It has been 10 days since Representative Ivy Spohnholz (D, Dist 16) pulled the pin and threw a live grenade into the floor debate on the nomination of Karl Johnstone to the Board of Fish (BoF). Her hand grenade was claims of anonymous allegations of offensive sexual comments made by Johnstone to ADF&G staff supporting the Board. Spohnholz claimed more than two women had reached out to her office.
At the time, supporters of the nomination believed they had the necessary 31 votes to confirm. The entire session quickly voted to table the nomination and then came back shortly afterwards to reject him by 24 – 33. Insiders report the allegations flipped 7 wavering votes in favor.
The best reporting on this has been (as always) by Craig Medred and Suzanne Downing. They are well worth your time to read
Johnstone spent a couple terms on the BoF under Sean Parnell. He was fair to commercial fishermen statewide, though he did believe that allocation of salmon in Cook Inlet should shift so sport and personal use fishermen could catch more that 20% of the available salmon. Cook Inlet commercial fishermen viewed this as simple theft of what was rightfully theirs, fought him every step of the way, and celebrated his replacement by Bill Walker. They vowed to defeat his reappointment. And Ivy’s gambit appears to be the ultimate weapon in that fight.
For her part, Spohnholz, who reportedly knew about the allegations at least a week before the floor session and did nothing to bring them forward, is playing the victim card, claiming personal threats since her actions. She also changed her story at least once telling the Anchorage Daily News that only two allegations were made. She has yet to release names of the so-called victims. Neither has Louise Stutes (R, Dist 32), who reportedly was coordinating activity via cell phone on the floor during the session.
OTOH, Ivy did make a floor speech this week defending herself and demanding a new procedure to allow these sorts of allegations to be handled in secret session, yet another outrageous demand, political crawfishing at its finest.
The supposed victims here were ADF&G employees. As such, they have an HR Department, union, and well-established procedures – confidential procedures – to handle harassment complaints. In this case, none of the employees at the time made any complaints. And this portion of ADF&G does not appear to have a history of harassment of female employees.
Ivy wants to stand up a legislative Star Chamber, where anyone can bring an anonymous complaint against anyone, go into secret session, and render Caesar-like their secret judgement.
Her problem is that once an allegation is made in the legislative process, the whole thing is public. And most importantly, the accuser and the accused ought to be afforded due process to face and respond to an accusation.
What should have been done here? The legislative leadership should have called a halt to the discussion and bounced the nomination back to committee to investigate. To their shame, neither Speaker Edgmon nor Senate President Giessel saw fit to do that. Both voted against Johnstone, by the way. Convenient, that. I made a few requests for an explanation from Giessel’s office about her vote and action and have not yet received a response.
What do we do about this?
First would be to acknowledge that commercial fishermen, specifically Cook Inlet commercial fishermen believe they are entitled to first and soon to be exclusive access to the resource. Other user groups can go hang despite what the Constitution of the State of Alaska says.
Second would be that they are ready, willing and able to use the most despicable, underhanded political tactics to get their way. Now that they have dusted off the #MeToo weapon, they can only go one direction, further down the political rathole.
Finally, this is a political problem and it is time sport, personal use, and subsistence fishermen get themselves into the political game, organize, and dish out just as much political pain to the 33 legislators who voted to reject Johnstone on Spohnholz’ bogus accusations as humanly possible. If salmon is a shared resource, then it bloody well ought to be shared equitably. It is up to every single one of us to make the primary season next year just as interesting for these people as humanly possible.
Otherwise, this will only get worse until commercial fishermen strip every single catchable fish out of the waters of Cook Inlet in their quest to keep their failing business model and past political decisons alive and afloat.
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.
