NPFMC 279 Day 2 - June 5, 2026

Good morning, everyone. So we will begin our meeting this morning with the remainder of the B reports. We have 2 more cooperative reports. I'd ask— and actually Salmon Genetics after that, apologies. So after the Salmon Genetics report, we'll be taking public testimony.

Testimony. So please do sign up before the end of that report if you wish to testify on any B agenda items. So with that, we'll bring up Austin Estabrooks, if you're ready.

And excuse me, I did have a note and I completely forgot. I'd like to, um, thank all of the hosts, uh, for their, um, warm reception last night, uh, PSPA, MTC, Groundfish Forum, FLC, and APA. And Pacific Seafoods. Thank you very much.

Here we go. Perfect. Got it. So, good morning, members of the council. For the record, I'm Austin Esterbrooks, representing the At Sea Processors Association, also the Pawlik Conservation Cooperative, as their Unofficial cooperative manager, and so I'm here to present the PCC HSCC annual report.

The PCC is the AFA-named catcher processor vessels, and then the High Seas Catcher Cooperative, those are the 7 catcher vessels that historically delivered Pollock to the catcher-processor sector. And generally speaking, I view these reports as intending to give the Council a look at whether or not the American Fisheries Act goals are continuing to be met by the cooperative level structure.

Before I get into the numbers, I would just like to highlight that the— there really is no other fishery in Alaska or possibly the world that provides the level of transparency of data that we do.

They're—. For example, on an annual basis, we provide extensive species-level catch down to the vessel level. So that is quite unique. And beyond the public-facing data, I'd just like to remind the council and the public of all the things that we do behind the scenes within the cooperative.

For example, we produce fishing plans on an annual basis and set target level bycatch for the fleet that we then report out to the fleet on a biweekly or weekly basis. We also have extensive communication in season and utilize SeaState extensively for rolling hotspot or bycatch reporting. And then Last but not least, we do have skipper-level bycatch awards at the end of the season, and the skippers are very competitive.

Within the report, we track groundfish discard ratios, and so this slide highlights the longer-term In 2025, for example, we had a discard— or sorry, a groundfish bycatch ratio of less than 1%. And so this gives you sort of a benchmark of how the fleet performed historically. That longer-term groundfish discard ratio was— is 1.7%. So 2025 was relative to the historical period cleaner on average. And then again, these numbers just present the PSC in addition to the, the groundfish and pollock catch for the PCC.

Relatively speaking, we also track longer-term trends of the retention ratio of the, the groundfish that we catch. And so this is showing you what we keep and use as a saleable product relative to what we catch, and this of the FMP, so the Fisheries Management Plan managed species. And again, it's 99.8%, and this is pretty typical for our fleet over the long-term average. I would say we, we over the long term retain greater than 99.5% of everything that we catch.

This gives you a sense of the vessel-level catches and discards of pollock, but just as a reminder, Pollock is an IRIU species, therefore it's required to be retained if it's of food-grade quality.

Giving you a brief look at the halibut performance of the fleet last year relative to the longer-term trends, again, it was the, the third best year and I attribute this mostly to, again, the health of the pollock stock and reduced time fishing generally equates to lower bycatch.

In terms of the historical Chinook salmon bycatch, 2025 wasn't as good as 2024.

And this is typically due to temperature regimes in the Bering Sea. We typically see a lot more Chinook move up onto the shelf and overlap with the pollock distributions when temperatures are warmer. And this held true in 2025, particularly in the A season. There were a lot more Chinook up on the shelf overlapping with the fishery.

Uh, chum salmon bycatch, again relative to the 2024, um, it was a higher year for chum salmon. And this was again reduced sea ice, typically, uh, causes the pollock and chum distributions in the B season to overlap more extensively because there's less feed on the shelf relative to along the shelf break. And the salmon are primarily basin dwellers, and so in the warmer years, there is more overlap with the fishery and the chum distributions.

So historically, a lot of our vessels participated in the yellowfin sole directed fisheries, and therefore, through the AFA, we have a— there's an open access sideboard fishery that some of our vessels have historically participated in since about 2015, 2016.

What I call our, our big boat, um, pollock vessels have not participated in this fishery. In 2025, we had one vessel that participated in the directed yellowfin sole fishery. Most of their catch occurred in the nearshore Bristol Bay fishery that opens in the late spring, early summer, and that's primarily a spawning fishery, and therefore bycatch rates tend to be, uh, very low in that fishery, and that held true for, um, last year.

Uh, we also have sideboard, um, limits in all of the non-directed pollock fisheries, and this gives you a look at, um, what our PSC catches were relative to those sideboards, and all all remained well under the limits.

And finally, there, as Susie I think mentioned yesterday, there was no high seas catcher vessel participation in any sideboard fisheries in 2025. And that was all I had for the PCC HSCC report.

Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Ostbrooks. Are there any questions?

Just if we go back to slide 7, um, you're talking about temperature regimes, um, warmer temperatures in 2025. Just wondering if— how they compared to some of the the comparable PSE numbers in '19 and in '20, if you had just that information on top of mind when we saw— when we last saw numbers similar or a little bit higher. Sorry, is 7 the Chinook or the Chum? I think the Chinook is the one we're looking at. Chinook, yeah.

Yeah, obviously 2018-19 were some of the lower, lower sea ice years on record in the Bering Sea. So, um, 2018, you don't see the effect yet, but 2019 and 2020, there was definitely sort of a lagged effect there in terms of the bycatch. And so, um, the catch was lower relative to, to those years. And 2017 was, um, that was a high-run year, so I think that's the signal that you're seeing in 2017. But it was also quite warm.

Okay, thank you for that. Thank you, Shadab.

Yeah, yeah. Not seeing any other hands, I think we're ready to move on. Thanks.

So I'm also presenting the Ketchum Processor Chinook and Chum Incident Plan Agreement for the 2025 year as the CPIPA representative.

Oops. So all of the primary IPA components remain the same for 2025, and those are listed here, but I won't read them.

But I always like to give the council and the public just a demonstration of how the Rolling Hotspot program works in season. And so this is an example actually from the 2026A season, not 2025, but all of these are trawl tracks for a specific week and the white VMS tracks are zero, shrunk by catch, or very low, and then as the shade of the track gets deeper red, that means more Chinook salmon occurred in that hole. And so this just gives you a demonstration. So you see on the left-hand slide or left-hand picture, some red tracks showing up and therefore the the red box was drawn for the subsequent week. And then on the right-hand side, you see how the fleet disperses both east and west of, of that box and generally finds cleaner fishing outside of that area.

And again, this is showing a, a B season consecutive weeks where within the, the box you see a handful of, of lighter red tracks, and that area was then closed and the fleet then again dispersed closer to the shelf edge there in the subsequent following week to avoid chum.

This is the, the detailed version of how our rolling hotspot program works, but I think generally for The high-level overview is that we're tracking a broader, longer-term, what is the general abundance of Chinook on the grounds over a 3-week period? What is the larger temporal average rate that we're seeing? And then we look discrete spatial areas, so those ADF&G stat areas, and we see where in the Bering Sea we're seeing rates that are higher relative to that longer, broader-term Chinook abundance. We identify those areas that stand out above that broader-term bycatch rate, and then we then close those areas, and those areas are prohibited from fishing by any vessel that is not performing better than 25% or 25% better than that baseline average bycatch rate. So you have to actually be performing better than everyone else in order to not be prohibited from fishing in that area.

And so for the catcher-processor fleet, the incentive there is that you have 140 people on board and you're running fish through the factory and stopping that process in order to move, you know, 20, 30, 40, 50 miles to be forced out of an area is a very strong incentive because that is extremely costly to, to stop work, clean the factory, and move the vessel. And so therefore, the vessel operator is doing his very best to avoid all salmon so that he can continue fishing anywhere, even within, you know, areas that might get closed if their rates remain very low. But they don't do that, so therefore we try to avoid triggering any bycatch areas. Mr. Esterbrooks, just on that previous slide there. Sure.

Can you remind me as far as the temporal spatial or the longer-term temporal spatial metrics that you're looking at? Is it—. What type of conditions are you overlaying with that? Are you able to look at temperature trends over the long term and see temporally at a specific— or during a specific year how that's shifting year to year? Or are there other environmental factors that you're able to overlay in your analysis of that the spatial anticipation enclosures?

Um, so we, we don't look directly, um, at temperature within the IPA itself. We're just looking at what is the baseline, uh, 3-week rolling average. And so that's, that's primarily, um, the metric that we use.

To—. I mean, it's just a strict base rate, uh, relatively speaking. But obviously a lot of our skippers are using some sophisticated oceanographic mapping software that provides them with sea surface temperature and other things like that. And so they're anecdotally using that in addition to sea state information. Thank you.

And Ms. Gone. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you, Mr. Asterbrooks, for the presentation.

Um, I— my questions are on the two slides before, and I really appreciate your comments at the opening too, that this fleet has incredibly transparent information here and what you're sharing. So I appreciate that. So for the Chinook hotspot and the chum hotspot, I'm curious how you set those areas. When I look at the Chinook one, the trawl tracks are on the left-hand side, but you created a much bigger box. And then on the chum, you're covering the area where you're seeing a little bit higher rate.

I'm just curious on the thought process on how you select the size of the box.

Oh yeah, the view, that wasn't intentional.

I think I was just quickly making screenshots there, but it probably would have been more helpful to have the actual shelf break to the left there.

So also, just as a reminder, these are the fixed area closures that we actually do have within our IPA. In the A season, there's an area that's of 735 square miles that's permanently closed to pollock fishing. And then the B season, we have some conditional closures. For the late bee season.

The take-home from this slide is just that under a low abundance year, which we were under in 2025 and have been for a series of years, the 1.8 or 0.018 number there is what the fleet is striving to achieve. So essentially, if you catch more than 2 Chinook salmon in any given tow over the course of the season, that's too many. And so that, that's the goal at which our fleet is trying to operate across the entire season.

These are again the numbers and show the differential rates by season. Obviously, we catch the majority of our Chinook salmon in the A season and the majority of the chum in the B season.

This is giving you a closer estimated look at what our Western Alaska component of the catch was for both chum and Chinook.

And yeah, we appreciate the increased— I put a screenshot of the next presentation you'll see, which is the increased resolution of the genetic baseline there for the last 2 years.

This gives you a look at where we had 13 different Chinook bycatch avoidance areas that were identified across the 2025 fishing year. And again, as a reminder, our fleet does incorporate the catcher vessel data into identification of rolling hotspot program, and therefore some bycatch avoidance areas do get identified based on catcher vessel catch alone and aren't necessarily reflective of where the CPs are fishing at the time. And, and therefore you see some weeks in which no catcher processor vessels are excluded from bycatch avoidance areas.

Again, we had 9 chum bycatch avoidance areas that were identified in 2025 across the B season.

And again, we also use catcher vessel data for identification of these.

This is in the report. It's just a box plot figure showing the distribution of every single vessel in our fleet. And the idea is that prior to the IPA years, you can see the extremely broad distribution of individual vessel level bycatch performance on the left-hand side. And then as you move into the post-Amendment 91, 2011, and to the present, the fleet level distribution has become incredibly homogenized, and that continues to hold true in 2025 and 2026. You'll see, um, This is another statistical representation of the same sort of effect, looking at the year prior to the implementation of Amendment 91 and the most recent year.

As you can see, the distribution of the vessel bycatch performance is just really condensed and pushed to the, the left. And in 2025, for example, all of our fleet remained within roughly a hundredth. You can see that here on this, um, basically the, the entire fleet distribution remained within 1/100th of each other in terms of bycatch performance. So it just basically demonstrates that the fleet is performing, uh, incredibly similarly in terms of where they're choosing to fish and their interactions with salmon. And so this is demonstrating our outlier provision.

