Allocation of halibut calls for revolution

But what the state really needs is its own little Alaska Halibut Party to make the point made long ago on the East Coast with the Boston Tea Party.

If you remember your history, you'll recall that the rallying cry for that 1773 protest against the tax on tea was "no taxation without representation."

Americans didn't like it. And Alaskans shouldn't like the allocation without representation now being imposed on the state's halibut fishery by the federal government and powerful Outside business interests.

Alaska's rallying cry ought to be "No allocation without representation!''

Maybe someone could ask the governor if she could find time to take this up between her photo shoots for fashion magazines and her tussles with Big Oil over who should build the Alaska gas line.

Not that I want to say anything good about Big Oil -- that would be almost un-Alaskan -- but at least it pumps a lot of cash into the state in terms of royalties and jobs. The fishing industry pumps most of its money south.

Worse yet, it's now conspiring with the North Pacific Fishery Management Council and the U.S. Department of Commerce to stick a fork in the Alaska tourism industry, which while it doesn't provide the state a lot of cash does provide a lot of jobs.

Some of these jobs are with the mom-and-pop charter fishing businesses, which provide access to the recreational halibut fishery for the tens of thousands of anglers -- both resident and tourist -- who haul in a tiny percentage of Alaska's annual halibut catch each summer.

How tiny?

On average, 6.2 percent of the total catch over the past 10 years.

The North Pacific Fishery Council -- a pack of commercial fishermen and fishing interests with a token angler representative -- thinks this is too much. Council members and the commercial interests cozy with the council can prattle on about how the catch is growing dangerously, even though it's small.

Ah, yes, at the current rate of growth, the huge majority of Alaska halibut fishermen (these would be the anglers) might be taking 10 percent of the catch by 2020, leaving only 90 percent for the handful of commercial fishermen who got those so-called IFQs (individual fishing quotas) when the government decided to privatize a public resource.

Basically, what Uncle Sam did was give individual commercial fishermen a fixed percentage of a common-property resource that's supposed to belong to all of us.

Southeast is where recreational fishing has posed the greatest threat to that commercial catch of 93.8 percent of the halibut. So commercial fishing interests have convinced Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez to cut the halibut limit to one fish per day there.

If they can make one fish per day stick in Southeast, though, why not one fish per day for the entire state?

Hey, look at it this way:

With commercial halibut going for $15 a pound and up, even if Joe Angler pays $200 for a charter and only gets to keep one fish he's still getting a bargain. Even a 20-pound halibut figures out to $300 at these prices. OK, maybe more like $200 after it's headed, gutted and filleted.

But why should anglers complain? They're still getting a deal, right?

Unfortunately, it's nothing like the deal the IFQ shareholders are getting. I have a friend who owns halibut shares. He's letting someone else fish them this year, and confessed the other day he feels a little guilty that he's making more money off this deal than he ever made actually fishing halibut back in the days before IFQs.

Only in Alaska does it work this way. Only in Alaska does the commercial fishing business get the fish while the recreational fishery gets the scraps, if that.

It's a lot different Outside.

The Pacific Fishery Management Council -- which regulates halibut fishing off Washington, Oregon and California -- actually has a "catch sharing plan."

Share the catch? That's an interesting idea.

Under the catch sharing plan, the harvest is divided between Washington treaty Indians who get 35 percent (they made a good deal long ago; more power to them), and all non-Indian fisheries. The 65 percent chunk for the non-Indian fisheries is split three ways:

• Recreational fisheries north of the Columbia River get 36.6 percent.

• Recreational fisheries south of the Columbia River get 31.7 percent.

• Commercial fisheries get 31.7 percent.

Meanwhile in Alaska, where the halibut resource is orders of magnitude larger, recreational fishermen get their 6.2 percent.

Somebody should have gone to court long ago.

So where are the Alaska departments of Fish and Game and Law, the entities that are supposed to be looking out for the interests of the state as a whole? Are they so afraid to go up against powerful Outside interests that they leave the legal action up to a handful of struggling Southeast charter operators?

"The National Marine Fisheries Service estimates a one halibut daily limit could result in up to a 30 percent reduction in angler demand in Southeast Alaska -- that's 27,000 fewer people flying into coastal communities that rely heavily on sportfish tourism,'' says the Southeast Charter Halibut Task Force. "Even a 10 percent reduction could put a significant number of charter operators out of business.

"The rule adopted by the secretary (of commerce) makes clear that the rule was issued to address an allocation issue between the charter and commercial halibut sectors and is not a conservation issue. ... The International Pacific Halibut Commission has said that the stocks are healthy and that the National Marine Fisheries Service 'disagrees' that the rule is necessary for conservation reasons."

So how does this happen? Easily.

Allocation without representation.

And I thought Alaska was supposed to have ended its existence as a colony of Seattle with statehood. Obviously I was wrong.

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Outdoors editor Craig Medred is an opinion columnist. Reach him at cmedred@adn.com or 257-4588.