Herring Scrap 19

This is the last of the three newsy scraps that I’ve tried to set up as a foundation to get my scrap machine scrapping. I think it’s working for me. I hope it’s working for you. If things aren’t (or if I’m not) quite making sense yet, don’t worry. This is an epistolary fisheries procedural; a new genre. It’ll take a while.

To recap: In scrap#17, I highlighted the recent Alaska Department of Fish & Game (ADF&G) announcement forecasting the 2024 Sitka Sound herring biomass and announcing a record-high GHL as a result. I did this to begin to highlight the link between ADF&G’s herring enumeration program and the commercial harvest allowance. In scrap#18, I highlighted recent court action around sitka herring, a case that had a lot to do how information is shared with decision makers and the public. I did this in part to show that the fishery has been mired in litigation and in part to show that regulatory decision makers (and judges) don’t know (and aren’t expected or equipped to know) how to interpret the workings of the ADF&G herring enumeration program. In today’s scrap, I want to tell you about the voting history around herring at the Board of Fisheries, as a new regulatory cycle for herring is starting up. My thinking is that between these three posts, you’ll have an up-to-the-minute picture of the major bodies responsible for the modern herring governance program, and that I can work backwards from there.

Proposing to the Board of Fisheries

In Alaska, commercial fisheries are guided by the regulations (here’s the link to herring regs specifically), and the regulations are shaped through a curious public process: Board of Fisheries meetings. Within that process, a 7-person, Governor-appointed Board of Fisheries votes on the proposals that have been submitted; proposals of changes, additions, subtractions to any part of the rule book Proposals related to herring (or any other fishery) in Southeast Alaska are generated (by anybody, through a public process) and reviewed (by the Board of 7) every three years. At those meetings, the ADF&G staff are the resident experts, but anybody can come forward with whatever they’ve got, so long as they can express it in a few short minutes. I participated in the Southeast Alaska Finfish meetings - the meetings where Sitka herring are covered - in 2018 and 2022.

At the last meeting, in 2022, the Board ultimately chose1 not to address the herring proposals after hearing hours of public testimony. Looking back on my notes from that week, I wrote: “I was there to witness and to participate in the conversations about herring management in Sitka Sound. My perspective on what transpired is this: the Department made clear their disinterest in representing their science appropriately, and the Board made clear their disinterest in making decisions. Why a person might believe in or trust these entities is well beyond me.” I was dismayed by what seemed a disingenuous public process.

Having participated in a couple meetings and listened back to others, I don’t really believe that this process is set up to work well for the herring protection side. It usually feels mostly rigged for moneymaking, in the way these things often are.

But still it’s the process that there is.

And proposals for the January 2025 Southeast Alaska Finfish meeting are due in three months, on April 10(pdf).

Anybody can submit one.

The proposals that get submitted will get the whole deluxe Board of Fish treatment: they’ll get numbered and clarified and assembled into a proposal book, available on the meeting website. For a while after the proposal book is published, any individual or group will be able to submit public comments in support of or against or in consideration of any proposal. And then, at the meeting itself, anybody can sign up to speak about that proposal. Like a good karaoke night, you sometimes have to wait awhile - days, even (unlike a good karaoke night) - between signing up and speaking. It’s a big commitment to try, but many do. In the end, the record on each proposal will be rich with testimony.

I find the Board of Fisheries meeting records to be a powerful and fascinating source of information. There’s the meeting tapes - people talking about what and how much can be pulled from the sea. And then there’s all manner of paper material and galley scrawl that gets generated in the course of the meetings. And then there’s the proposals themselves. Who was asking for what, when, where? With what success?

If only…. there was a list… a comprehensive list of all of the proposals - failed and successful, that have defined - or failed to define - the commercial fishery, and the state’s obligations to it, over time…

Starting from all Board of Fisheries Proposals ever…

Such a list would help make sense of the rule-making history in Sitka Sound! It would let me see how proposals to restrict or restrain the commercial fishery have fared, it would highlight which groups have experienced success at the board of fishery, and it would allow me to hone in on select proposals which have allowed the commercial fishery to expand in Sitka Sound despite public protest.

I should make it!

[time passes, as represented by this footage of the first (false) spawn of springtime, kruzof shoreline, 2022…]

[…]

OK, so I made a list! Luckily this is all made much easier than it might otherwise be, thanks to a team of researchers who assembled a dataset of ALL (24729) Alaska Board of Fisheries Proposals 1959-2016 (Krupa, M., Cunfer, M., & Clark, J., 2017) and also published two papers (Krupa et al., 2018, 2020) introducing the dataset and some important early findings from it.

