Greed often brings out the worst in people. Petty greed always does. So turn your attention to the small community of Homer at the tip of the Kenai Peninsula.
Back in 1988, a Homer fisherman by the name of Kevin Hogan on his way home from the Pacific Northwest with a new, $140,000 fishing boat encountered engine problems that forced him into port in Canada. Normally, this would not be a big thing. Hogan thought so little of it at the time that when he later stopped in Ketchikan at the entrance to Alaska's Inside Passage and was asked by customs officials if he'd visited the foreign country between the Lower 48 and Alaska, he said yes.
This led to a U.S. Customs inspection of his boat, the Hold Tight. Customs agents found 1.7 grams of marijuana in the possession of Hogan's nephew, a 21-year-old crewman on the boat. Everyone agreed Hogan knew nothing about the drugs, but federal agents seized the boat anyway citing the Reagan administration's zero-tolerance policy on bringing drugs into the country.
The seizure caused Hogan to miss the first opening of the commercial halibut season back then when they were run as something of a derby competition. He figured at that time that this cost him $40,000, a stiff fine to pay for a young crewman bringing a common drug aboard your boat.
Government officials, however, didn't think that was enough. Insisting that the skipper of a boat and should have known what was aboard, it proposed a $10,000 fine to be paid in order for Hogan to get his boat back.
It was a ridiculous case, and people in Homer saw it as such. About 1,000 of them, more than a fifth of the town's population at the time, rallied to Hogan's defense. The Homer City Council, according to newspaper reports at the time, passed a resolution demanding the U.S. government show "some sense of proportionality" in dealing with drug crimes. Others from around the country joined in, arguing the drug policy was being imposed in a draconian manner.
Hogan eventually had to pay a $1,400 fine, but he got his boat back in time for salmon season, which allowed him to pay his bills and survive. He was less successful seeking compensation from the federal government for the seizure, but he still had the people of Homer to thank for helping save his fishing business.
Flash forward to 2011.
Hogan is now a member of the Homer City Council himself, and the local charter boat industry has come before that council to ask for help in battling onerous new regulations proposed by the Fisheries Service of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council.
You'd think a guy who had a bunch of the town go to bat for him against over-reaching federal regulations would be most concerned about more of the same, not to mention the economic survival of the community that saved his bacon.
You'd be wrong.
A word or two about Homer -- "The Halibut Fishing Capital of the World'' -- is in order here for those who have never visited. Tourism is big in this little town. In winter the winds whip past empty buildings the line either side of a road that slices down the middle of a sand spit that stretches for 4.5 miles out into Kachemak Bay. In summer, the very same spit throbs with life. There are people everywhere, and the local businesses flourish from dawn until dusk, which is a long time in the land of the midnight sun.
Not all of the spit businesses are charters, but the charters are the fuel for the economic motor that drives Homer tourism. So it was not unreasonable for the charter skippers to ask the city council for help in at least trying to get the federal government to do an economic study of proposed changes in halibut regulations that many fear will devastate their industry.
The issue here, it must be noted, is not about conservation, though some federal officials have tried to paint it that way. Remember, Alaska commercial halibut long-liners catch nearly 90 percent of the big flatfish landed in Alaska.
The halibut issue is totally about allocation. Commercial long-liners' catch has been declining because of a decreasing number of halibut in the North Pacific -- even though it's still an overwhelming majority of the overall catch.
Why halibut stocks are going down is the subject of debate, but most everyone agrees it's not because of the catch in the charter fleet, a bit player in the halibut-killing game.
Compared to the commercial fisheries in total, the charter fleet catches little. But because it has operated under a fixed "guideline harvest level,'' instead of a floating catch quota, its percentage of the harvest in Cook Inlet is pushing toward 20 percent of the harvest -- nearly double what it once was.
The response of NOAA and the North Pacific Council has been to propose a regulation destined to cut the halibut bag limit for charters from two fish to one next year. Many charter operators are already struggling with high gas costs and a weak tourism economy due to the national recession. Some say this will put them out of business.
So the charter folks asked the Homer City Council for help in getting NOAA to rethink the federal plan. The charter businesses suggested a study to determine how halibut most benefits the Homer economy. Find out, they said, whether the shift of halibut catch in Cook Inlet, which has hurt the commercial fleet slightly and helped the charter fleet greatly, is a good thing or a bad thing.
