan, the Alaska Board of Fisheries Southeast and Yakutat meeting has been pushed back to March and relocated to Anchorage.

First set for Jan. 4-15 until COVID interfered, the meeting will be March 10-22 at the Egan Civic and Convention Center in Anchorage, the Department of Fish and Game announced.

In a news release ADF&G said “holding the meeting in Anchorage is not a preferred choice of the board, but part of a balancing act between allowing the current COVID-19 surge to peak, limited budget, logistics, fishery timing, other board meetings, and COVID-19 testing and hospital capacity.

“To support strong public participation by impacted Southeast Alaska residents, the board is allowing remote public testimony for this meeting at select ADF&G Southeast offices. All committee work at the meeting will be held in-person.”

Starting early next week, the signup link will be posted at adfg.alaska.gov, and the written comment deadline has been extended to Feb. 23, Board of Fisheries Executive Director Glenn Haight said.

After registering online, those wishing to testify will go to their local Fish and Game office at a designated time to deliver their comments.

Fish and Game offices in Sitka, Juneau, Haines, Ketchikan and Petersburg will be open to accept public testimony, Haight said. He was uncertain whether offices in Craig or Yakutat would be participating.

“This is a more affordable way for a lot of people to provide their testimony and not have to fly, even to Ketchikan,” Haight told the Sentinel. “I do expect less people actually in the meeting itself, but we’ll see what happens with the remote testimony.”

He recalled that about 200 people commented in person at the board’s 2018 meeting in Sitka,

In his conversation with the Sentinel Thursday Haight said the board recognizes Sitka’s high interest in herring management, and will put herring issues high on the agenda.

“The herring season is going to be upon us come mid-March, so we looked at the numbers when the fishery starts and the best thing that we could do is to have the herring subjects up front, so that might be important for folks to know,” Haight said.

The revised agenda starts with herring March 10-13, followed by groundfish and shellfish March 14-17, and wraps up with salmon and other finfish March 18-22.

Testimony will not be taken online through services such as Zoom, Haight said.

“The board has always resisted doing remote testimony, and it really isn’t a COVID thing,” he said. “There’s a couple factors to it: one is ... having the technical capacity to make phone calls and make them really audible in these hotel conference rooms we’re in, or in these civic centers, the technology just isn’t great.”

Also, he said, there’s concern that unfettered remote access might open the door to an overwhelming volume of comment on hot issues.

“The big thing, and it’s almost more of a Board of Game thing, is depending on the subject matter, you could have an explosion of interest and public testimony if it was remote,” he said. “And for some things, like the Board of Game, you talk about wolves, for instance. You have national interest and hundreds and hundreds of people calling in. So what might be a six-day meeting, you might spend six days just on public testimony alone… We have been resistant to it because we don’t know how much it will blow up the meeting.”

Sitka area management biologist Aaron Dupuis told the Sentinel Thursday that the exact process for providing testimony at the local ADF&G office is still being worked out.

Written comments can be emailed to dfg.bof.comments@alaska.gov or mailed to Alaska Department of Fish and Game, Boards Support Section, P.O. Box 115526, Juneau, AK 9811. Alternatively, people can send comments by fax to (907) 465-6094 or in-person at ADFG Boards Support Section, 1255 W. 8th Street Juneau, AK 99811.

The meeting will be livestreamed as well.