I read Cook Inlet Keepers’, Stand for Salmon’s, and the Alaska Conservation Foundation’s pro-House Bill 199 opinion and find their salmon solution conclusions to be completely illogical.
I read their latest version of HB 199 and I see no way to get the public to vote for such a monster. I am 100 percent in favor of their intent, but the average person will see it making a bad salmon situation even worse.
It would do this by taking all the resources and energy willing to help protect our salmon now and expelling them on a monster (HB 199) that would be shredded by our courts because of multiple unconstitutional references. What remained would then be manipulated and perverted by big business by way of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game commissioner.
Even if none of that happened, the massive bureaucracy necessary to implement this measure would require a substantial increase in the ADF&G budget, which the state doesn’t have.
They are basically talking about trying to implement a “legally shredded and big business manipulated measure” that nobody is going to want to pay for. The end result being a tremendous amount of pro-salmon habitat effort vaporized into nothing.
There is a better and simpler way to protect salmon habitat.
The first element would require habitat permits to have nothing to do with politics or the ADF&G; both are controlled by business and “fisheries supply and demand” requires the eventual destruction of our salmon.
Second; any permitting process must impact the saltwater as much as it impacts the freshwater. Third; nobody is exempt, no government and no group. Fourth; the federal government is the only agency able to finance such a huge permitting program.
If these organizations decide to ignore my above prediction or my four-point solution and attempt to sell their current (HB 199) monster to the public, they should prepare for failure and helping assist in the future destruction of what is left of our salmon.
Donald Johnson,
Soldotna