We do have outlier provisions where we penalize vessels that are consistently poor performing.

We have yet to have a chronic poor performer for Chinook salmon, but our baseline metric for being a poor performer is that your bycatch rate, your season-long bycatch rate, is greater than 1.5 deviations from the mean fleet level bycatch rate.

Again, we do it by season just because of the, the very differential bycatch environments by season for Chinook in particular. So we had one outlier in the A season and one in the B season. Both were different vessels.

This is looking at the provision for chum salmon bycatch.

We again had one vessel outlier in the B season, and I believe we've only had one vessel due to timing of their fishery that has been a chronic poor performer in two consecutive B seasons for chum, and I think that occurred 2024 prior, so, but that's only occurred once.

Again, just want to highlight all the research we continue to do through the Pollack Conservation Cooperative Research Center, just highlighting a couple of the projects that we have ongoing. There's a new project looking at salmon carrying capacity and Just giving you a sense of our funding over the long term, we funded more with respect to salmon research than any other category of marine research in the last 20, 25 years.

This just highlights the Ongoing work we have with respect to gear research and development, you heard from John Govan and the ongoing EFP. Craig Rose is still continuing work on his active excluder. There is a video that probably won't play, but there was some work done in April at the flume tank to further refine this active excluder. And then again, just reminding the council and the public that we still, we still run with live feed camera systems on all of our vessels.

That's just an example of the short clip.

Hopefully the future of excluder devices.

And this is a long summary that's in the report. I won't go through everything, um, but just highlighting that there were no violations of any of the IPA bycatch avoidance rules or fishing prohibitions in 2025.

And with that, I'll take questions.

Thank you, Ms. Baker.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Mr. Estabrooks, for the presentation. I—. You may have covered this, and I'm sorry, I'm on slide 15, uh, which is the effects of the incentive plan agreement, and you did note In this particular slide, you were talking about the one outlier vessel, and I think I just— I get this question a lot, maybe from members of the public, and maybe I'm asking you to repeat yourself, but for the vessel that you did identify as an outlier, maybe in a couple of different years, can you just walk through the IPA requirements when that occurs, say in year 1, if that was 2024, just as an example, and then happens again in, in year to, like you said. Just can you remind us what the IPA requirements are for that particular outlier?

Sure. Um, so for our chum outlier program, through the chair, we're, um, we— if we identify a vessel as being an outlier in, in a season for chum, uh, they are just put on notice for that first, uh, incursion. And so I notify the entire fleet at the beginning of the season that this vessel was the outlier last season, and therefore they, they know that. And if they are an outlier in 2 consecutive seasons, then in the following season they are excluded from every bycatch avoidance area that is identified, regardless of their performance. So it's basically put in the penalty box for a season.

Yes, Mr. Pamplin. Thanks, Madam Chair, and thanks, Mr. Esbrooks, for the presentation. Kind of on a similar line, I guess, if you could go to slide 12 where you have the, the box plots and looking at the outliers that are catching Chinook at a lower bycatch rate, I'm just curious if you see skippers consistently be low, and then how are they communicating across the fleet? If that is the case.

Yeah, through the chair, yes, we do have some consistently high-performing bycatch skippers that routinely win awards, and I don't have a great explanation for why they do better than other vessels.

Other than that they might be better fishermen.

I mean, I would just hate to speculate honestly about why they're doing better, but that's my only real conclusion. And whether or not they're— I mean, is a lot of— there is certainly a lot of communication. I mean, anecdotally, if And our vessels do tend to fish in the same areas. And so I think there is communication like, "Hey, we caught, you know, 10 Chinook here. We need to leave." And the other vessel says, "Oh, we only caught 2." And then they communicate, "Well, how did you do that?

Like, how did you do that? We were side by side." And I think there is definitely communication there. And so hopefully they're figuring it out. Through about why, how and why they can perform better.

But I, yeah, I don't have a great answer.

Thanks, Madam Chair. I guess for me, I know, you know, fishermen get antsy with their secrets and their processes, but this is exactly the kind of performance we want to see. And so where there's that peer education or tips and tricks on how they're looking at their depth sounders, etc., to fish. I just, anyway, encourage you to help facilitate that conversation. Thanks.

Great.

Thank you.

Were there any other questions?

Just on, on slide 16, Mr. Asterbrooks, it looks like the cooperative is supporting a lot of ongoing salmon research. We know that there's some, obviously some, a lot of attention and challenges on salmon in Alaska right now. Wondering if you could just, you didn't really speak much to it, but could you just provide a very brief description of some of those research initiatives if you can? I'm not sure if you're prepared to speak to that. Thanks.

Sure, the first species distribution modeling of Chinook salmon, that's been something that Sabrina Garcia has been working on for some time, and the idea is to use all the tagging information that we have and try to predict distributions of Chinook salmon based on environmental drivers as well as historical bycatch records, as well as any kind of tagging data that informs Chinook salmon distributions and trying to get, you know, an understanding of when and where and why Chinook go where they go. And that would then translate into potential data products that the fleet could look at to inform when and where they're going to choose the fish and preemptively avoid Chinook salmon, as opposed to the way the rolling hotspot program works, which is to avoid salmon after you know where they're at. The second project is Econ River Norton Sound Chum Salmon Marine Ecology. This is a co-funded NPRB project by Alexey Pinchuk, and this This is just looking at, I think, some more environmental drivers of what's driving the chum salmon declines, particularly on the Yukon. And it's primarily a diet study, so they're looking at what the fish are eating and collecting samples in river on the Yukon.

Salmon carrying capacity, that is, it's a desktop look at what the scientific literature says about, broadly speaking, what the carrying capacity of salmon might be and whether or not we would be anywhere near those kinds of thresholds currently, given a lot of the hatchery production out there.

And then the last one, we're also through Dr. Clinton at UAF looking at some ichthyofaunas, the marine drivers of infection. And so basically trying to understand how salmon are contracting ichthyofaunas in the marine environment. So there's not a lot of information or understanding about how and why ichthyophthanus infections either increase or decrease and how they're getting that disease. And so that's an investigation looking more into those causes of ichthyophthanus in Chinook salmon. Great, thank you for that.

And just as far as the species distribution modeling, do you, do you have an indication of when the findings of that will be available? Oh, that, that project should be scheduled to wrap up, uh, soon. I know it was a 3-year project, uh, off the top of my head. I don't know, they might have had a 1-year extension on that too, um, but she should be wrapping up relatively in the— I mean, in the next year or two. Okay, thank you.

Yes, Ms. Cohen. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you, Mr. Asterbrooks. On the same slide, I'm curious about the funded research pie chart you have up there and just in the calculus of your thinking or your group's thinking on the council's top research priorities and then how you allocate what you're funding research towards.

Through the chair. Yeah, we are limited in the proposals that we do receive. So obviously, if we get a lot of proposals on one area, we're kind of limited in our choice there. But certainly salmon has always been the— I mean, the highest bycatch priority of our fleet, and therefore we placed, you know, high degree of importance on learning as much as we can about salmon. And, um, and then obviously as a pollock organization, I think second on the list is, is looking at pollock research and related things.

But, uh, you know, marine mammals has also been high on the list for a number of years. And then, yeah, we have But, but as you can see, we, we fund a very broad range of, of research projects through that program.

Yeah, I'm not seeing any other questions. Thank you very much. Thank you. And we appreciate receiving all of the cooperative reports. It's really informative and understanding the effectiveness of cooperative management and meeting the objectives of the council's various programs, and obviously management in regards to PSC.

So thank you very much.

I think we're ready, Dr. Hoppele, for B10. And just a reminder, this is our last oral report. So any members of the public wishing to testify, please sign up before the end of our B10 report. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair, members of the council. Good morning. Uh, Kate Hopla with council staff. I'm just here to introduce the B10 item and report for you. So, um, under the B10 item, you're going to receive a presentation from Dr. Patrick Patrick Berry with the Alaska Fishery Science Center on the salmon bycatch genetic stock composition reports.

For this, this council meeting and this year, you will receive the Chinook salmon genetics reports for the 2024 and 2025 fishing years. There are, there's one document, which is the written report, and one presentation under this agenda item, as well as the action memo. There's no action associated with the salmon bycatch genetics reports, which is somewhat different from what has occurred in recent years. Just, we've tried to align the genetics reports for you alongside the chum salmon bycatch action. So this is really informational only.

The 2024 and 2025 reports use new genetic baselines that provide greater specificity on the stock of origin for the Chinook salmon taken as bycatch from the Coastal Western Alaska Reporting Group, and Dr. Dr. Berry will spend a lot more time in his presentation going over those baselines with you. Note that the chum salmon genetics reports for the 2025 Bering Sea pollock fishery are not available at this time, but we anticipate that those will be available for you prior to the October 2025 or 2026 council meeting. Excuse me. So with that, I'll ask Dr. Berry to come on up, unless there's questions, Madam Chair.

Good morning, Madam Chair, members of the council. For the record, Patrick Berry, fisheries geneticist at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center. So yeah, today I have two presentations for you. They're pretty short, the first of which is a status update on a long-term collaborative project with the Alaska Fisheries— or the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, and the Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission. And the goal of this project was to develop a new rangewide genetic baseline for improved resolution of Chinook salmon in mixed stock fisheries.

And so we, we envision this new baseline as a genetic resource that could be broadly applicable across multiple different mixed rock fisheries along the coast. And so this is mostly a status update. This is research that's currently being, you know, it's in prep for a scientific manuscript, which will be— we will be submitting. There is no report on this that we've submitted to you because it is still undergoing a lot of peer review.

Okay, just as a reminder of the historic baseline that we've used. So here we have a map of Alaska with each circle representing one of the 172 collections that are included in that baseline. And so those, each, each of those collections were genotyped for around 40 different genetic markers or loci., and based on genetic similarities, those 172 collections were grouped into 11 distinct reporting groups that are genetically distinguishable in mixed stock fisheries, and we've reported from 2011 to 2023 on the genetic stock composition within the Bering Sea and Gulf walleye pollock fishery. And so within the Bering Sea, at least, a large proportion of the bycatch originates from this very large CWAC, or Coastal Western Alaska Group. Between 30 and 70% annually can come from that group.

And as you can see, it encompasses a very large range of populations along the coast, from the Seward Peninsula in the north through Norton Sound, including lower Yukon River, the Kuskokwim, and most of Bristol Bay. And so because it comprises a very large proportion of the bycatch in the Bering Sea, there's been a strong desire with declines recently in the, you know, along the western coast of Alaska in Chinook populations, breaking that apart so that we get a better understanding of the fishery's impact on those stocks. And so, you know, from 2011 until now, we've been trying to break this group up, and finally we have, we've kind of aggregated enough of these regional baselines and genotyped additional populations to get that ability. And so the next couple of slides, I'll go through what we've done.

So unfortunately, we couldn't create just a single genetic baseline. So to break apart coastal western Alaska, Um, so our approach really is to build a coast-wide genetic baseline with fewer genetic markers, and then a regionally specific one with a ton of markers and a lot of populations within Alaska. And so we have this coast-wide baseline as well as a regional specific one within Alaska, uh, with that ability to pull out, um, a lot of populations within western Alaska. And so by combining these two different reporting groups, we can actually arrive at around 80 different fine-scale reporting groups. We're able to aggregate those into the previous 11 ones so that we can, like, compare with the regular time series that you're used to seeing.

