By Margaret Bauman
Alaska Journal of Commerce

A federal fisheries plan to allocate individual fishing quotas for halibut charter boats is back to square one again, more than four years after it was approved but never implemented.

The action, moving the whole plan back to the drawing board, is unprecedented in the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, which spent several years analyzing and debating the plan before approving it in April 2001.

"It's still on the table in its basic form, but open to modification," said council member Arne Fuglvog, a Petersburg fisherman who fought to move forward the original proposal. "I remain convinced that it is the best solution for the charter sector."

The original plan called for halibut charter vessel owners to be assigned individual fishing quotas, to be used by clients aboard their vessels, based on the owner's history in the fishery.

According to Jane DiCosimo, the NPFMC staff person overseeing the issue, there were issues revolving around who was participating in the fishery, but in 2002, the council's scientific and statistic committee recommended that the council proceed with the program.

The council later revised its analysis, based on comments from the National Marine Fisheries Service, but by 2004, most of NMFS's time was consumed by the implementation of another program, privatizing the federal crab fisheries. In July 2005, the National Marine Fisheries service asked the council to confirm its support for the proposed halibut charter IFQ program. The council merely acknowledged receipt of the letter, neither confirming nor denying support, DiCosimo said.

Meanwhile, Alaska Fish and Game Commissioner McKie Campbell, who represents the state on the council, voiced the state's opposition to the halibut charter IFQ proposal. "Whether one supports or opposes the halibut charter IFQ, we do not believe anyone benefits from the adoption of a program that is likely to be overturned in court," Campbell said. Campbell said he felt the fatal flaw centered around participants in the fishery. A number of fishermen who qualified in the spring of 2001 are no longer involved in the industry, and others who entered the fishery after the qualifying period would have no quota and could conceivably challenge the issue in court.

The commissioner also expressed concern that implementing the original halibut charter IFQ plan would cause economic problems in Alaska's coastal communities because some charter operators now in business did not qualify for IFQ under the initial plan.

What the council approved by a 6-5 vote on Dec. 10 in Anchorage was the appointment of a stakeholder work group to consider two alternatives by April. Fuglvog said it was unrealistic to expect the committee to come up with streamlined new concepts by the council's April meeting. One option would allow for a finite number of charter vessels and possible bag limits. The other would allow for charter boat IFQs, with provisions to grant quotas to those new to the fishery.

"We are recreating what took years to develop," Fuglvog said. "We don't need to go down that road."

Council chairwoman Stephanie Madsen, who is employed by the Pacific Seafood Processors Association in Juneau, disagreed. "This is not a resource issue," Madsen said. "This is an allocation issue. This does not destroy the council's reputation for responsibility of the resource."

Madsen said that at the April meeting in Anchorage the council would decide on moving the analysis forward and take up the issue again when the council met next in Alaska. Scheduling the matter for a meeting out of state would not be appropriate, she said.

A number of commercial fishermen - from Southeast to Western Alaska - who supported the 2001 decision said they were disappointed, but not really surprised by the council's action. "I've been working this since the 1990s," said James Swift, a Sitka longline fisherman.

The council also heard from those in the charter boat industry and sport anglers who opposed the IFQ program. Several of the charter operators in opposition acknowledged that they had gone into the charter business after the period of qualification for quota shares, but argued that quota shares had no place in a recreational fishery.

The controversy centered in large part around the dynamics of those engaged in charter operations. Some charter boat operators who would have received quotas under the program are no longer in business. A number of new operators who weren't chartering during qualifying years for quota would not have been eligible for quota without amendments to the initial plan.

Council member Ed Rasmuson, an Anchorage banker, was among those opposed to moving forward with the initial plan. "It's a fairness issue," Rasmuson said. "We don't have a problem with abundance; we have a problem with allocation." With the number of residents and visitors to Alaska growing, the council needs to look at giving more quota to charter boats and sport anglers, he said.

"I understand the commercial fisheries' desire to keep what they have, but there are other pressures on the resource too, and they all have to be taken into consideration," he said.

Linda Behnken, director of the Alaska Longline Fishermen's Association, had a different view.

Behnken, who voted for the halibut charter IFQs in 2001 when she was a member of the federal council, said that with the Dec. 10 vote the council "took a giant step into the past."

"They're afraid to make hard decisions to maintain the health of the resource and the health of the industry," Behnken said.

Veteran charter boat operator Bob Ward of Homer said he was very disappointed at the council's action. Ward said he expected to fight to put the quota program back in front of the council in its exact same form, with the exception of adding the "good-hand plan" designed by the industry.

The good-hand plan takes all the quota from people who qualified who are no longer fishing and redistributes it to all the new people who are not qualified for quota, Ward said. "It gives the have-nots what the don't-needs don't need to get," he said.

"We have a political bump, and I'm going to make the state vote for my program," said Ward, who has championed the charter IFQ for years. "We have work to do. We got hit, but we're not sunk."

In testimony to the council during it's December meeting, Ward reminded that it was at the federal panel's insistence that his industry got involved in formulating the 2001 plan.

"After sitting through years of charter boat industry discovery, well represented by operators and charter boat associations across the state, we came to offer the charter boat IFQs as a final allocation settlement that didn't give everything on the table away to one user group or the other," he said. "It was a compromise that provided each user group something it could count on."

Margaret Bauman can be reached at margie.bauman@alaskajournal.com.