Favorite Son and I made our annual trip to the Great Alaska Sportsman Show Friday afternoon. I enjoy looking at the toys and vising with old friends and acquaintances. He likes to get out and about and eat lunch afterwards.
One of the things I check out are the bottom-feeding anti-development groups who have purchased spots in the show. This year, Bob Gillam’s anti-Pebble group was nowhere to be found as were the anti-Chuitna people.
On the other hand, we did have Trout Unlimited, Stand for Salmon, and Stand for Alaska. Ducks Unlimited were also there, but they tend to not be as virulently anti-development as Trout Unlimited or Stand for Salmon.
Seeing the Stand for Salmon guys (three 20-ish young men) got me thinking about precisely what they were asking the voters to approve. You can find the actual language here: http://elections.alaska.gov/petitions/17FSH2/17FHS2%20Bill.pdf
They want a brand new permitting system that will be applicable to any waters that touch anything a salmon either traverses or spawns in, essentially the entire watershed of the state. Their excuse is that the current permitting system run by Department of Natural Resources DNR) and Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) at the state level is not up to the task. They also tell us that the current permitting rules and regulations need to be updated to a more modern form. Yet when they impose the new permitting and bonding requirements, they do not remove or repair the current system, requiring resource development and infrastructure projects to traverse an additional set of speed bumps.
The kicker is that they have no answer what has fallen through the cracks over the years, what DNR / DEC have screwed up other than the possibility that Pebble Mine might get permitted.
They propose setting up a parallel, new permitting system, one carefully crafted to ensure that once a project is approved, that approval is meaningless. Why? Because any future governor or ADF&G Commissioner can whistle in after the fact, be shocked, simply shocked at damage to salmon habitat, and shut down any activity – mine, well, road, bridge, airport, building, culvert, tunnel, etc. because of some claimed harm to that habitat and demand both a permit and a bond for the already approved operation.
This leads to a couple questions. First, if DNR & DEC aren’t doing their jobs, what are we paying them for? Second, and more importantly, precisely what does issuing a state permit actually mean?
Here’s the funny part: These guys have written a ballot initiative that puts the fox in charge of the henhouse, in that it puts the very department busily decimating mixed salmon runs in Cook Inlet, Southeast, and Southwestern Alaska (ADF&G) in charge of the new permitting system. If ADF&G is doing its job, there would be no Fish Stocks of Concern. This is what you get when you manage the resource for the benefit of commercial fishermen while ignoring the needs of all other user groups and the overall health and sustainability of the resource. http://www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=specialstatus.akfishstocks
It’s not the miners decimating the resource. It is not damage to the habitat. Rather it is commfish, aided and abetted by the very government employees who the Stand for Salmon want to put in charge of permitting.
Further, these guys propose a race-based permitting system, allowing any tribal or tribally connected entity to do whatever they want to do without posting a bond to cover costs of remediation. All Pebble (the real target of this initiative) needs to do to bypass the bonding requirement is hook up with a Native operation, something they brilliantly did last year with ASRC’s mining subsidiary. So much for equal rights under the law. https://www.adn.com/alaska-news/2017/06/13/pebble-and-asrc-team-up-frustrating-mine-opponents-in-bristol-bay-region/
Finally, bonding requirements are also waived when any government wants to do something. Think about that for a while. Then consider what the EPA, a government entity, did when they screwed around and destroyed the plug in the Gold King Mine in Colorado in 2015, dumping millions of gallons of toxic chemicals down the watershed of rivers in four states. While the mine oversaw the runoff, there was no problem. Once the EPA got itself involved, the spill was all but inevitable. To date, no single EPA official has gone to jail.
The Road to Very Hot places is paved with good intentions, though I am not so sure that there were any good intentions behind this initiative, as the proponents and signature gatherers lied about it from the beginning, claiming to want to protect the salmon, habitat and update state permitting rules, when all along all they wanted to do was to install yet another speed bump in front of Pebble Mine.
And if they have been lying from Day One, why do they deserve our support?
Alex Gimarc lives in Anchorage since retiring from the military in 1997. His interests include science and technology, environment, energy, economics, military affairs, fishing and disabilities policies. His weekly column “Interesting Items” is a summary of news stories with substantive Alaska-themed topics. He is a small business owner and Information Technology professional.
