Unalaska, AK – The city of Adak is requesting the state to issue an emergency order that will allow boats to fish for Pacific cod in the far western Aleutians in spite of a new federal regulation put into place to protect the endangered western Steller sea lions.

State of Alaska waters were included in the National Marine Fisheries Service's Biological Opinion on the status of the marine mammal. That meant that the interim final action they issued in December, which closed Area 543 to fishing for cod and mackerel, also closed the state's parallel and guideline harvest level fisheries. Alaska Department of Fish & Game special assistant to the commissioner Doug Vincent-Lang says the state disagrees with the new regulation.

"Largely, what [NMFS] said was that fishing was causing nutritional stress in Stellar sea lions, and the data that we looked at we could not substantiate the finding nor reach an agreement that fishing was causing nutritional stress to Stellar sea lions. In our opinion, this was just not necessary to reduce jeopardy to the western Stellar sea lions, and we think that that population is generally increasing over all."

However, Vincent-Lang said the state government did not feel they could legally act against the NMFS rule to provide additional fishing opportunities to communities in the region. "We looked very hard at our emergency order authority as a mechanism to provide some additional opportunity, but we did not feel that we had the sufficient authority to do that. We need to go back to the Board to clarify or give them an opportunity to become involved in this, given the allocative implications to some of the decisions."

The Board's opportunity for involvement began on December 23, when the City of Adak filed an emergency petition for state waters to be open to fishing for Pacific cod by the 60 foot and under fleet. This gave the Board of Fish an avenue to consider an emergency order.

Adak Mayor Michael Swetzof says that Adak relies on fish taxes to survive. The city has lost large amounts of money recently because their on-shore fish processing plant, formerly known as Adak Seafoods, was not operational. Swetzof says that Icicle Seafoods plans to take over the plant soon, which will attract boats, if the boats have waters to fish in.

"If Icicle comes out here to Adak and you have somebody that has money in their pocket instead of the way it was before when they never knew if they were going to get paid or not. It created a lot of problems and so people didn't really want to come out there. But you can get a lot of them, King Cove and Sand Point boats plus some of the Icicle boats," Swetzof said.

Currently, Adak has very few other sources of income. Swetzof said they get about $400,000 per year from fishing, custom packing, and selling golden king crab, but most of the small community's money used to come from raw fish tax. Swetzof says he hopes the Board passes the emergency order during the meeting and implements it in late January, when cod start to school up near Adak. If implemented, the emergency order would open the fishery for 90 days.

The Board will review the petition during their meeting in Anchorage from January 16 to 19, and they will accept public comments. NMFS will also be presenting at the Board of Fisheries meeting about current and previous Steller Sea Lion protection measures and about the 3-mile groundfish closure around Kanaga Island and the Ship Rock rookery.