State auditors in Alaska have been told to spend the next several months going through nearly three years of Board of Fisheries meetings - not the decisions the board reached, but how it reached them.
The Legislative Budget and Audit Committee approved the review unanimously on 16 July, covering every board action from 12 October 2023 through 1 July 2026. The request came from Rep. Louise Stutes, a Kodiak Republican who has chaired the House Special Committee on Fisheries for eight years and represents one of the largest commercial fishing ports in the state.
Her language was blunt. "The breadth and frequency of stakeholder complaints about the Board's process make it clear the Board has lost the public's trust," Stutes wrote in the audit request, which described board actions as "increasingly characterized as lacking transparency, unethical, and/or unlawful."
Speaking to legislators, she framed it as something building over years rather than a single grievance. "A common theme that, in the eyes of the public, is growing more severe each year is the board's adherence to a transparent public process, ethical conduct, as well as its own policies, regulations, and statutes," she said.
The fight that produced this audit is Area M. In February the board voted 4-3 to cut June commercial salmon fishing time near the South Alaska Peninsula by roughly a third, a move backed by subsistence fishermen and the Yukon River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission on the argument that it would let more chum and chinook reach Western Alaska rivers. Area M fishermen said it would gut coastal communities without meaningfully helping those runs.
The Aleutians East Borough, the Native Village of Unga and two Area M commercial fishing groups filed an ethics complaint over conflicts of interest, then sued in Anchorage Superior Court in April. The suit was dropped in May after acting Attorney General Cori Mills stepped in, ruled the votes improper, and voided five of the regulations outright.
Stutes points to that intervention as proof the process is broken. Not everyone on the committee agreed the conclusion follows.
Sen. Scott Kawasaki, a Fairbanks Democrat, called the wording of the request "rather inflammatory" and asked whether plain research into past decisions would do the job instead. Rep. Andy Josephson, an Anchorage Democrat, pushed harder on whether the audit would simply ratify the attorney general's view.
"I guess where I'm going is, attorneys general opinions are featured in the statutes all the time, but until there's a Supreme Court decision they're not dispositive of anything," Josephson said. "Are you going to have an independent legal judgment, or are you going to say, 'Well, Attorney General Mills said this is so, so I guess it's so.' That's my question."
Legislative Auditor Kris Curtis answered that she reviews such opinions on their merits and that auditing standards "require we maintain our independence, both in fact and appearance." Her office did a comparable review of the Board of Game about eight years ago and recently stood up a section dedicated to performance audits of this size, which she said means work can start unusually quickly.
Stutes was careful about scope, repeatedly. "This audit request is not based on any outcomes of what the Board of Fish has done," she told the committee. "We are asking it based on the process on which those outcomes were determined. The process, not the end result."
Board chair Marit Carlson-Van Dort did not push back. "Any insights and suggestions to improve the board's process are both welcome and encouraged," she said in a statement, noting that the board leans on five decades of statutes, regulations and findings and that she has consistently sought guidance from the Department of Law on how meetings are noticed and run. The board has kept a Process Review Committee going since 2021 and expects to convene it again in September.
The reaction outside the Capitol split along familiar lines. The Kenai River Sportfishing Association asked the committee to reject the request, with executive director Shannon Martin writing on 15 July that it would "require a substantial expenditure of taxpayer dollars and thousands of hours of staff time to review regulatory process that is already among the most transparent in Alaska state government."
United Fishermen of Alaska, the commercial fleet's advocacy group, welcomed the audit as "much over due" and turned on the sportfishing association directly, saying it was "deeply disturbing" to see an organisation oppose transparency and accountability in fisheries management.
Timelines vary depending on who is asked. Curtis told the committee the work could be done in four to six months and possibly land before lawmakers return in January; she has also cautioned it may not. Either way, nothing about the audit reverses the Area M outcome, and nothing in it binds the board. It produces findings and recommendations - and, for anyone with a stake in how Alaska's fish get allocated, a documented record of how the room actually works.
