Alaska is quietly making it harder to keep water in its rivers for salmon

Alaska is rewriting the rules for one of the only legal tools that keeps water in its rivers, and critics — including a former state fisheries commissioner — warn the changes tilt it toward industry and away from the Tribes and communities that use it to protect salmon.

A reservation of water is how anyone — a Tribe, a nonprofit, a town, a person, or a state agency — sets water aside to stay in a stream for fish, wildlife, or recreation, blocking later users from pumping it out. It is one of the few ways to keep water in a river rather than take it out.

The proposed changes raise the bar. Applicants would have to supply at least five years of flow data and detailed habitat studies, and could be made to pay for installing and maintaining stream gages — costly in remote, roadless country. And when a Tribe, nonprofit, or citizen wins a reservation, the state, not the applicant, would hold it.

"With proposals for energy projects, mining developments and potential large data centers on the horizon, now is exactly the wrong time to make it harder to reserve water for fish," said Frank Rue, a former commissioner of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. "Salmon don't hire lobbyists."

DNR says the opposite: the changes clear a backlog, set clear requirements, and let the state enforce reservations more consistently — strengthening protection, not weakening it — without eroding the constitution's guarantee of water for fish and wildlife.

Now the window is closing. DNR has ended the scoping phase and will hold no more hearings, and public comment ran only through June 30, during the busy start of fishing season. Critics call it an end-run — a rule change to do what an earlier attempt to change the law could not.