Alaska's Board of Fisheries is about to have its homework marked. State auditors will review every meeting and action the board took between 12 October 2023 and 1 July 2026, under a request the Legislative Budget and Audit Committee approved unanimously on 16 July.
The board's seven members, appointed by the governor and confirmed by the Legislature, decide who fishes for what and when across commercial, subsistence and sport fisheries in state waters. The audit is aimed at how those calls get made, not at the calls themselves.
Rep. Louise Stutes, the Kodiak Republican who has chaired the House Special Committee on Fisheries for eight years, wrote the request. She did not soften it.
"The breadth and frequency of stakeholder complaints about the Board's process make it clear the Board has lost the public's trust," she wrote, describing board conduct as "increasingly characterized as lacking transparency, unethical, and/or unlawful."
In committee she described a complaint pattern deepening year on year. "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.
Behind it sits Area M. The board voted 4-3 in February to cut June commercial salmon fishing time near the South Alaska Peninsula by about a third. Subsistence fishermen and the Yukon River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission supported it as a way of moving more fish toward Western Alaska rivers. The Aleutians East Borough argued the board had broken state ethics law getting there, filed a complaint alongside the Native Village of Unga and two Area M fishing groups, and went to Anchorage Superior Court in April. The suit was withdrawn in May once acting Attorney General Cori Mills voided five of the regulations on 19 May.
Stutes treats that as evidence the process failed. Two of her colleagues were not persuaded that an audit is the right instrument.
Sen. Scott Kawasaki, a Fairbanks Democrat, described the request's wording as "rather inflammatory" and suggested straightforward research might answer the same questions. Rep. Andy Josephson of Anchorage wanted a guarantee the auditors would not simply defer to the attorney general.
"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 said she weighs such opinions independently and that auditing standards "require we maintain our independence, both in fact and appearance." Her office ran a similar review of the Board of Game roughly eight years ago and has since built a team for performance audits of this scale, so the work can begin faster than usual. The scope covers statutes and regulations, public notice and comment requirements, the Administrative Procedure Act and the Executive Branch Ethics Act, and includes stakeholder interviews and a reading of the meeting record.
Stutes kept drawing the same line. "This audit request is not based on any outcomes of what the Board of Fish has done," she said. "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 welcomed it rather than resisting. "Any insights and suggestions to improve the board's process are both welcome and encouraged," she said, adding that the board works from five decades of accumulated statutes, regulations, policies and findings, and that she has relied on Department of Law guidance to ensure meetings are properly noticed and open to participation. She noted the volume the board handles - hundreds of proposals a cycle, often compressed into short windows - and that its Process Review Committee, running since 2021, meets again in September.
The advocacy groups took opposite sides, predictably. Kenai River Sportfishing Association executive director Shannon Martin urged the committee on 15 July to decline, arguing the audit 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 called the approval "much over due" and went after the sportfishing group in public, saying it was "deeply disturbing" to see an organisation oppose transparency and accountability in fisheries management.
Estimates of when it lands range from four to six months to sometime after the January session begins. The audit cannot reinstate the Area M rules or overturn anything the board has done. What it can produce is a public account of how the state's most contested fisheries decisions are actually made.
