August 25, 2017 — ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Sooner or later, Congress will have to start wading through dozens of fights that go along with re-approving the key law that governs federally managed fisheries.
Sen. Dan Sullivan is pushing for sooner, pressing the Commerce Committee to start advancing a revisit of the Magnuson-Stevens Act, historically brushed up in Washington every decade or so, but not since 2007.
As part of Sullivan’s effort to advance MSA to re-authorization, the Republican senator on Wednesday convened a meeting in Soldotna for a subcommittee that deals with fishery policy to hear testimony from a variety of industry leaders.
State and federal government leaders were among the 14 panelists, and so were commercial and sport fish business owners.
One view expressed by many stakeholders on the panels at Kenai Peninsula College was actually not directly related to MSA approval: The belief that the federal government needs to invest more money to improve quality of the data used to monitor escapement goals, bycatch, and other fishery benchmarks.