Lawyers representing the Cook Inlet drift fleet fired off the latest in a volley of court actions asking judges to implement a federal management plan to optimize the commercial harvest of sockeye salmon swimming through the federal waters in the inlet each summer.
The Jan. 24 filing came as the latest rebuttal in a longstanding battle over which agency should manage the fishery – and how it should be managed – in the U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), which encompasses the majority of Cook Inlet waters beyond three miles from shore.
The United Cook Inlet Drift Association, which represents 585 drift permit holders, and the Cook Inlet Fishermen Fund challenged the methodology by which the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) and the North Pacific Fishery Management Council (NPFMC) originally conveyed management of Cook Inlet’s EEZ to the state. The main argument, since 2011, has been that the feds handed management off to the state without including it as part of a federal fisheries management plan.
For decades Alaska’s Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G) has managed all of Cook Inlet, based upon escapement of sockeye and silver salmon into its predominant rivers – mainly the Kenai, Kasilof and Susitna River drainages.
The new filing in some ways reiterates what the courts have already ruled upon favorably for the fleet, but with some additional language, according to Erik Huebsch, vice president of UCIDA.
“There’s definitely some differences, and some of it is the same,” he says. “We keep arguing the same points even though we already won the argument in the courts. In this brief we made it abundantly clear that the Alaska Region is not following standards the way the Magnuson Act intended.”
Since the initial lawsuit, NMFS and NPFMC have responded to U.S. District Court and Ninth Circuit Court decisions by instituting a series of amendments in an attempt to manage waters of the EEZ in compliance with the national standards outlined within the Magnuson-Stevens Act. Last year ADF&G and NMFS jointly managed the fishery, but the drifters caught about half of what they should have.
The state-managed model allows openings during the season (in-season management) while the federal regime sets a Total Allowable Catch (TAC) and manages by a schedule of fishing days per week. The rigidity of the federal schedule limited the fishery to only one day per week when most of the salmon were swimming through the EEZ.
Worse yet, fishermen were not allowed to fish in the EEZ and state-managed waters in the same day, according to Huebsch.
“The plan doesn’t at all allow the fishery to function,” he says. “Using a TAC to manage a salmon fishery just doesn’t work. If the TAC is too high when there is a weak return there is the risk of over harvest.”
In years of abundant returns the opposite holds true. Many in the commercial fleet contend that TACs within the federal plan have been modeled to mirror the state’s escapement goals. Those goals, they say, allow too many fish to swim far upriver and out of reach before granting fishing days in the central waters of Cook Inlet.
Like other conflicts in fisheries management, motives often cross the permeable line between science and politics. A longstanding beef with the gillnetters has been that management of Cook Inlet sockeye salmon panders to other user groups, including a commercialized sport fishing industry.
The most recent brief bolsters the argument posed in 2017, which states the feds are sidestepping the intended definition of what constitutes a viable commercial fishery and dodging the task of ensuring that the Fishery Management Plan (FMP) complies with national standards within the Magnuson-Stevens Act (MSA).
“To be clear, this does not mean that (NMFS) is required to take over the State’s job or preempt state fishery management,” the Cook Inlet association’s January filing states. “Rather, it means that (NMFS), through the FMP, has to set the standards for this fishery based on the requirements of the MSA and its 10 national standards. Whether the State is ultimately willing to voluntarily meet those standards is a separate question as is the potential need for preemption if the state does not meet those standards.”
Huebsch says that attorneys representing UCIDA have requested oral arguments before the judge but that a date has not yet been set. The hope is that the case will be heard and that management changes can be made in time for the upcoming season.
“The forecast is for a run of 7 million,” says Huebsch. (Of that run, 4.9 million sockeyes would be available for harvest.) “That’s higher than it’s been in quite a while; yet our ability to harvest has been so reduced that we’d be lucky to get a million and a half.”