In their dataset, every proposal made, whether by individual or association or Tribe or government is listed with: a proposal description, date, meeting information, categorization of the proposal, species affected, voting action (passed, carried, /as amended, tabled, no action) and final tally, among other fields. I’m very glad they made it.

I filtered down their data set by species and location, and added new data from the last couple rounds of the Board of Fisheries meetings on Southeast Alaska herring; just like that2 I had a hopefully comprehensive historic list of 270 proposals relating to the commercial sac roe herring fishery in Sitka Sound (which I refer to here by the code G01A - I’ll explain where that comes from another time).

I could start working with the data to understand the history of BoF proposals and actions. I started with some high level questions:

How are the proposals (affecting herring fishing in Sitka) of different groups received at the Board of Fisheries?

Here it is clear to see that proposals initiated by ADF&G are most likely to experience success, being carried or carried as amended 25 times in 34 attempts and representing 57% all carried proposals pertinent to Sitka herring. In contrast, proposals led by individuals were only successful on just 3 out of 117 occasions. Of note, proposals generated by Tribe/Village Council were Carried as written on just one occasion and Carried as Amended on 4 occasions, with 17 proposals unsuccessful.

These patterns are consistent with the more general findings of Krupa et al (the researchers who assembled the data set I’m using), who wrote in one paper about BoF voting patterns that:

“Over time, the public has played a large but relatively unsuccessful role in the Board’s proposal process. The dataset clearly describes the process as more administrative than public. ADFG and the Board – the two state agencies that create and run the process – dominate in terms of proposal success rates. If the Government, Board of Fisheries, and ADFG groups are combined into a single “government” group, that group submitted 30% of the proposals over the entire Board process. Within this minority of proposals, however, is the majority of successful proposals. Government entities submitted 75% of all carried proposals. From an administrative perspective, this appears to be a highly efficient and effective process.

When you look at public participation, the process looks entirely different. Our results indicate the existence of serious barriers to diverse and inclusive public participation.” (Krupa et al, 2020)

After spending a lot of time listening to board meeting audio recordings, reviewing meeting material, and attending and participating in meetings, I mostly agree.3

Combined, ADFG, BoF, and “Other Government” have provided 29 of the 43 carried proposals involved in forming the current herring fishing paradigm in Sitka Sound.

How many of these proposals have dealt with restraining the commercial fishery, and how have those proposals fared?

While I was going through the longlist of 270 proposals, I categorized each proposal according to whether or not it could likely introduce new restraints/restrictions4 on the commercial herring fishery in Sitka. This was loosely and generously defined: ranging from repeated calls for a moratorium on the fishery to lower GHL rates to area closures, to things that would place regulatory value on the needs of other non-commercial user groups and potentially to the detriment of the dominant commercial fishery. It was a clumsy way of setting up the question, and I don’t really believe it gives useful results, but still, I ran the results, and they seem telling to demonstrate my idea : very few proposals - 6 of ‘em, if you count them like I did - that might introduce restraints to the fishery have been successful since 1973. There have been 67 tries. Most successful proposals are doing something other than that.

How many of these proposals could reasonably be expected to affect the Guideline Harvest Level for the commercial sac roe seine fishery in Sitka, and how have those proposals been received at the Board of Fisheries?

I tried something else. In processing the data set, I also created a variable to indicate whether a proposal would be likely to have some bearing on the Guideline Harvest Level - if it would increase it or decrease it. In the following table, you’ll see that of the 270 proposals, 44 were carried or carried as amended. Of those 44, 7 could reasonably be expected to increase the allowance for the commercial fishery and 2 could reasonably be expected to reduce it, and 2… it’s hard to tell. That gives me 11 proposals that I can focus on in trying to understand the regulatory history of expanding allowances for the commercial fishery in Sitka Sound.

Here are those 11 GHL-influencing proposals:

And that’s what I wanted! Now I can use that list to structure my understanding of regulatory drivers of the rising GHL as I scrap on. I’ll circle back to this short list of Carried Board of Fisheries proposals before too long.

Hopefully these last three scraps help paint a picture of where things are at regarding the colonial herring governance paradigm in Sitka - and demonstrate why and how the regulatory machine seems impervious to protest. I have a few more scraps in development right now, and I’m not sure which one will get done first. But I’m curious what you’re making of all this. I like comments and questions and I’ll try to respond to them in futurescraps.

pb