Officials talk fish in Soldotna

Protecting local habitat was a theme at the Kenai Classic Roundtable, an annual event hosted by the Kenai River Sportfishing Association that gathers anglers and politicians from around the state to talk fish.

The roundtable was bookended by speeches by visiting dignitaries. It opened with a keynote address by Rep. Mary Peltola and closed with remarks by Gov. Mike Dunleavy.

In between, a short film premiered, a conversation was had around the complex relationship between recreational fisheries and rapidly developing offshore energy platforms, and state government entities gave an update on collaborative efforts to support access and improvements to fisheries in the state.

Through it all, the content centered around protecting local habitat and spawning grounds for salmon, understanding the impacts of human development on those areas, and expanding access to local rivers and streams without harming them. Of course, the specter of declining chinook salmon populations hung over much of the conversation.

On the screen

The short film, “Rivers Are Life — Kings of the Kenai,” was produced by Dow, and featured extensively the late Bob Penney, who founded KRSA, as well as board members for the association and current Executive Director Shannon Martin.

That film celebrated the Kenai River as a resource and as a teacher. It pointed to damage to riverbanks, especially grassy constructs “where millions of baby salmon live” as a potential factor in the decline of king salmon. The film celebrated the construction of light-penetrating boardwalks, like those that are a familiar sight along the river for allowing access without contacting the habitat below.

Development on the wind

The topic that took up the largest portion of the roundtable centered around offshore energy development — most specifically wind turbines. The speakers came from the East Coast: Andy Lipsky, offshore wind program lead for National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association Fisheries, and Mike Waine, Atlantic fisheries policy director for the American Sportfishing Association.

This topic is relevant, Lipsky said, because changing political and energy landscapes are leading to the rapid upscale of that development. He said he’s fished around turbines, but only around six or seven — soon he anticipates that there will be hundreds.

A big part of that expansion is the development of new floating turbines that can be deployed at much greater depths. Those don’t exist at “commercial scale” anywhere on Earth just yet, “but those projects are fast coming into being.” Fishing around these floating turbines could be difficult, he said, because they’ll have tether cables.

Lipsky said that he was a scientist, not a policymaker. He said his perspective was aligned to the effort to understand the interactions between offshore wind energy and fisheries and the way that the rapidly increasing development of offshore wind turbines will change the way NOAA is able to do scientific research — which he said has previously been powerful because it’s been done the same way for decades.

Installing turbines will preclude NOAA vessels and aircraft from surveys they’ve previously been able to do. That reduces sampling and increases uncertainty, he said.

This major shift, he said, represents an opportunity to reevaluate, reenvision and reinvest in science. He said NOAA is taking that chance.

Development is happening now on the East Coast, he said, and Alaska residents and agencies should now be preparing for the same to start happening in the near future.

Turbines change the ecosystem. This can be positive and this can be negative, he said. The changes come from impact of construction, noise, increased activity, electromagnetic fields, and the addition of hundreds of new islands. A major shift that Lipsky described was the wakes produced by the massive windmill structures — he said he was introduced to that idea a few years ago by a group of engineers in Europe.

“I didn’t even think about that — no one was thinking about that,” he said. “That’s a massive potential change to the ecosystem. That’s one of those research things that keeps me up at night.”

Lipsky reiterated that there’s no settled science yet on whether those changes were positive or negative, just that there are changes as a result.

“The studies have not been done,” he said.

There are also, of course, interactions with local fisheries.

“There’s a lot of research that needs to be done before this happens,” Lipsky said.

Offshore wind is imminent, he said, so now is the time to mitigate impacts to science, wildlife and fisheries.

More on the policy side is Waine, who described advocacy efforts by his association to see anglers involved in the development of the offshore turbines.

“The wind energy folks are not fishery experts,” he said. “They are very reliant on stakeholders to obtain a lot of this information.”

He said that his association has pushed for making orientation of the turbines uniform, trying to minimize construction during known fishing seasons, and constructing turbines from materials less harmful to the environment. Another big goal he described was getting different companies to cooperate on a single cable corridor — that is aligning the miles of cable running from each turbine to one specific pathway.

Restoration through collaboration

The final panel was hosted by representatives of state and federal agencies, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Senior Advisor for Conservation Boyd Bilhovde; Bureau of Land Management Alaska Director Steve Cohn; Alaska Department of Fish and Game Commissioner Doug Vincent-Lang; and Alaska State Parks Director Ricky Gease.

The panel described the importance of collaborating with one another to complete projects, especially those that crossed boundaries of jurisdiction.

“It’s all hands on deck when it comes to restoring habitat for fish,” Cohn said. “We all know fish don’t recognize land ownership.”

He pointed to federal funding — and the Gravel to Gravel Keystone Initiative for People, Salmon, and the Land — as allowing for development of close relationships with other federal agencies, state agencies, Native tribes, and other community organizations.

Vincent-Lang said that such collaboration would be tremendously important to the future of king salmon, because salmon don’t just stay in Alaska water.

“We can’t simply regulate fisheries at the state level any longer,” he said. “We pretty much all agree that we’re having issues out in the ocean. Fish and Game doesn’t have the capacity to get out in the deep blue ocean to understand what’s happening out there.”

What Vincent-Lang said is important is community engagement.

“I hear from a lot of different fishermen about their thoughts on fisheries. Sometimes, I wish they expressed it a little kinder, but the good point is that they care enough to call and they care enough to be involved,” he said. “I think we all know what happens when people stop caring about resources.”

Gease shared updates on local projects at Big Eddy State Recreation Area and the Eagle Rock Landing. Big Eddy will soon see new paved areas and parking, as well as new public access points to the river. Eagle Rock will see tripled capacity for trucks and trailers.