From Ketchikan to Kodiak, owners of Alaska halibut charter businesses say they would be devastated -- if not bankrupted -- by a new, federally proposed plan to ensure that 85 percent or more of the state's premier flatfish continue to be caught by the commercial fisheries industry. But there is one sort of halibut charter business that would not be affected at all by the new rules. Roland Maw, the executive director of the United Cook Inlet Drift Association, admits to running this sort of business.
Maw's main employer, UCIDA, is a politically powerful lobby for Cook Inlet commercial salmon fishermen. But Maw is more than the group's spokesman. He is an aggressive businessman who commercially fishes and sometimes charters his boat out to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and to other halibut fishermen who lack boats but hold what the Fisheries Services of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration calls "individual fishing quota."
Initially these quota were given to fishermen with a history of catching halibut, but after that initial allocation, the fishermen were free to buy and sell them in the marketplace. Critics of IFQs have accused the government of privatizing a public resource for no public good -- of actually giving away the marine resource instead of leasing it for profit as the government does for oil or grazing lands. Federal officials and commercial fishermen in turn deny IFQs amount to privatization. Here's what Maw says:
"These are property that people have, these IFQs."
And someone who holds such property can't earn any income off it unless it is fished. Halibut in the ocean aren't worth a thing. All of which is where Maw comes in. He helps fish other people's IFQ.
"I do some of that," he said. "There is quite a bit of this going on. I take people out who don't have a boat for whatever reason, but they have IFQs. Some of them are widows, or they're people who've gone through divorces...but they don't have a boat. She got the quota; he got the boat. They're actively fishing (the IFQ), but we do the boat work for them."
The deal works like this: The hundreds of hooks attached to a longline are baited, placed in the water to soak, and then pulled up laden with halibut, hopefully. When those halibut are later sold, the profit is split. It's a good deal for everyone, according to Maw. Halibut is going for about $6 per pound at the moment. It was half that only a few years back.
"They're catching half of what they could have caught," when they fish with Maw, he said, but half of something is better than half of nothing. Maw said he has even taken out people who have bought IFQ shares. He was unclear as to why someone would buy IFQ shares if they didn't want to be a commercial fishermen, but it could be one good way of catching a lot of halibut and avoiding the inconvenience of the two-fish-per day limit in the sport fishery. IFQ holders are allowed to catch up to a certain poundage. What they haul up on the longline in excess of that, they are supposed to throw back. But since poundage is hard to calculate at sea, the federal Fisheries Service also allows for an "overage." Overages are supposed to be recorded and compensated by a reduced catch for the next season.
Maw doesn't like the term "charter" applied to what he does. "It's not a charter business," he said. "I lose gear; they don't pay a thing (for it). It's different. I get a portion of the catch," not a cash payment.
He admits, however, that he can't think of a word other than "charter" to describe a contractual agreement reached to allow someone else to fish from his boat. And though this clearly puts Maw in the halibut charter business, he has been a vocal supporter of the plan written by the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council, a body controlled by powerful commercial fishing interests, to lock charter halibut businesses, at least of the sport-fishing variety, in place as minor players in the harvest of Alaska halibut.
Maw likes the 'catch share plan'
As a so-called "catch share plan'' was written by the Fisheries Service, charter operators will be forever restricted to about 15 percent of the catch. The plan is set to be implemented next year. It will immediately reduce angler bag limits from two fish to one fish per day to leave more fish in the ocean to be caught by commercial fishermen. The charter operators add that they doubt many clients will pay the $150 and up cost of a charter to catch one flatfish of 20 or 30 pounds, if that.
Maw, who has been actively involved in the Council processes and says he likes the catch share plan "we'' developed, doesn't believe the charter operators. Their argument that the one-fish limit will kill them is a bunch of hype, he said. Some will surely survive, he said, and it is only right they abide by the Council plan. It is, he said, only "fair in the sense that the harvest by two commercial sectors (longline and charter) go up and down with abundance. It is taking fish out of the charter sector at the same time fish are being taken out of the commercial sector."
The commercial longline fishery has long operated under a floating harvest quota that varies with the abundance of halibut in the Gulf of Alaska. Charter catches, meanwhile, have been limited by a fixed guideline harvest level. With halibut populations declining in recent years, the result has been that the charter catch has been slowly creeping up as a percentage of the total harvest. Though commercial fisheries still catch more than 90 percent of the halibut of Alaska, the charter catch in Cook Inlet near Anchorage has been pushing toward 20 percent thanks to flourishing tourism businesses in places like Homer and Resurrection Bay. The council would like to get the percentage back closer to 15 percent. Maw and other commercial fishermen think that's a reasonable number.
"At one time,'' he said, "it was 100 percent. (But) I think we're recognizing there are other users that are there. They have a legitimate place in the fishery."
The charter businesses, he said, can't continue to grow or he will lose money. And he is already losing money. "In my own case, I bought about 19,000 pounds of IFQ,'' Maw said, but he is now allowed to catch only 9,800 pounds. Because of that, he added, "I (now) owe more on my halibut IFQs than they're worth if I sell them.'' And his income has gone down even as halibut prices have gone up. Three years ago, he said, he was allowed 14,000 pounds of halibut worth $70,000, but this season he was allowed only the 9,800 worth about $66,000.
"I'm down about $170,000 in the last six years,'' Maw said."I'm not happy that I've lost half of my poundage that I can catch.'' The small volume of halibut to be made available by the proposed restrictions on the charter fleet won't do much, if anything, to alter Maw's bottomline, but he doesn't care. He thinks it only fair the charter fleet share the pain.