Hogan, a halibut fisherman and councilman, led the fight to block them.
"The idea the commercial catch is worth less is absolutely absurd," he told me, citing the high price now paid commercial fishermen for their catch and the resulting $35-a-plate halibut meals in fancy restaurants across the country. Hogan may indeed be right about this. I don't know. Nobody knows, although a study done by Utah State University professor Keith Criddle in 2004 suggests otherwise. Criddle's study suggested the biggest economic bang for Alaska's halibut buck might come from a 30-70 split of halibut between the sport and commercial fisheries in waters near communities like Homer.
But the study is old.
And Criddle, now a Juneau-based professor for the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said earlier this year his study was based on marginal data that needs refinement. Shortly after his halibut study came out, the seat came open for The Stevens Professorship at UAF. That job, according to the university, is "an endowed position funded by the Pollock Conservation Cooperative, a consortium of pollock fishing companies of the At-sea Processors Association. The cooperative funds the UAF Pollock Conservation Cooperative Research Center and the Stevens Professorship, and has donated more than $6 million to the School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences for these causes."
At-sea processors also happen to be one of the big players in the NOAA-NPFMC game, and Criddle has been kept busy at UAF studying pollock. He said there is no money to study halibut. It is enough to make an independent observer, let alone a Homer charter skipper, a little suspicious. Hogan said he didn't care. Asked about the way the process appears to be stacked against the charter industry, which has almost no voice in the allocation issue, he said, "maybe you should talk to Congress."
Asked about the many and complicated conflicts of interest that members of the North Pacific Council weave together, he said, "maybe you think we just need a bunch of idiots on there," and dragged out the tired, old nonsense that in order to manage the fish of the North Pacific, the council needs to be made up of people with significant interest in the fishery.
It was pretty clear, too, that Hogan didn't like me, though we've never met and I found his mistreatment by the government back in the 1980s a grave injustice.
"You're out to eliminate commercial fishing because you think sport fishing is worth more," he charged, which is wrong. I told Hogan I believe Alaska ought to get every buck it can out of every resource in the state -- oil, gas, minerals, timbers and, yes, fish. This is pretty much the same thing now-deceased governors Jay Hammond and Wally Hickel sought. So did former Gov. Sarah Palin. Those three didn't have a lot in common politically, but as Alaskans they professed the belief that as a resource state Alaska should try to extract the maximum dollar out of its resources.
So, yes, I suspect there are situations in which the dollar return per fish is significantly higher in sport fisheries than in competing commercial fisheries. If that's true, more fish ought to be pumped into those specific sport fisheries to maximize the economic return to all Alaskans. But there are darn few fisheries in the state where this is the case. The significant sport fisheries are localized and catch a tiny portion of the overall catch of fish in the 49th state.
Is the halibut fishery one of these sport fisheries deserving special treatment? I honestly don't know. There are indications it could be, but it's hard to know for sure at this point. Still, you would think a councilman in Homer, someone who is supposed to be concerned about the entire community and not just his commercial fishing friends, would want to know.
And you'd be wrong.
I repeatedly asked Hogan about the economic consequences for Homer in all of this. He repeatedly called me names. He cited an earlier city council policy saying the council should stay out of fisheries allocation issues. He danced, and he dodged. But finally, in the end, he said, that if I printed my question in full and his answer in full he would answer. So I asked:
"Isn't the economic survival of the community a policy that should trump all policies?''
"I think it's a ridiculous question," Hogan said. "I think it is a ridiculous question, absolutely."
And what about all those Homer people who stood up for Hogan when he was in an economic and legal predicament many years back? Hogan laughed and said, "That was long ago and far, far away."
I don't know Hogan personally. I don't know if he is at heart a good guy or a bad guy. I do know he's a rotten public official, because it's pretty clear he's put his self interest here above that of the people he's supposed to represent in a classic display of the sort of petty greed that always brings out the worst in people. A solid economic study might actually prove Hogan right. But Hogan isn't willing to take even that risk, and the really sad thing is he got enough of the rest of the council to go along with him. It's small-town politics at its worst.
Alaska Dispatch encourages a diversity of opinion and community perspectives. The opinions expressed herein are those of the contributor and are not necessarily endorsed or condoned by Alaska Dispatch. Craig Medred's views are his own. Contact him at craig(at)alaskadispatch.com.