That's just—. That's not to say that we expect to see all of these 82 reporting groups in the bycatch. Far from that. It's unlikely that they'll all be there. And so internally, we're talking about how we're going to aggregate some of those to display to the public.

Because when you're trying to estimate really small proportions, like 1% of a very large fishery, you can start to expand to large, well, large-ish numbers for relatively small populations, which are unreasonable. And so we're trying to figure out how we may aggregate these fine-scale reporting groups to display in the future. And so hopefully by next year, when we present the 2026 results, we'll have most of this published and have a finalized baseline.

So just to review the large broad-scale genetic baseline that we've constructed. So within this we have 508 populations. So we've increased the total number of populations substantially. It's genotyped for about twice as many markers. And you can resolve— well, we can resolve 73 different reporting groups with this.

But unfortunately, like I said, we still can't break apart the coastal western Alaska component. We can do a lot better within the southern range, and so we, we envision this genetic resource to be very useful in other fisheries, such as the hake fishery that encounters some Chinook salmon in the south.

Within our regional baseline, there are 258 populations that are genotyped for 233 genetic markers or single nucleotide polymorphism SNPs. And so we can resolve 40 different reporting groups within Alaska. And so here I'll just go through some of that, some of the region within coastal western Alaska to illustrate what we envision that we're going to be able to do. And so within the Seward Peninsula, we'll be able to distinguish that from Norton Sound. In the Yukon River, we'll be able to distinguish the lower river from the Tanana and Koyukuk, and then the upper Alaska portion and the Canadian portion.

Unfortunately, we still cannot break apart, um, the lower Kuskokwim from Bristol Bay. So we envision, you know, we're always going to be reporting the Kuskokwim as well as Bristol Bay in aggregate.

And so within the northern, northeast Gulf of Alaska and southeast, we can additionally identify 7 different reporting groups, but I won't go into that too much.

So because we're using these two new baselines, we can't analyze the data the same way that we have in the past. We need to integrate against both of those baselines, and fortunately, some biometricians and geneticists at the Alaska Department of Fish and Game recently published a manuscript and created an R package that does this within the same environment that we normally analyze data. And so this is kind of an illustration of how the analysis is performed using these little fish at the top that are silver. Those represent the unknown fish within your mixture, and so those fish are in the first tier of the assignment. They're assigned to one of these three different reporting groups within the coast-wide or broad-scale baseline, and so fish that assign to the red Group A or the pink Group B, So those are, those are all estimated, and there's a, there's a regional baseline for anything that assigns to that blue group.

And so fish that are assigned to the blue group are then analyzed using the, the regional-specific baseline, so in our case, that Alaska baseline. And at the end, those results are integrated, and then you're able to preserve all the uncertainty at each of those steps. And so it's a, it's a really nice package.

It's just published and we've been going back and forth trying to figure out exactly how to parameterize it. And so this is the first time we've been using it to analyze data. And so there's a little bit of a learning curve on how to parameterize all these models to get convergence within all these these Bayesian chains. Anywho, it works, it works well. And so really happy with how things are running with both the analysis as well as our new baselines.

That being said, the baseline is still being considered for publication and the package is undergoing active development. And so So in the context of reporting for the bycatch for 2024 and 2025, what we're going to do is not use that fully expanded new baseline, but report on 13 reporting groups. So pulling apart that western Alaska component, so we'll present on both the Seward Peninsula and Norton Sound combined. We'll do the Yukon River. For Alaska, the Yukon River for Canada, and then the normal reporting groups for the North Alaska Peninsula.

Chignik and Kodiak are combined here. We have Cook Inlet, then the Copper River. The Aleut and Sitka are pulled out, and then we have the normal Southeast Alaska, British Columbia, and West Coast U.S. groups. So that's what I'm going to be presenting on today. Probably a good idea to pause here and ask if there are any questions specific to the baselines.

Yes, Ms. Kimball.

Thank you, Dr. Berry. I'm, I'm just trying to track what we would see in the future compared to what you're about to present. So is it, is it, is the focus on slide 6 where the further breakouts of the Yukon Tanaanaay Yukon-Koyukuk Yukon Lower Alaska. Those are not things we have in our 2024-2025 draft report. Correct.

But we would see it next time. Yeah, once, once it passes peer review and we're, um, we're more certain of, um, how we've tested, evaluated the baseline to arrive at, um, sufficient power to distinguish each of those groups. Um, we don't envision not being able to do this, but out of an abundance of caution and reporting to the public, we thought it prudent to report on these semi-expanded groups for this year because it is— there are some longstanding questions that can be answered with this new baseline.

Thank you. And maybe this is just further in the next presentation, so you can stop me, but we previously were looking at a breakout of— we had the middle and upper Yukon in one component, and then the Lower Yukon was in the greater CWAC aggregate, correct? Through the chair. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, so to be clear, that is correct.

So the Lower Yukon was always included in that coastal western Alaska group. So if we go back to— so this was the aggregation of collections that we used in the past. And as you can see, everything within that yellow group was part of the Coastal Western Alaska group. And so that included the Seward Peninsula and Norton Sound, as well as the lower Yukon River. And so now we're going to identify Norton Sound and Seward Peninsula by itself, the Yukon River.

So now combining the middle Yukon, which we in prior years had analyzed separately, um, and then pull out the Kuskokwim and Bristol Bay together. So those are the main differences. But, um, comparing to historical estimates, I'll re-aggregate our new baseline and use the same reporting groups so that we can see the long-term time series, so you can see fluctuations in the reporting groups that we've seen in the past.

See, that was my other question. So we would be able to compare and see trends, and the North Alaska Peninsula has never been part of CWAC. That'll continue to be its own separate group. Through the chair, correct. The North Alaska Peninsula has always been estimated separately.

Thank you. And Ms. Vanderhoeven. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Dr. Berry. I think You might have answered my question in responding to Ms. Kimball's question.

With the new baseline, um, can you apply that to older samples from previous years without having to rerun them, which seems incredibly time-consuming and ridiculously expensive, or is that really going to be a tool more for going forward?

Through the chair, that's actually a great question that comes up quite a bit. Um, So yeah, the prior baseline— the prior bycatch samples were analyzed for these 37 different genetic markers. And so we would have to re-genotype all of the samples that we've run at the 233 markers to be able to apply them to the new baseline.

Yep. Thank you. And Mr. Thum.

Thanks, Madam Chair. Dr. Berry, Along those same lines, I was curious of what— this is a great improvement, I think, over what we've had in the past in terms of the new sampling, but what's the limiting factor on getting even a finer resolution for, like, Siwak or other areas? Is it the freshwater sampling, or is there actually a change in methodology that would have to occur to actually get an even finer scale resolution? Through the chair, so finer scale than these now 40 reporting groups. So I, I envision that people are now interested in breaking apart Kuskokwim from Bristol Bay, obviously.

And so, not getting too far into the methods to design this baseline, what we ended up doing was aggregating a lot of genetic data that already existed from regionally specific baselines. And so, So you could have seen on the— our collaborators on this project span, you know, most of the West Coast. And so really what we did was we combined a bunch of different genetic resources, identified markers that were highly informative for certain areas. We then went back into sample archives that already existed to genotype all of those samples for genetic markers that were already documented. And so there was no, you know, field collections and new genetic sequencing.

We didn't use low-coverage whole genome sequencing to find new markers within the Chinook salmon genome to start separating out these populations. That's something that we have applied to chum salmon to try to break apart that species within western Alaska. But really, we went back to old, you know, old baselines and aggregated. The issue with, you know, creating a whole new baseline is that we've already done a lot of the genotyping for many of these collections. These collections are very expensive to go actually collect, flying out to coastal western Alaska and getting at least 100 fish from each of these populations.

Is an endeavor that is quite expensive. And so, you know, within the southern portion of the range for Chinook salmon, it'd probably be very difficult to replicate the baseline sampling that exists already. And so I think within coastal western Alaska, this, this Kuskokwim and Bristol Bay group, you could potentially find some markers by using, you know, new whole genome sequencing. That may be able to distinguish them, but being able to add them to these 233 SNPs that already exist would be potentially difficult. As you get these bigger and bigger marker panels, they don't work as well.

I think the upper range is generally— I've seen some that are in the maybe 500s, but we hope to get like 300 that work very well together. Yeah, that was a very long-winded answer.

Okay, thank you. I think we're ready to move on. Thanks.

Um, so the next part of the presentation, uh, reviews the, the genetic stock composition for both the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska for the 2024 and 2025 years.. And so I'll progress from the Bering Sea at first and then the Gulf, and each of the different sections pretty much mirror one another. So we've seen these time series from some of the IPA representatives where the Chinook salmon bycatch on the y-axis is displayed through time on the x from 1990 to 2025. And so they broke it down by each of the sectors So this is combining all sectors, but broken out by total, the A season in green, and the B season in blue. And so we've drawn kind of a dividing marker here in 2011 when Amendment 91 was passed.

And so pre-Amendment 91, you can see that the mean or the average Chinook salmon bycatch was around 40,000, with really high variability throughout that time period. And then post-Amendment 91, bycatch is reduced to just over 18,000 Chinook salmon, and it remains pretty low throughout that entire period. Another thing to note is that, as Mr. Esterbrook pointed out, much of the Chinook salmon bycatch occurs in the A season, and so that green line for the most part always occurs much higher than that blue line, the B season., and so when the Chinook salmon are caught can influence what stocks we see within the bycatch. And so for 2024, the overall bycatch for the Pollock fleet was about 8,000 fish, and in 2025, it was just under 20,000, which is just a little bit over the mean from 2011 to 2023.

So in addition to when the bycatch occurs, where each Chinook salmon are caught can determine which reporting group or genetic group it comes from. And so often we display the bycatch catch in the Bering Sea within these maps. And so these are the maps for the 2024 season with the A season on the left and the B season on the right. And so this is just a sum of the total Chinook salmon bycatch, all reporting groups, by ADF&G stat area. So each of those circles represents— the colored circles represent the bycatch within an ADF&G stat area.

So larger circles represent larger bycatch, smaller circles represent smaller bycatch. And so you can see some spatial differences between the A and the B season. Within the A season, much of the bycatch is constrained close to the Alaska Peninsula. Most of it's occurring in the eastern portion of the, the CVOA. There's some off the southeast edge of the Pribilof Islands, whereas in the B season it extends much further to the northwest.

And so often this is the, the spatial distribution of the bycatch because sea ice is a limiting factor on how far the, the fleet can disperse within the A season. In 2025, as Mr. Estero noted, sea ice extent in the A season was very, very little. It was at one of the lowest records, you know, in the last 20 years, I think. And so the bycatch within the A season, which was much further to the northwest than in prior years, and you can see in the B season, it's much more homogeneous along that shelf compared to the prior year. And so this may represent changes in Chinook salmon distribution from that really low sea ice.

And so next I have a couple of different tables that just display the total bycatch and their proportions for the A and B season for 2024 and 2025. And so this is, so in this column on the left are each of those genetic reporting groups now broken into our new groups. So we have the Yukon, Alaska, and Kuskokwim, Bristol Bay separated from that Western Alaska group. And so what we can see here is that, you know, the majority of the bycatch, 54%, is from that Kuskokwim, Bristol Bay group. And so really, the Yukon, Alaska is less than 1% in the AE season in 2024.