Council stacked with commerical fisherman
From an economic standpoint, however, there are questions to be asked about whether that makes sense. The Alaska economy suffers no matter who in the halibut business loses fish or fishing opportunity, but some allocations cause the economy to suffer more than others. Keith Criddle, an economics professor at Utah State University in 2004, wrote a lengthy study published by the American Fisheries Society that calculated the state would stand to benefit most if about 30 percent of the halibut catch went to charter businesses. The study -- "A Simulation-Optimization Model of the North Pacific Commercial and Sport Fisheries for Pacific Halibut'' concluded there is a higher "marginal net benefit'' for fish caught by the clients of charter businesses, but that economic benefits equalize near a 30-70 split of the catch and beyond that the halibut become more valuable as a commercially caught species.
The Fisheries Service has repeatedly denied knowledge of any economic information that might help it figure out the optimum allocation scheme for halibut. Criddle himself left Utah State in 2006 to become the "Stevens Professor of Marine Policy" at the University of Alaska Fairbanks research station at Lena Point, just up the road from the headquarters of the Alaska regional office of the Fisheries Service in Juneau. He has spent his time there studying the economics of the billion dollar Alaska pollock fishery.
Duffy is a former commissioner of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. He left that job to go to work for At-Sea Processors, arguably the most powerful political player in the fisheries business of Alaska's coast. Even Maw admits this looks just a little too incestuous. "That was bad all the way around,'' he said.
Criddle, for his part, said in a telephone interview that he doesn't think he was bought off. As a researcher, he said, he was kind of stuck going where there was money for research. He said he still has an interest in the halibut allocation issue, but there is no money to fund further research there. Still, he has followed the issue a bit, and said he was baffled when the Fisheries Service charged ahead with its catch share plan instead of considering simpler proposals -- such as an annual limit on the catch of halibut by anglers.
There is no seasonal limit on the sport catch king salmon in much of the state, and the system seems to work well. But Criddle said Fisheries Service officials aggressively fought a similar plan for halibut as too costly to implement and too hard to enforce. He admits he cannot understand why. Maw, on the other hands, defends the actions of both the Fisheries Service and the Council -- even if the latter is dominated 10 votes to one by commercial fishing interests dictating catch rules for a competing sport fishery.
"I don't see a problem with that," Maw said. "Look at the range of the issues that Council has to deal with."
Because the Council is involved in regulating huge commercial fisheries that mine the oceans off the Alaska coast, he argued, it needs members with a lot of expertise in commercial fishing.
Recreational fishermen just don't know enough about the businesses involved, he said. The council might be stacked with people representing commercial fishing interests, he said, "but it isn't inappropriate. Look at what they're managing. I think they're operating in the public interest … to somehow cast dispersion against the Council, I'm not going anywhere near that premise. I don't buy into that premise that people act in their own self interest. I think they're operating in the public interest.''
"I think this was pretty fair.''
'Fair' is a relative term
Maw is, however, willing to admit that "fair" is a tough thing to pin down. He is an educated man. He holds a doctorate in forestry and wildlife management. He was once one of former Gov. Sarah Palin's nominees for the Council, though he never got picked by the U.S. Secretary of Commerce. He is also a man who works in the commercial fishing business, which is usually hard and sometimes cutthroat. Commercial fishermen all across Alaska battle to make a year's income in a matter of months to avoid looking for second jobs to tide them through the winter. The lifestyle, like any other, influences how people think. Maw's idea of "fair'' might not be everyone else's idea of fair.
Maw went to court in 2003 with the estate of fishermen Patroky Polushkin to try collect tens of thousands of dollars in Exxon Valdez oil spill funds off a permit Maw had sold years before. In the fall of 1989, Maw sold Polushkin an upper Cook Inlet driftnet permit for $186,000. At the time of the sale, the two men both signed an addendum to their contract that said Maw was to get any money "resulting from the March 1989 Exxon oil spill, against the vessel Exxon Valdez, and the 1987 Glacier Bay oil spill.''
Maw subsequently got almost $55,000 from a court settlement in the Glacier Bay case. The Polushkin litigation, which went all the way to the Alaska Supreme Court, does not make clear how much Maw collected from Exxon for a 1989 fishing season shut down by oil drifting into Cook Inlet, but most fishermen sent to the beach that summer later received settlements worth tens of thousands. The litigation does note that Maw got about $4,000 from the Alyeska Pipeline Service Company for the 1989 season.
He thought, however, that he was owed a lot more and when it was determined the lingering impacts of Exxon Valdez spill had affected the Inlet in 1990, 1991 and 1992, Maw tried to collect for the years Polushkin fished Maw's old permit. Polushkin had died in '92. When Polushkin's son, David, found out what was going on, he sued Maw in the name of the families' estate. Maw in court argued that the elder Polushkin had wanted any and all spill funds to go to Maw, no matter who had been fishing the permit. The Supreme Court didn't buy it.
The court, which used the words "unreasonable'' and "self-serving'' to define Maw's arguments as to why he was due money for the 1990-92 fishing seasons on a permit he'd sold in 1989, concluded that no reasonable person could conclude the addendum to the permit sale was "meant to assign losses suffered by Polushkin to Maw.''
Maw, however, to this day believes he was owed the money. It was in his view only "fair.''
"That's what the guy signed,'' Maw said. "(Then) he sued, and I defended myself."
Contact Craig Medred at craig(at)alaskadispatch.com.