Fishermen and the fisheries-inclined turned out by the dozens Tuesday for an open hearing before the Board of Fisheries to air their concerns on a host of issues.

The Board of Fisheries, preparing to enter its 2016-2017 cycle, is holding a work session in Soldotna this week to discuss Agenda Change Requests and non-regulatory proposals and to take public comments. When the session was scheduled in October 2014, the board set aside an entire day for fishermen to make public comments on any issue they wanted to address.

Title 16

Commenters spoke on a variety of issues, but several recurred throughout the day. The issue that received the most comments, both for and against, was a non-regulatory proposal requesting the Board of Fisheries to lobby the Legislature to update the state fish habitat permitting process to include specific criteria from the Alaska Sustainable Salmon Fisheries Policy.

The proposal, authored by a collection of commercial, subsistence and sport fishermen from all around the Cook Inlet region, asks that the Legislature update Title 16 — the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s fish habitat permit regulations — to more specifically define what constitutes the protection of fish and game. Currently, the law states that the Fish and Game commissioner should issue permits unless the activity is deemed insufficient for the protection of fish, but the law doesn’t clearly define what sufficient protection is.

Willow King, one of the proposal’s 12 authors and a setnetter from Kasilof, urged the board to send the Legislature a letter supporting the proposal.

“I find that the references to protecting fish and game in water are vague,” King said. “… What is beneficial to finances isn’t always beneficial to fish. And salmon have enough trials to go through.”

The parameters for Title 16 do not require a public notice and comment period for fish habitat permits. Several people testified Tuesday that they want the public to have a chance to weigh in on fish habitat permits as well, like Mike Wood, another of the proposal authors and a setnetter near the mouth of the Susitna River.

He said one of the reasons he supports the proposal is the proposed Susitna-Watana Hydroelectric Project, which would have dammed the Susitna River above Devil’s Canyon to produce hydroelectricity. The project received wide criticism from residents and fishing advocates, and Gov. Bill Walker announced in June that the project would go on hiatus.

“I think that a closer look at our state’s sustainable salmon proposal could help provide better guidelines to keep large projects such as Susitna Hydro from even going to the point that they did,” Wood said.

Other supporters wanted the state to take an “anadromous until proven otherwise” attitude toward the state waters. Sam Snyder, engagement director for the Alaska chapter of Trout Unlimited, testified to the board that because only a portion of the state’s waters are catalogued, Fish and Game should assume that streams are anadromous when issuing fish habitat permits if not catalogued. The law also has too much ambiguity for how the commissioner could define the proper protection of fish and game, he said.

“Luckily, so far, we’re not a part of the story that faces the Lower 48, where they’re spending billions of dollars to restore trout and salmon habitat degraded by bad habitat management, overpopulation, large disruptive dams and other impactful projects,” Snyder said. “In Alaska, while there are habitat issues in the more populated areas of the state, we again largely avoided those issues. If we can keep habitat intact, we can really work to maintain healthy fisheries.”