The other large stocks contributing to the bycatch in the AE season is the North Alaska Peninsula at around 34%, which is about, you know, just under 2,000 fish, and then just below that, About 7% is British Columbia, and then around 2% is Southeast Alaska, and 1% is West Coast U.S. So this is a major difference from what we have seen in the past, where the Kuskokwim and Bristol Bay have been rolled into that Western Alaska group. And so evaluating it for the A and the B season for both years shows pretty consistent trends. And so again, in 2025, in the A season, the majority of the bycatch comes from that Kuskokwim-Bristol Bay group. And so in 2025, it was about 65% of the bycatch, and because the bycatch in 2025 was substantially more than in 2024, it equates to about 9,000 fish from that reporting group.

Again, the second largest contributor to the bycatch was that North Alaska Peninsula group at around 18%, which equates to about 2,500 fish. So really consistent trends between the two years for the A season.

In the B season, things are slightly different. We see a much smaller contribution from that Kuskokwim-Bristol Bay group, group. So in the A season for— or sorry, the B season for 2024, around 37% of the bycatch is from Kuskokwim-Bristol Bay, which is around 1,000 fish, and a much smaller proportion from the North Alaska Peninsula. However, you have increased contributions from southern stocks, so British Columbia is now around 18%, and both Southeast and West Coast U.S. are at around 10%.

And again, comparing that to 2025, really consistent results. We see a much, a much smaller proportion, but here actually, sorry, in 2025, the Kuskokwim-Bristol Bay was actually 60%. We do see an increase in the southern stocks, but Kuskokwim-Bristol Bay was actually quite large. However, as noted in the report, because of the government furlough, NOAA's Fisheries Monitoring Analysis Division was unable to debrief some of the observers from late bee season trips, and so we recently received samples from the bee season, around 200, that need to be integrated into these analyses. And so we expect these estimates for the Kuskokwim Bristol Bay to be slightly high.

And so for the tech memo that will be published, all of those samples will be integrated. So I would say that these will be updated for sure in the future with nearly double the number of samples.

Yeah. One thing to note here though, in 2022, Yeah. Dr. Berry, um, Ms. Kimball has a question. Thank you. I just didn't understand that last statement.

Did— are you saying we don't have all the samples in yet, so when it's finally published, we'll have all the samples in, and we would expect some of these percentages to change in what direction? Through the chair, um, yeah, sorry, that was unclear. Um, correct, they— we do not have all of the samples from the Bering Sea bee season for 2025 only. And so we will integrate around 200 new samples for 2025 when the tech memo is published. And so when we present 2026, all of those estimates will be updated as well.

Um, and so I expect that the, uh, the Alaska stock groups to go down slightly, and the southern groups, the Southeast Alaska, British Columbia, and West Coast US to go up. Because typically we see a much larger contribution from those stocks in the B season. And so we'll see that actually in this plot here. And so this is a, a time series of both the A and the B season from 2011 to 2025. And so we've re-aggregated the collections in our new baseline to match the the prior groups.

And so here we have the Middle Yukon broken out by itself and Coastal Western Alaska, where we've aggregated the Norton Sound and Seward Peninsula and Lower Yukon into that group. And so there are a couple of things to point out here. Um, what you can see on the top in the A season is that, um, in the red is the Coastal Western Alaska group, And in the blue is the North Alaska Peninsula. They consistently comprise the largest proportion of the bycatch in the A season. There are some fluctuations through time, however, by and large, they are the largest contributing stocks to the bycatch in the A season.

Compared with the B season, The majority of the, the stocks contributing in the B season are those southern stocks, the coastal Southeast Alaska, British Columbia, and West Coast U.S. You do see in the B season in 2022 through 2024, relatively large contributions of North Alaska Peninsula. However, in 2025, it's been reduced to what we've seen historically. We do notice, though, in 2025, this kind of increase in the middle Yukon reporting group in the A season. And so we were very interested in that increase. It's a relatively minor increase, and going through the, the historic, you know, estimates we see in prior years, there have been relatively similar proportions caught.

However, with this new baseline, we now have the ability to do individual assignment of Yukon fish. We can't individually assign lower Yukon fish, we can't individually assign even Canadian, but if we combine them all, we can start to do individual assignment. And so here, what I've done is plotted the spatial distribution of fish that are very likely of Yukon River origin. And so again, we have a map of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game groundfish statistical areas with the total bycatch represented with these blue circles, but each of those red dots is an individual Yukon Chinook salmon. And so with this new baseline, we're hoping with some of the projects that were described by Mr. Esterbrooks with the spatial distribution model, we'll be able to start integrating some of these, these new analyses that we're able to perform to better understand the spatial distribution of stocks.

But one thing that is very apparent from just this exercise is that the majority of these fish occur west of 170 compared to the majority of the bycatch occurring east of it. And so there does seem to be, you know, as we start thinking about where the fleet is fishing and where some of, you know, these environmental drivers might be changing fish distributions, the pollock distribution and fishing effort, it may change the relative impact on different stocks.

So a quick summary of the Bering Sea. The majority of it consistently comes from the lower Kuskokwim-Bristol Bay and North Alaska Peninsula. There are some of those differences within the A and the B season, but because the A season bycatch is typically much larger, the lower Kuskokwim-Bristol Bay are generally going to be the, the largest contributing stocks overall., and overall it was a very similar composition to prior years despite the fact that we're using this new baseline. So it provides very good evidence that, you know, nothing really has changed by updating our baseline with new genetic markers. I guess I can stop here to make sure that there are no Bering Sea-specific questions.

Before progressing to the Gulf. Thank you. Ms. Kimball. Thank you. And I, I just wondered if the distribution slide, is that something you plan to provide on a regular basis in the report, or is that something the council would— I know that's a lot of work, and, but if we need to request that, is that something we would have to be specific about?

Through the chair, it— I didn't envision always doing it because these reports are getting pretty lengthy, And yeah, it's always a delicate balance on what we provide. But obviously in this case we saw, you know, an increase in the relative proportion of the middle Yukon group. And so it was, I think, a worthy exercise looking at it.

Will we always produce it? I think that might be— yeah, I think you'd have to ask for it.

But yeah, we'll see if a request is forthcoming.

Spoiler.

Okay, if there are any other questions, we'll progress to the GOWA. And so again, here we have Chinook salmon bycatch on the y-axis and then the the years on the x, so from 1991 through 2025 in the GOA, quite a bit more variability than the Bering Sea. Here, instead of the A and the B season, I've plotted the total bycatch of Chinook salmon, the pollock trawl-specific fishery, and then other fisheries. And so when we analyze the genetics, we're specifically analyzing the pollock fishery because they represent the majority of the Chinook catch within the Gulf, and it's about 80%. Overall, in 2024, the total bycatch of Chinook salmon was just under 26,000.

In 2025, much smaller at just over 13,000, which is similar to the long-term average. One thing to note is that in 2024, the Central Gulf was closed because they exceeded their Chinook salmon cap. And so we have some analyses specific to that that I'll present on.

Again, we display the overall distribution of the bycatch. And so here I just display both the 2024 and 2025 within those ADFNG stat areas for the Gulf. And what you can see is that you know, most of the bycatch occurs off the southeast shore of Kodiak within Shelikhof Strait, the Shumigan Islands, and some off of Yakutan, but really large catches, especially in 2024, off the southeast coast of Kodiak.

And so again, where the bycatch occurs definitely influences which of the genetic stock groups we observe.

Here we have the tables for 2024, and so very different composition within the Gulf compared to the Bering Sea. So we really don't see any of the AYK stocks. So from Seward Peninsula, Norton Sound, down to the North Alaska Peninsula, the average for those reporting groups is 0, and so really we don't see, we don't see any of those stocks within the bycatch. Predominantly, it's going to be the British Columbia, the West Coast US, and Southeast Alaska groups. So about 45% were from British Columbia, 31% from West Coast, and 20% from Southeast Alaska.

And so again, really quite large bycatch in 2024. So that equates to just under 12,000 from British Columbia, just under 8,000 from West Coast, and about 5,000 from Southeast Alaska.

In 2025, greatly reduced bycatch overall, but very similar stock composition. So again, we're seeing around you know, 47% from British Columbia, 26% from West Coast U.S., and about 21% from Southeast Alaska.

And so again, we can aggregate our new baseline. In this case, we haven't really broken out the coastal Southeast Alaska group at all, the British Columbia, or the West Coast. However, when we aggregate those those new baseline collections, they really represent kind of the same, the same trends that we have seen in prior years. So going back to about 2014 here, you can see that, you know, between 80 and 95% of the bycatch is made up of those 3 different reporting groups, really very little representation from the other reporting groups. Some from the Northwest GOA in 2019, but really it's just those 3 that we see consistently.

And so, as I mentioned, in 2024, there was a closure within the, the Central Gulf. There's a press release that was issued by the Alaska Groundfish Data Bank that describes all the events that led up to it. Basically fishermen were communicating with one another based on their catch rates. One vessel encountered a very large amount of Chinook salmon. It notified another fishing vessel that was fishing on the same aggregation of pollock.

They immediately pulled their nets such that their total bycatch in the second tow was large, and then the fleet stood down so that NOAA observers could sample and enumerate every single fish within those hauls. And so we have the ability to analyze each of those two hauls separately and then compare them to the overall bycatch in the Gulf, the Central Gulf, and then those catches off of Southeast Kodiak. And so one of the, the large primary concerns was that, um, NOAA observers noticed that many of the fish were were very similar in size, and so that there was a worry that they were all from the same cohort and potentially the same stock, and they were all swimming together. And so as we analyzed the stock composition, it was very apparent that that was not the case. It's not a single genetic group that was contributing to this single haul, but each of those lightning strikes, as they describe them, where you have dramatic increase in catch of Chinook salmon per metric ton of pollock, they were very similar in overall composition to what they were seeing within the general area.

And so it seems like, as we've seen with chum salmon in individual hauls, by the time they are old enough to overlap with the pollock fishery, they're very well mixed. And so, you know, as we compare against, you know, the— oh, GOA overall is slightly higher in composition of Southeast Alaska, Alaska relative to the Southeast Kodiak and the lightning strikes, which are on the end in red and blue. But the lightning strikes are very similar in composition for the British Columbia across the board for each of those different aggregations.

Yep.

So we have— we've done this for chum salmon in the past, and it seems to be very consistent these schools of fish are relatively homogeneous, and that stock compositions generally vary, you know, over large scales, over large time periods. And so when you compare things like Accutane versus Shelikof Strait, you might know marginal changes in the overall stock composition, but typically you don't see hotspots of an individual reporting group.

Root. And so here is just a really quick summary for Chinook salmon in the GOA. Yeah, as we've seen in the past, the majority, about 95%, comes from Southeast Alaska, British Columbia, and West Coast U.S. Really, the remainder is from the Copper— or the Cook Inlet in Copper, which is typically around 3 to 5%. And as we've seen in the past, really, there are no AYK stocks in the bycatch in the Both, um, again with the new baseline, uh, really happy to see that overall the stock composition matches prior years and indicates that everything's working as we envisioned it. Um, and so really happy going forward.

Hopefully, uh, the manuscript has passed peer review and we have some solidified reporting groups for you next year for the 2026.

And so really quickly, I'd like to acknowledge, because this is a very large, complicated sampling and analysis design, you know, we have fishery observers that are on board vessels or at shoreside processing plants that enumerate every single Chinook salmon, and they sample in the Bering Sea 1 out of 10 that are encountered., and that's now mirrored in the Gulf. So we have a complete census now of all of the Chinook salmon that are encountered in these fisheries, and we're sampling at a rate of 1 in 10. And so over, you know, 2024 and 2025, there were over 140 observers sampling nearly 18,000 different hauls. So it's a ton of work that's involved. And then, you know, the Fishery— Fisheries Monitoring and Analysis Division does a great job of debriefing all of these observers, making sure that the data that's transmitted to us is of very high quality, and then aggregated by our partners at ACFIN so that we can turn around these reports much quicker.

