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In a matter of months, the Alaska Supreme Court will decide if Alaskans can legally ban an entire group of fishermen by ballot initiative. At the heart of the court’s decision is a definition: what makes an allocation?

On Aug. 26, the Alaska Supreme Court presided over an unusually packed house to hear arguments from the Alaska Fisheries Conservation Alliance and the State of Alaska on whether to allow a ballot initiative to ban setnets in urban areas to be allowed in the 2016 election cycle. The court has no deadline for a decision.

Lt. Gov. Byron Mallott certified the ballot initiative after the Alaska Fisheries Conservation Alliance submitted 43,000 signatures in support of the measure. The initiative would almost exclusively impact the Kenai Peninsula, where 735 setnet permits are registered alongside a large guided angler industry. More than 80 percent of the permits are held by Alaska residents.

After the initiative was filed in late 2013, then-Lt. Gov. Mead Treadwell rejected it in January 2014 as an allocative measure, which is prohibited by the Alaska Constitution.

AFCA appealed and won a reversal in Superior Court that allowed it to begin collecting signatures.

The State of Alaska is appealing the lower court decision, calling the initiative an unconstitutional de facto reallocation of salmon from one user group of fishermen to another, if not an explicit one, while AFCA argues the constitutional definition of allocation should be applied literally according to a particular legal precedent.

In Pullen v. Ulmer, the Alaska Supreme Court ruled in 1996 that salmon are a state asset and cannot be allocated by ballot initiative, which is prohibited under the state constitution.

The initiative strikes the state and setnetters as purely allocative in nature. Banning setnets would allow more chinook salmon, prized sport fish, into the Kenai River, which could then be harvested by other groups including the guided anglers and sportfishermen. The sockeye salmon targeted by the setnetters would also end up harvested by the drift fleet.

Allocations of salmon are the exclusive domain of the Alaska Board of Fisheries and the Legislature, under the Alaska Constitution. The State of Alaska said that the banning of an entire gear class is too broad not to be a hindrance to the resource’s management.

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