By admin 
At a fisheries forum held Wednesday night in Kodiak, all four candidates remaining in Alaska’s gubernatorial race found plenty of common ground.
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Former state Rep. Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins, a Democrat, and the three Republicans, former Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson, former state Attorney General Treg Taylor and business owner and talk-show host Bernadette Wilson, described the seafood industry as a pillar of the state’s economy and fish as part of the state’s identity.
All four gubernatorial candidates, who are set to face off in the general election in Alaska’s ranked-choice voting system, said they consider bycatch — the accidental interception of nontargeted species — to be an urgent problem for salmon runs.
All said they want to appoint a special adviser on fisheries, something that past governors have done but that current Gov. Mike Dunleavy has not.
All said they wanted to appoint members of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, the panel that oversees practices in federal waters, and the Alaska Board of Fisheries, which has jurisdiction over state waters, who would represent state interests broadly, including non-commercial interests.
All vowed a commitment to science, support for the state agency that markets Alaska’s seafood and investment in the infrastructure in coastal communities.
But there were differences that emerged at the event, sponsored by the Kodiak Chamber of Commerce. Those started with the candidates’ personal connections to and knowledge of seafood issues.
Kreiss-Tomkins, who is from the coastal town of Sitka in Southeast Alaska, which he called “a community that was built by fisheries,” provided evidence of the closest connection to fishing and the seafood industry. He spent summers during his college years working as a fishing crew member, and he is the only one of the four candidates who has personal experience fishing commercially and participating in the seafood industry, the Kodiak event revealed.
Wilson said she was connected to the fishing industry through her family. Her grandmother was born in the Bristol Bay community of Naknek, and her father operates a business “that is responsible for hauling all of the fish out of Valdez.”
Republicans Treg Taylor and Dave Bronson, who live in Alaska’s largest city, indicated in a lightning round held near the start of the forum that they had personally engaged in both sport and subsistence fishing; Wilson indicated sport fishing experience but not subsistence experience.
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Taylor, who spent part of the debate talking about non-fishery issues like crime, confessed to a certain lack of knowledge about the subject. “This is admittedly an area that I’m not an expert in,” he said. He learned a lot preparing for the Kodiak forum and even “learned a ton during this debate listening to the responses from the other candidates up here,” he said.
Much of the event focused on trawling, the practice of using large nets in the midwater zones or bottom-water zones to scoop up large amounts of pollock and other groundfish. The pollock harvesters in particular have been accused of damaging the state’s salmon runs through bycatch, the accidental harvesting at sea of fish that would be otherwise returning to in-state spawning areas.
Pollock, which is caught mostly in federal waters, is the top-volume seafood harvest in the nation and accounted in 2023 and 2024 for 60% of the Alaska commercial seafood harvest volume, according to the most recent industry by the McKinley Research Group, a consulting company. But pollock is a low-priced fish species, and the state’s pollock harvest accounted for only 29% of the value of the state’s total commercial seafood harvest, according to the McKinley Research Group. In contrast, salmon, caught mostly in state waters, accounted for only 13% of the volume but 31% of the total value of Alaska’s commercial seafood harvest in those years, according to the McKinley Research Group.
Bycatch a hot campaign topic
In different ways, candidates at the Kodiak event discussed what they consider to be the threats to salmon from bycatch in the trawl fisheries that target pollock and other groundfish species.
It is a hotly debated issue because it pits different sectors of the fishing industry against each other, including in Kodiak, a community dependent on both trawl harvests and salmon harvests.
Bronson defended his broad anti-trawling stance, which he admitted might not be popular among some people in Kodiak, including some audience members at the forum, which was held in the Kodiak High School’s auditorium.
Drastic reductions in trawling are needed to protect faltering runs of salmon, such as Interior Alaska river king salmon runs that have collapsed, he said.
“We’ve been trying to fix this by pushing all these little buttons. We reduce limits on sport, on subsistence, and we’re doing all this, and it’s not working,” he said. “Where are the kings? Where are the king crab? They’re gone. It’s time to start pulling the big levers, the big ones, and it’s going to devastate some people.”
There are already established areas of federal waters where trawling is banned. None of the candidates named any specific federal areas where they believe new bans should be established.
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