And then I'd like to highlight the fact that we have great collaborators at the Alaska Department of Fish and Games Gene Conservation Lab. They are super helpful in helping kind of parameterize all these models that we're using and in developing the new baseline.

Thank you very much for the report, Dr. Berry. Mr. Cicotta?

Yes, uh, thank you very much for the presentation, good chair. Um, I think I know the answer to this question. Um, I— it's my understanding that not all hatchery stocks are clipped or identified, uh, physically. Is there any way genetically to distinguish hatchery stocks from wild stocks on this analysis? Through the chair, that's actually a really great question.

So there is in many hatcheries down here, down in the southern range, it's called parental base tagging where you genetically sample each of the parents that are used as broodstock, and so if you have a sufficiently informative marker panel, when a fish returns, you can use its genetic, signature to identify its parents. So you can actually tell what brood year it came from and the parents that were used in spawning from the hatchery. That's not something that is going on within Alaska right now. So we do not do any PBT or parental-based tagging within Alaska, but it is very common down here. Many of the markers that we used in constructing this new baseline were originally developed for this parental-based tagging program, especially by the Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission.

Yep. Thank you, and Ms. Kimball. Thank you, I had the same question, but I guess we, you know, I'm glad to see the composition hasn't changed and we've continued to see 92 to 97% of the bycatch coming from West Coast, BC, Southeast Alaska, but we did at some point look at fin clips to understand, and then previous analyses that showed that the majority, vast majority, was hatchery fish. Are that— is that not a— is that not something that people are doing anymore in order to determine the hatchery component? I heard your response to Rudy, and that sounds very complicated, but we used to look at fin clips.

Through the chair, thanks for the question. No, so fish are still coded wire tagged. The coded wire tagged fish that have their adipose removed removed are still being collected. So the heads are taken off any fish that have its adipose clipped, and then those heads are transported to the Alaska Fisheries Science Center, the coded wire tags removed, and they're read. Um, there's some delay in that, and so, um, I actually got some coded wire tagged information that wasn't integrated into this presentation Mostly I wanted to confirm that when we were assigning fish using our new baseline from known stocks, so I took all of the coded wire tags from specific stocks within Southeast Alaska that had some coded wire tags, and I made sure that when we used the genetics, we could assign those fish to the reporting group they came from, and everything looked really good.

However, I don't present each of the coded wire tags that were recovered for this year just because they haven't processed them all. If that is of interest, again, the report is growing and growing, but potentially someone could write a tech memo that reviews like the history or the time series that is available for all the Coded Wire tags. But because of the turnaround now is much more rapid, I don't think there's sufficient time between getting the last heads and processing them before we report on the genetics.

Thank you. And I'm, I'm not suggesting to, to add to the report. I guess I would just put out there that if you saw something in, and in part because it's been so consistent in the, in the past. So, but if you saw something inconsistent, I guess bringing it to the council's attention would be helpful. Through the chair.

Yeah.

Thank you. And Mr. Thum.

Thank you, Madam Chair. And I could probably ask a billion questions. This is pretty cool stuff and really like the genetics work. Um, one maybe just related to Rudy's question about the, the linkage on parental-based tagging, are the samples that are taken through the Observer Program available to other researchers like in the Northwest where they could run those for PBT to track that, and is there, or could there be sharing of samples to look at further analysis? That's one question.

Through the Chair, I'm not sure as a geneticist, based on like all the confidentiality requirements with fisheries data, what the channels would be to pursue something like that. That's—. Yeah. Thank you. And then my other question related to the spatial distribution.

So I really appreciated that, the point where you put the likelihood of the Yukon fish being in certain areas. I've always actually been interested in maybe a finer scale resolution and looking at potentially like the repeated depletion of populations or smaller populations or spawning aggregations over time. And so when you look data from the West Coast, they've actually shown some genetic data where adult Chinook congregate on specific localized reefs off the coast and can be therefore differentially impacted on a given troll, you know, troll area. And based on your sampling scheme, like with the Gulf of Alaska where you're only sampling 1 in 10 fish, like, is there a way to actually start to analyze the potential for repeated population depletion of a specific stock in a specific area over time or anything like that, or disavow me of that, I guess, is the other option. Through the Chair, so there, there are some issues with identifying exactly where bycatch samples come from, especially within the shoreside fleet, because an individual boat can perform multiple different hauls and then do a delivery.

And so you, you get a genetic sample and it could come from one of up to 12 ADFNG stat areas. And so it's really hard to get really fine-scale information on the spatial distribution.

It's less of a problem when you start to look in the Bering Sea at the, the catcher vessel or the, the CPs. Because typically they do one haul, process it, and you have a very specific area from which that haul could have occurred. And so, yeah, that's my short answer is that it's harder in the Gulf and for the shoreside fleet.

Yep. Yes, Ms. Vanderhoeven. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Dr. Berry. My question's back on the Bering Sea, and don't worry, I don't need you to go back to a slide, and you may not know the answer, the new baseline when that's available, do you know if BBSRI will be able to use that for their in-season project, or if, if it'd just be something that then we'd see in the NOAA report?

Through the chair, so BBSRI's project is specific to chum salmon right now, And so we haven't developed a new one for CHUM just yet. Yeah.

Okay, I'm not seeing any other questions. I appreciate your report. Thank you.

So that brings us to public testimony.

We'll try to get through a couple testifiers before taking our mid-morning break. Looks like we have 19 people signed up. As a reminder, the public companies and individuals will have a 3-minute time limit and organizations and associations 6 minutes. There's a timer on the screen to cue you when your time is up. So we'll begin with John Henrichscheed followed by Robert Alverson.

Good morning, Madam Chair, members of the Council. My name is John Henderscheidt. I am the president of Phoenix Processor, which owns and operates the mothership Excellence. My testimony is related to Agenda Item B2, the NMFS report. We are heartened by the agency's inclusion of the Pollock Roe calculation topic in this report and want to emphasize to the Council just how important this issue is at present.

In fact, the ROE calculation issue described by the agency is symptomatic of a broader disconnect in the relevance and application of very dated regulations to our contemporary fisheries. For the Bering Sea pollock fishery, regulations promulgated prior to 1998 predate significant changes to the management and commercial realities created through passage of the American Fisheries Act. Things like sector and cooperative management of the fisheries, the use of flow scales as the principal tool for measuring total catch, and the increased value of pollock fillet and surimi products relative to the value of pollock roe.

The responsibility of our team at Phoenix Processor among other things, is to preserve the value and enhance the value of our partners' investments. And regulatory compliance is foundational to that goal, and it is one of our primary objectives in all of our operations. Unfortunately, the widening disconnects between our 20th century regulations and 21st century fisheries create the risk of distorted regulatory and enforcement outcomes and a level of compliance uncertainty that constitutes significant business risk. For these reasons, we urge the Council and the agency to make every reasonable effort to identify and resolve all these regulatory disconnects. Thank you.

Thank you very much for your testimony. Are there any questions?

Okay, yes, Ms. Kimball. Thank you, thank you, Mr. Henderschiedt. And, and you referenced the B2 report from NIMS management. Were there additional issues not outlined in that report that you're seeking clarification on, or is it— is your request just ask the agency to look at the kind of overarching regulations to ensure we're modernizing our regulations as we modernize our programs. Thank you.

Through the chair, Ms. Kimball, a couple of things. First of all, there are a few I can identify, but I would not want for the council to think that that was a full catalog of those issues. And secondly, it's important to point out that my comments are directed at the regulatory framework and application and not at the women and men who are responsible to do all this work. So this is not directed at people, but at a system.

In addition to calculation of, of, for roe retention regulations, we have run into accusations of misreporting total catch because utilizing those same product recovery rates in the regulations as a back calculation to total catch at times is grossly different from what our actual total catch is. Our recovery rates for virtually all the products that we make vary widely due to fish size, fish condition, time of year, multiple variables, none of which can be or are reflected in recovery rates in the regulations. And so any use of that regulatory framework to try to capture true total catch is, is really a fraught exercise. Secondly, um, we have heard the need to ensure that all of the numbers line up, I think was a term that we've heard from time to time. And the challenge with that is that we're generating data, we're reporting data to the agency at different times and for different purposes.

And so, for instance, we on a daily basis provide an electronic report to the agency that's called the Daily Production Report, and it's our best estimate of, what we've produced that day. In any given day, we produce about, um, 150 tons of frozen product, and that's, um, the equivalent of 6,000 to 7,000 cases of product. And so we're always accurate, but we're never absolutely precise. Um, and in fact, we have attempted to use digital means to, um, capture those numbers and have found that our people counting cases coming out of the plate freezers are more accurate. But the point is that, you know, we had a seizure of RO earlier this year because when we offloaded that RO, the number that we provided for the offload was correct, but it was about half a percent different from the sum of our daily production reports.

And so So again, utilizing one report to enforce a much different regulation or regulatory objective is challenging, and it just puts us in a situation of really not knowing truly how to comply. And so again, this is the fault of no one. This is the result of cumulative changes in our regulations and in our fisheries. But compliance is a serious issue. It's a business issue, and we can't afford to put assets at risk over lack of transparency or understanding of how, when, and why data from our fisheries is going to be used for regulatory compliance purposes.

Yes, thank you. And Mr. Kerlin. Thanks, Madam Chair. Mr. Henderson, you highlighted the information we provided on the Pollock Grow calculations, and you're aware that in our— the council's work plan, which, which has been developed in close coordination with the agency for the executive order on restoring seafood competitiveness, we've highlighted a number of areas in the regulations to update along, along these lines. I'm wondering, from your perspective, what do you see kind of the highest priorities for those updates?

Thank you, Mr. Chair. And Mr. Kerland, I'm sure that almost anyone you ask might provide a different answer to what's important. But I believe that there are some regulations that are outdated but benign in the sense that they're, they're not really resulting in, um, let's say misplaced enforcement actions or misunderstood enforcement actions. So I think that the highest priority is to ensure that the regulations as they exist at the other end of that process are as closely reflective of the way we're managing our fisheries, and in particular how we accounting for total catch, and as reflective of the operational and commercial evolution of our fisheries that have taken place over these decades, so that we are really identifying the highest, the highest levels and places of compliance risk Obviously, we want to ensure that our regulations are achieving conservation goals.

And so I think it's through that lens. Where do our regulations ensure that we're achieving conservation goals, equitable management, et cetera, as opposed to, let's say, accounting exercises. That may have no bearing really on any of the key goals and objectives that the council has.

Thanks. Thank you very much for your testimony. Thank you. So Bob Alverson is next, followed by Jacqueline Muehlbauer.

Good morning, Madam Chairman, Council members. For the record, my name is Bob Alverson. I'm representing Fishing Vessel Owners Association out of Seattle regarding the implementation of the small sablefish release action the Council took on April 5th, 2025. We've been informed, and the Council has also been informed, that this implementation of this action will not likely occur until 2028. We request the Council request assistance from National Marine Fisheries in D.C. to assist in the implementation of this, of the allowing of the release of small sablefish for the 2027 season.

As you know, the freezer longliner fleet fleet has always been allowed to release small sablefish. And as the council staff reported at the time the council took this action, only the catcher vessel fleet was required to retain small sablefish. It has been mentioned that implementation of this action will require changes to the catch accounting system and stock assessment methods. At the time the council action, the staff and the Ashming Fisheries Service staff indicated This change would not have a large effect on a new stock assessment. The report by Ian Kanucki suggested up to a 10% long-term positive impact on spawning biomass, while the staff suggested it was likely a wash.

If either opinion is accurate, there should be little risk in moving forward to separate CFR that allows the catcher vessel fleet fleet to discard small sablefish. I don't know if the council has a good idea of how big an issue this is. Last year, the National Marine Fisheries Service report to the fleet— IFQ fleet— showed 241 individual black cod vessels making deliveries between Dickson Entrance out to Dutch Harbor. That's 1,300 crew, 4 to 5 people crew per boat, 241 individual vessels. The price is up, the catch rates are excellent this year.

It's almost impossible not to have a small sablefish go overboard when you're dealing with 40,000 to 60,000 pounds in 3 to 5 days of fishing. This is problematic concern for the fleet because we're subject to fines if if we do release these small sablefish, we have the 2023 year class that is made as an uber— I call it an uber year class— and that we're seeing smalls on that are causing a problem. Pacific Council allows for the release of small sablefish, State of Alaska allows for it. I got a dry spot in my throat, sorry about that. That.

So this is a big issue. You know, yesterday we heard National Marine Fisheries Service and the council moving forward on allowing prohibited species to be made into fish meal. Frankly, that to me is— and our association is— do we, do we have nothing to do, let's get this one done? That's not a big priority. This is a big priority.

Thank you.

For at least 241 individual vessels. That concludes my comments.

Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Alverson.

See if there are any questions.

Yes, Miss Goan. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you, Mr. Alverson, for your testimony. You mentioned that the benefit to the stock of allowing this release of small sablefish, that it's either neutral to a positive. I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit more to the benefit to fishermen of allowing this small release, and if fishermen have made any investments thinking that this would be a permanent sooner.

Through the Chair, a number of our vessels have that are steel, vessels have cut into where their overflow from their tanks, um, so that they can release the small sablefish through a grate in the Pacific Council Arena and in, and in Chatham Strait. So they have these bars that they empty the, the pot in that are designed to keep, uh, say a 2-pound or more fish, and they just drop through the, into the lower deck, and the water just pushes them right overboard. So these fish are not— probably a minute and a half out of water when the pot comes up. And, uh, now, well, we're not allowed to use that in the North Pacific, so you have a crew trying to sort through all these fish at these high rates. It's just impossible.

And so from a release standpoint in the Pacific Council, um, there was a, a National Fishery Service report done quite some time ago that suggested a 16% mortality, and I think that was done on hookfish. I think there's a high, much higher probability of survival the way they're doing it off of Washington, Oregon, British Columbia with this grate system. And it's very similar to what your crab guys do when they release small crab or undersized crab. When they put it in, they go out the chute with the water from a tanked-up boat.

Thank you. Mr. Muller.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Mr. Alverson, for your testimony. I apologize in advance to ask you to speak a little bit more here, but, um, I ask that you, um, maybe elaborate a little bit on— if I heard you correctly in your, in your statement on on engaging National Marine Fisheries Service national in terms of helping to, to move this regulation along. Could you mind elaborating a little bit on how you envision that?

Through the Chair, the Council is advisory to the National Marine Fisheries Service and Commerce Department, and if you have a logjam And we understand we're not the only regulation this council has passed that hasn't moved. You got the cap, halibut cap thing in the Bering Sea, and some other issues, possibility. We've had funding issues. A lot of people leave and retire out of the National Marine Fisheries Service. If the council is passing important things and you're not getting them done in a timely fashion, I think it's fair game for the council to ask for assistance assistance from Washington, D.C. You're not asking for lobbying for more money, which is— I don't think you're allowed to.

But asking for assistance from the guys upstairs, I think, is fair game. So this assists the council to get these important regs in place in a timely fashion.

Thank you for your testimony. Thank you. Thanks for the water too.

So next up is Jacqueline Muehlbauer, followed by Linda Benken.

Good morning. My name is Jacqueline Muehlbauer. I live in Fairbanks, Alaska, and I'm currently a policy analyst there. I appreciate the time to testify today about some thoughts I have over these reports in the B section. Um, I'm here because the Bering Sea pollock fishery intercepts salmon that Interior communities are waiting on.

Those are not commercial fish. They are food. They are culture. They are the obligation this council months honor. In May 2026, the Alaska Board of Fisheries voted— voided 5 regulations that would have restricted salmon interception in the Area M fishery.

Those regulations were the product of years of advocacy by tribal and subsistence interests. They were vacated because of a state procedural failure, not because they were wrong on the merits. The adaptive management program the industry points to as a conservation success is entirely voluntary. It has no enforcement mechanism. This council has now seen twice in recent months what voluntary conservation looks like under pressure.

I ask you to draw the obvious conclusion. Second, NMFS published a 12-month finding on Gulf of Alaska Chinook salmon in May 2026, concluding that listing is not warranted. I reviewed that finding carefully. It identified environmental variability as the greatest threat to those salmon populations. It then concluded, without modeling projected climate trajectories beyond 40 years, without scoring climate as a separate risk factor, without any analysis of subsistence adequacy, and without incorporating traditional ecological knowledge, that the risk is low.

Two ESUs with fundamentally different biological profiles received identical risk scores. The observer coverage weaknesses this council manages with DAILEE are the same weaknesses that Finding relies on to catch— to call bycatch risk low. Not warranted for ESA listing is not the same as these populations are adequate for interior Alaska subsistence. Those are different standards. This council manages to a different one.

I'm asking this council to do 4 things today. Make the gear performance standards binding. Establish a mandatory in-season chum PSC trigger. Define practical, practicable under National Standard 9 to include downstream subsistence impacts, not only commercial fishing economics. Oppose any reduction in observer coverage.

Tribal consultation is a federal obligation, not a courtesy. I ask this council to confirm that Interior Alaska Tribes were formally consulted on each agenda item affecting SAM and PSE. If formal consultation does not occur, there should be an explanation as to why. Voluntary conservation has failed Interior Alaska before. It is failing right now.

I ask this council to act with the authority it has. Thank you.

Thank you very much for your testimony. See if there are any questions. Okay. Yes, Ms. Gone. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you for the testimony.

I'm wondering if you can elaborate a little bit more. You had 4 asks. First, I missed the first one, if you could repeat that, but then on your one about defining practical to cover downstream subsistence. I'm wondering if you could elaborate a little bit more on that. Yeah, thank you for the, for the question.

3 Minutes is not a lot of time. My first one was making gear performance standards binding, and then under practicable, I'm asking for the Council to come up with a definition in writing before deciding on these agenda items.

Okay. Thank you very much.

And we'll go to Linda Benken, and then we'll take our mid-morning break.

Thank you, Madam Chair, members of the council. Linda Benken testifying for Alaska Longline Fishermen's Association. My comments mostly address the NIMS report. I wanted to start by thanking NIMS and let the council know that we have successfully launched the first regional community quota entity in Southeast Alaska. NIMS approved our application earlier this past winter, also approved our new entity to purchase quota, and we have purchased quota now for 2 communities in Southeast.

We have 6 people who have applied for a transfer of eligibility certificate. Um, that means there are 6 people who will be fishing halibut from these small rural communities for the first time commercially. So it's a big win for entry level into this fishery, and I wanted to share that news with the council. Also thank the agency for moving all that through the process so quickly. We have run into one challenge I wanted to bring to the council's attention, We've had a number of people from these communities with a lot of background fishing salmon commercially who applied to fish this community quota, but because they were under 18, they are not being granted a TEC.

So I know that the agency has brought this issue before you. The council did not take action on setting a minimum age, but it's a policy the council has adopted in the interim of no one qualifying under the age of 18. Um, it's really now become a challenge for people where we have these young people who want to get involved, where we really want to be encouraging them to get involved. They're fishing from some of these communities in a small skiff right in front of town. It feels very safe.

Would like the council to consider maybe with some kind of guardian signature as being responsible for any fees or any violations, um, to allow these younger people to be part of this program. Um, I know both my kids received a TAC— TEC before 18 and purchase quota, and would like to see that opportunity offered to these young people in these communities. Um, moving on to small sablefish, I, I just will say we share Mr. Albertson's dismay about how long it's been taking. This is an issue we've first brought to the council in 2019 asking for the opportunity to release these small undersized fish. We're now hearing it won't be till 2028.

It is a big impact on the industry. We know the agency is short-staffed. Just want to call it to your attention to ask that you do anything you can to bring additional resources to the table to get that implemented sooner. I'd also note that under the cost recovery agenda item that you're taking up later, that there is an ask from the agency to address some administrative IFQ bottlenecks. We support those, but we'd like to see some of our bottlenecks addressed as well.

Of course, our first choice is small sablefish. There's one other IFQ issue I wanted to raise, which is that for decades, the opening of sablefish and halibut has been synced, so they've started on the same day at the same time. The IPHC, under the understanding that those opening dates and times were joined at the hip, moved the halibut opening to 6:00 AM. Unfortunately, it turned out in regulation only the date is tied together, so now halibut opens at 6:00, sablefish opens at noon, We have people on the grounds who are multi-species fishing that time of year since halibut are deep. By regulation, they're required to release any black cod that is caught on gear set before noon.

You have to keep track of that, and it's silly. So we're, we're driving confusion on the grounds, forcing people to release fish that are valuable and could otherwise be retained and we'd really like to see at least that one fixed in time for the 2020 season, 2027 season. Finally, just a comment on this halibut ground as fishmeal. We were surprised. We have always had the understanding that trawl-caught halibut cannot enter commerce.

We don't want to see waste, but we do think there should be a holistic review of the regulations to really clarify clarify what's okay here and, and what's not, so the public is, is well informed on that. And thanks, that's all I have, and happy to answer any questions. Thank you very much for your testimony. Yes, Miss Kimball. Thank you for your testimony, Miss Banken.

I, I was trying to track your first items on the TEC and the age restrictions, and I'm sure you recall the council passed a motion to change that. Interim policy by looking at different minimum age requirements and to allow, you know, no TEC required for those that are using CQE-derived quota. And so we've got that in the queue, very specific to your ask. So I'm trying to discern if there's a different ask or if it's just you, you still would like to see that moving. I, I think people are realizing we don't have a lot of power in moving things faster than we currently have.

Yeah, through the chair, yes, I think the exemption for CQE specifically and people under 18 is coming up in October. I'm not sure where the broader ask is. We certainly support allowing people under 18 and, you know, with some kind of signature from a guardian or parent if that's what it takes to address the sort of legal concerns or liability concerns on the part of the agency. We'd like to see both of those move forward, and I just wanted to flag that it's coming up right away in these CQE communities. Okay, that explanation helps.

I expect to see that in October. Thank you.

Yes, Ms. Gone. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you, Ms. Banken, for the testimony. Kind of building on Ms. Kimball's question, recognizing the staffing challenges we have and that the agency has, and then also the President's executive order, how would you prioritize these asks? I mean, I heard the, the CQE asked for the age, the small sablefish cost recovery housekeeping, and then the halibut sablefish making the seasons open at the same time, and then the fish meal Are there ones that are higher priority than others? Yeah, through the Chair, um, thank you for that question.

I guess, you know, we used to have a system where amendments passed and within a reasonable amount of time those amendments were implemented, and I think our sense is right now the system is just not working. I mean, there needs to be resources brought to this process, and given that there is an executive order recognizing, you know, that we want increase the competitiveness of our fisheries, that there needs to be recognition that you can't do both. You can't continue to reduce the resources available to the councils and the agency to implement them and have competitive fisheries. I mean, we are losing money in the fisheries now with the absence of the small sablefish release. We're creating other discarding issues.

With the season start date. You know, it's hard to rank them. It just seems like the system should work. I would say the industry would certainly, the people I would represent would certainly say the small sablefish release is their highest priority right now to get that in place. There was a real expectation that would be in place for 2026.

And now learning 2028, I, you know, can tell you there'll be a real ramped-up frustration over that.

Okay, not seeing any other questions. Thank you. Okay, we'll take our mid-morning break. We'll resume at 10:20 with Michael Lake. Thank you.

Council members, please come back to order.

To be resuming our meeting with our public comment on B reports.

Michael Lake is next, followed by Chad C.

Good morning, Madam Chairman. Can everybody hear me? Yes. Good morning. Thank you.

I'm going to be commenting on the NIMS report on the council's EO recommendations this morning, and I'm going to try to just blast through this thing, followed by all these— following all these articulate, great speakers. There is a couple of items— the modified minimum observer qualification requirements and the observer provider reporting requirements. I'll be addressing the minimum observer qualification requirements here in a moment. I would like to speak a little bit and quickly to the provider reporting requirements. And while we don't have a lot of heartburn with this, um, and we see that it's, it's a little bit of a loosening of the current language But what we really need and what we're looking for is full flexibility with regard to assignments, and the ability to change assignments is critical for us.

We don't have any idea necessarily on what a vessel is going to do, or their change of plans at the last minute, or whatever. And I guess the question is— and because this was done in a vacuum, I never got to ask this question before— But what really happens if in fact we provide a specific assignment for someone and then we change that out of necessity when someone arrives in the field? And that's a question later for NIMPS, and I would really appreciate some thought to that and having that answer. There's 3 other bullet points: modify the endorsement criteria to allow halls, modify the minimum sample hall requirements to obtain lead Level 2 certification and then grant the observer program authority to waive fixed-year LL2 requirements. And I'll speak to those.

The Council work plan makes no mention of the statistics requirement, though we did bring this up in our October 2024 letter. The stats requirement is a barrier to entry that restricts the pool of qualified candidates providers can consider when filling training spots. Observers do not perform statistical analysis on the job. Job, nor is a statistics background necessary to understand and apply random sampling methods. This is well established in scientific education.

Biologists routinely learn the concepts and practices of random sampling in undergraduate field courses without ever conducting any statistical analysis. The skills needed to sample effectively at sea are practical, not mathematical. Maintaining this requirement means that a meaningful number of otherwise qualified biology candidates are screened out of the program. Program, and not because they lack the aptitude, skills, or motivation to be observers. At a time when fewer biology graduates are pursuing field-oriented degrees, the practical effect of the stats requirement is to further narrow an already constrained candidate pool.

This requirement has never served a genuine purpose, and its continuation must be reexamined. Removing it would expand the pipeline of eligible candidates. With more candidates to choose from, providers could send stronger groups of new hires to training. Number 2, the council work plan does include mention of counting at-sea hake samples towards the minimum sampled haul requirements for LL2 certification, lowering the trawl vessel minimum to 60 sampled hauls. An obvious question concerns how the determination was made that none of these things could be addressed under secretarial authority.

And so, I know I'm running out of time here. What I'd really like to do is to close and urge the council and the region to give FMA the green light that you have the resources to do analysis, to move the needle, and get these things done rather than kicking the can down the road. Road. Thank you, Madam Chairman.

Thank you very much for your testimony. Let me see if there are any questions for you.

Seeing none, thank you. Perfecto. Thank you.

Chad C is up next, followed by Trent Hartell.

Chair Dabnika, members of the Council, thanks for giving me the opportunity to comment on B reports today. I will— my name is Chad See with the Freezer Longland Coalition. I will be commenting on the NIMS reports under B2 on EO actions proposed to be initiated under secretarial authority and to flag a potential matter for staff tasking tied to the Council's EO work plan. On the agency's EO report, following up on Mr. Lake's comments here, FLC supports additional NIMS engagement with observer providers on the agency's new observer reporting requirement proposal proposed under their EO report. We appreciate the agency's initiative to propose new observer reporting— propose new actions to be taken under secretarial authority to reduce the regulatory burden on observer providers.

Our fleet relies on observer providers, ensuring that we have a ready supply of lead Level 2 observers. Deployment challenges and rising costs for observer providers have a direct impact on our, our operations and our bottom line. Before the agency moves ahead with potential changes to observer reporting requirements, we'd encourage additional engagement to ensure that it meets the intent of the EO. On the council's EO work plan, we want to flag our interest as to come forward with a request of staff tasking that council schedule the initial review on lead level 2 endorsement criteria initiated by council last October. Uh, Mr. Lake, comment on some of those specific elements on that initial review here in this previous comments.

Uh, we appreciate the action by council to initiate this action. To follow— as a follow-up to its June and October 2025 motions identifying recommended actions consistent with the EO on seafood.

So the— this action reflected specific regulatory measures identified by observer providers to address long-standing challenges with lead level 2 availability and reduce the regulatory burden on providers and their fishing vessel customers like us. While the proposed observer-related measures identified for action under secretarial authority may provide some incremental help, we expect that to achieve real relief, these measures in the initial review identified— that are identified there must be considered. We appreciate the very challenging resources and time constraints that Council and the agency has with scheduling actions. However, observer providers are facing facing threats to their operations that go beyond the Level 2 availability into their ability to stay in business, frankly. Losing additional observer providers would then threaten the viability of our agency's full coverage observer program, not just for our fleet, but for all full coverage participants.

These measures may not fix that alone, but we don't believe Council can afford to wait to help find solutions to this problem. Thanks.

Thank you very much for your testimony. Are there any questions? Yes, Ms. Kimball. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. C. I'm just trying to sort through your testimony and the previous testifiers, but are you supportive of the, the couple small changes that the agency included in the discussion paper to move through the Secretarial Review Process, but highlighting the fact that the Council has already identified other observer certification changes, lead Level 2 in particular, that are on a different track and that those are important.

I'm trying to figure out what your— what that ask is. Thanks. Sure. Thanks, Ms. Kimball, for the chair. We're supportive of the first of the two new actions proposed under the EO report.

We're also not, as FLC, we're not opposed to the second one, but we're asking that given some of the concerns or uncertainties raised by the observer providers about about that second action, that there'd be some engagement by NIMS on that one before they decide to take action to move forward on that and some with some regulatory measures under secretarial authority. So that's, that's our request on that. And then on the other ones, it's our request is to, for council to schedule, put the initial review that's been initiated on the schedule for at some point in the next, on the 3 meeting outlook. So those are our two requests. Thank you.

Yep.

Thank you for your testimony. Thank you. So Trent Hartill is next, followed by Patty O'Donnell.

Good morning, Madam Chair, members of the Council. My name is Trent Hartill. I'm representing American Seafoods today. Good day. I'd like to focus my testimony on the NIMS B2 report and specifically the, the section that references the POLYCROR or PRR calculations.

Recently, one of our vessels was involved in an incident of using application of PRR calculations for ROE, and as the B2 report accurately reflects, the PRR calculations in regulation often do not reflect the actual recovery on board these vessels. I highlight this issue not to focus on one of our vessels, but to highlight the nature of applying outdated regulations in our current modern fishery management environment. Operating conditions, processing technology, management approaches, and economics of the fishery have significantly changed over the last 20 or more years, and the underlying regulations in this case do not reflect current catch accounting practices or operational practices. We support the agency's comments in the B-2 report to update and clarify these regulations and to modernize and reflect the current monitoring programs and production practices. Finally, this issue is currently relevant due to recent events, but it's likely that there are other regulations that are similarly outdated.

I encourage the council and agency to take a broad view in evaluating other regulations that are potentially outdated, ensure that there is outreach and adequate consultation with the fleet. That's all I have. Happy to answer any questions.

Thank you for your testimony. Yes, Ms. Vanderhoeven. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Mr. Hutcheson. I agree with you 100% that there are probably other regs that need some modernizing.

That's a pretty big and amorphous look considering the scope of regulations that we have. And so my question is, are you recommending that we address the, um, the ROE calculation concern, um, separately to get that moving, or to do the whole big holistic look recognizing that could really slow down the Roe issue? Through the Chair, Ms. Vanderhoeven, that's a, that's a good question. I think that we have unfortunately found ourselves in a looking through the rearview mirror situation where recent events are identifying outdated regulations that we're responding to retrospectively. It is a challenging situation to try to comb through through the expanse of federal regulations to identify, you know, specific instances that may additionally need to be evaluated.

But I think that there is a good opportunity to interface with vessel operators that engage in these regulations on a day-to-day basis to identify if there's low-hanging fruit to include. These— the PRR calculations that are identified in the NIMS report I think do represent a very clear and tangible first step that can be taken. So I, I, I want to provide the adequate flexibility for the Council and the agency to take that necessary step to address the, the current need while also being able to leave enough flexibility to include any other regulations that may also warrant that level of, of modernizing or updating.

Thank you for your testimony.

So next up is Paddy O'Donnell followed by Ernie Weiss.

Excuse me. Good morning, Madam Chair, members of the council. For the record, Paddy O'Donnell. I own the 85-foot trawler Caravel out of Kodiak. And today I want to speak about the EO 2.2 to modify trawl EM category recording requirements when transiting.

Last year I was fishing in the Western Gulf and delivering to a tender, and I went down, I went down there to fish. I put my mid-water gear on so that I wouldn't have to go all the way back to Kodiak to put it on. And as I was passing Sand Point I turned my camera on and I was probably about an hour and 15 minutes from the port to Sandpoint. And I figured, well, I'll turn it on here, right pretty, pretty close to town. And another day and a half to the grounds, or 30 hours to the grounds from Sandpoint and the Shellacoff there.

And I got a notification last week yesterday that from Office of Law Enforcement to deal with not turning the camera on in a port. And so I got to follow up with that when I get back from this meeting. So I think, you know, in dealing with this issue, I think having the camera on 2 to 4 hours prior to deploying gear is sufficient. We are being tracked by Office of Law Enforcement via VMS, so that's, that's 24/7. So I think that needs to be taken care of, and so it works for industry.

And then the other issue I have is as far as fish tickets and, and odds, uh, Trolley M and matching fish, uh, fish tickets to the odds number. We have to some way match the odds trip number with the fish ticket. The problem we have with the, uh, with the landing ID, landing report ID, is the fish tickets take a couple of days to get processed. And, and, uh, if we're doing, say, a trip a day of Pollack, which sometimes happens, uh, you don't get it in a timely fashion, and it's not in the odd system, so you can't click on the landing ID to close the trip out. And, and that's, that's problematic.

So we have to keep a personal log and try and match everything up. The other thing is the landing date. You, you estimate your landing date and you may land on a different date. You can change it in ODS, and but then when you close the trip, it reverts back to the, the original one that you estimated. So that again creates challenges and, and keeping track of the, the fish ticket and matching it up with the ODS trip number And that's all I have.

Thank you.

Thank you very much for your testimony, Mr. O'Donnell. See if there are any questions.

Yes, Miss Kimball. Thank you, Mr. O'Donnell, for your testimony. Just to be clear, were you supportive of the changes in the NIMS report as their potential solution to having the camera on during transiting, or are you supportive of a different approach? And I can, I can read that back if you don't have that in front of you.

I, I don't have it in front of you, but I, I read it a couple of days. I, I think the simpler— sorry, through the chair— I think the simpler the better as far as accommodating the fleet. So, uh, if it has to be within a couple hours of leaving town or something to that effect, that may work. But if you're leaving town in Petersburg and going to the Western Gulf to fish cod, that's a 3-4 day trip. So I mean, I, I honestly don't see the point in that.

I think making it simpler, and in, in the case, delivering to tender and then transiting to a different fishery, going from an open access odd strip— or yeah, odd strip— into an EM trip where we have the flexibility to carry both gears and go from one fishery to another fishery. And the reason I say that is, is we have boats that fish cod in the Bering Sea, and I did fish cod in the Bering Sea last year, went from there to the Western Gulf as I was out and went into the open access fishery, and then from there into the pollock fishery in, in the Gulf. And, and I had another issue this year that I'm going to follow up with enforcement when I get back, where the camera wasn't turned on. I'm not sure, I have to look at the fish ticket and, and look at my logbook that I keep to see what the particular trip that was, but I think it's an ongoing issue. And then as stated in in— as stated as to what the fix is, I don't think it's sufficient at first blush, and I only read it once.

I didn't think it was sufficient.

Okay, um, thank you very much, Mr. O'Donnell. Appreciate your testimony.

So next up is Ernie Weiss. I believe he's joining us remotely.

Can you—. Can you hear me? Yes. Madam Chair, thank you. Members of the council, for the record, my name is Ernie Weiss.

I'm the Natural Resources Director for the Aleutians East Borough. The borough is a municipal government, sits on the Alaska Peninsula—. End of the Alaska Peninsula and the eastern Aleutian Islands. Between the Western Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea and includes the fishing communities of Akutan, False Pass, Cold Bay, Nelson Lagoon, King Cove, and Sandpoint. I just wanted to, uh, talk briefly about the crab regional delivery requirements and our first year participating in a process for exemption from those requirements, specifically Bering Sea snow crab for the 2025-2026 fishing season.

The borough was not involved in the exemption process for the previous season, '24-'25. So in October '25, we were excited to hear that the processor in Akutan was gearing up to take deliveries of Bering Sea crab. This after years of no Bering Sea Aleutian Island crab processed anywhere in the borough. Uh, November 11th was when we were first contacted and found out that we would need to consider being involved in the exemption process. Very late in the game, given that we were not involved in the framework agreement or contacted, and that the preseason agreement application deadline had passed.

But nevertheless, the borough staff worked to learn as much as we could about the process, including seeking legal counsel from a fishery attorney. And one month later, on December 11th, the borough assembly adopted Resolution 2625, 5, authorizing the mayor to negotiate and execute an agreement between the City of Saint Paul and the borough for collecting and remitting taxes on Northern Region Designated and Central Bering Sea Fishermen Association's share Bering Sea snow crab delivered Nakatan in 2026. So then January 9th of this year, we had a signed memorandum of agreement with the City of Saint We believe this process has been beneficial for all the communities as well as the harvesters and processors. At this time, the Bureau administration is expecting to recommend participation in the process in the future if the situation warrants an exemption from regional delivery requirements. The decision to participate in the exemption process was a tough one for some assembly members that represent some of our suffering communities.

Hard to, for some to justify sending fish tax outside the borough when, for example, the city of King Cove has lost processing of all crab and fish and the associated revenue for more than 2 years. But the members do now have a better understanding of the regional delivery requirements and how this process has benefited all participants. And now that we've been through the process once, we feel better prepared in case there's another need. We, again, we feel the emergency relief process has worked, is working, and does not need amending at this time, especially with all that the council has on their plate and considering the significant workload NIMS Alaska Region is facing. The borough will continue to support crab harvesters, processors, and all Bering Sea crab communities.

We support the current current emergency relief program that allows exemption from crab regional delivery requirements. Um, and I, since I have 2 minutes, I just wanted to respond to previous testimony that mentioned the Board of Fish and the area salmon fishing fishery, just to note that the adaptive management program our fishermen have been employing for over 3 years to limit chum salmon harvest in June, the program is working to conserve all chum common. You just need to look at the facts and the science. And with that, thank you for the opportunity to share our views, and I'm happy to answer any questions. Thank you for your testimony, Mr. Weiss.

Yes, Miss Gohan has a question. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you, Mr. Weiss. Just a clarification, so I didn't hear a specific ask in there regarding emergency relief. Is that correct? No, no ask.

Uh, It, again, it was a confusing process for us being late to the game, but we think it's working fine and no, no need for changes in our opinion.

Thank you for your testimony.

Next up is Glenn Merrill, followed by Dr. Jim Simon.

Thank you, Madam Chair, members of the Council. My name is Glenn Merrill, representing Glacier Fish Company, and today I'll be speaking concerning B2, specifically the comments by NMFS on the EO for seafood competitiveness. I'd like to align myself with other testifiers who have noted that we have a number of outdated regulations that definitely need additional revision. Specifically, I wanted to highlight a few issues. Product recovery rates were established based on idealized studies that were conducted in the 1990s and 1980s.

Those idealized studies of production are not reflective of our production today. Product transfer reports were put in place in— under Amendment 16 for the Bering Sea Aleutian Islands FMP, again, that's not the world that we live in today. They were put in place in order to help track deliveries to foreign trampers for at-sea transfers. That's not how we operate now. We operate now with robust flow scales, at-sea reporting, VMS, cameras, extensive monitoring and tracking.

I think this is important as we look at these issues for seafood competitiveness to ensure that as these regulations are examined old regulations were established under a different era. We are highlighting the way that we operate currently. I think a few revisions could be made in those particular regulations that would be greatly advantageous to us. First, in terms of the PRRs, I think getting clarity that these are estimates of production on a daily basis is important for us to understand. I think the second thing that's important to understand as well, as you've heard from previous testifiers, is that there always will be with thousands and thousands of cases on a large trip, some misalignment between the final product transfer report and what is estimated on a daily basis.

Fish are moving, this is at sea, it is complicated, there are errors that can occur in boxing. All of those things need to be considered. At the end of the day, the most important thing though to consider is that this is not how we track our catch. We track our catch using FlowScale.

All these issues, I think, can be addressed in a specific motion on these issues. But I do think that we need to highlight the need to have a continuous process of reviewing some of these older regulations. It is difficult, as an exchange between council members and a previous testifier have indicated, to identify every single regulation that is problematic at this time. But providing an opportunity for us to continue to work collaboratively with you, the council, enforcement, to make sure that we are improving regulations moving forward, I think, I think is very much in the spirit of the executive order and something that we strongly support. Thank you for your time.

Happy to take any questions. Thank you very much for your testimony. See if there are any questions.

Seeing none, thank you.

So, Dr. Jim Simon is next, followed by Therese Vicente.

Good morning, Madam Chair and council members. Thank you for this opportunity to speak today on agenda item B10, um, the Chinook bycatch genetics report from the Bering Sea pollock fishery. Please see the attached written comments associated with my testimony, as I'll only provide a quick overview in my oral testimony. My name is Jim Simon, and I'm the policy director for the Yukon River Intertribal Fish Commission. We represent 44 tribal and First Nation Natives, governments whose people depend on Yukon River salmon for food, culture, and the health of our communities.

Our mission is to be a unified voice to conserve and restore all Yukon River salmon stocks and to co-steward these fish from gravel to gravel using our Indigenous knowledge and practices. The preliminary report by Dr. Barry and colleagues on the genetic origins of Chinook salmon bycatch in the Bering Sea pollock trawl fishery is deeply alarming to us. The data show that when you look at the stocks as a group, Chinook from the Yukon River, both Alaskan and Canadian origin, together with the Kuskokwim/Bristol Bay group, accounted for about half of the Pollock fisheries Chinook bycatch in 2024 and over 70% in 2025. In other words, most of the Chinook being caught as bycatch are from stocks already in conservation crisis, including Yukon River Chinook that our people have been asked to forego for years No. To understand why this is so serious, I want to briefly describe conditions on the Yukon.

Chinook, summer chum, fall chum, and coho salmon have all steeply declined. Escapement goals for Chinook, summer chum, and fall chum in U.S. waters have not been met in multiple recent years, including 2021 through 2025, and the United States has failed to meet its treaty obligations with Canada for Chinook and fall chum. Um, commercial, sport, personal use, and even priority subsistence fisheries have been severely restricted and in many cases fully closed, and the loss of commercial opportunity alone has been estimated at $1.4 million a year based on past Chinook and summer chum sales. On the ground, that means our communities have had little to no harvestable salmon surplus since at at least 2021. The very limited harvest opportunities for non-salmon in 2025 did not come close to meeting subsistence needs.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Games Division of Subsistence reported at the AYK Board of Fish meetings this past winter that from 2021 to 2024, the average salmon harvest was only about 10,900 pounds per Lower Yukon community, community, and about 1,450 pounds per upper Yukon community, representing tens of thousands of pounds of lost food per community compared to earlier research. Yukon River salmon loss is not just a fisheries management problem, it is a whole community crisis. Our families face severe food insecurity, and the multi-year, multi-species crash threatens a total collapse of the ecosystems that our Indigenous ways of life depend Climate and environmental change, warmer water, disease, marine interception and bycatch, and unsustainable management all layer together to undermine our food and economic security, our sharing networks, our cultures, and our physical and mental health. Against this backdrop, the new genetic bycatch information takes on even greater importance. The United States has committed under Chapter 8 of the Pacific Salmon Treaty to endeavor to reduce marine interception and bycatch so the Canadian-origin Chinook and fall chum can pass through U.S. waters into Canada.

In 2024, because of the extreme collapse of Yukon Chinook, and the U.S. agreed to stand down from all directed Chinook fishing in the Yukon River at least through 2030 or until 71,000 Chinook pass into Canada. That decision, which did not involve any consultation with our member tribes has imposed real hardship on Alaska and Yukon River communities, but recent assessments on Kwanlin Dunn First Nation spawning grounds near Whitehorse are documenting increasing Chinook presence on the spawning grounds in 2024 and 2025 due to the fishing moratorium in Alaska waters.

Historically, from 1981 to 2021, Yukon River Chinook run averaged nearly 292,000 fish.

From 2022 to 2025, the average total return was just over 48,000, a decline of more than 80%. The 2026 outlook remains bleak, with projected Canadian border passage expected to fall far short, around 75% short, of the 71,000 fish needed simply to resume subsistence fishing in Alaska on any har— available harvestable surplus. Above the 71,000 border passage requirement. At the same time, the new genetics data show an increasing trend in Chinook taken as prohibited species catch in the Pollock fishery, with 2025 producing the highest proportions of Yukon-origin Chinook bycatch on record, as I understand it. This is unacceptable when our communities are sacrificing so much in river.

This is also very alarming given the extremely low production and returns of Yukon River Chinook stocks, as the bycatch numbers of Yukon River Chinook stocks would likely have been much greater if our stocks were not in such disastrous condition. The principles of weak stock management should apply to avoid all direct and incidental fishing impacts on Yukon River-bound Chinook and chum salmon. For these reasons, the Yukon River Intertribal Fish Commission urges the council to take additional concrete steps to reduce Chinook bycatch in the Bering Sea midwater pollock— pollock trawl fishery. Doing so is essential to meet the United States' obligations under the Pacific Salmon Treaty and to rebuilding Yukon River salmon stocks that support our communities, our cultures, and our ecosystems. Finally, we'd like to thank you for your February decision to establish a chum salmon cap.

Thank you. Thank you very much for your testimony, Dr. Simon. I'll see if there are any questions.

Yes, Miss Gohan. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you, Dr. Simon. And you may have mentioned it and I may have missed it, but what is your ask of the council under— I heard your concern over what you saw in the Chinook report, but what is your ask? Is there an action that you're asking for? Yeah, we recognize, you know, the being short-staffed, you know, having so much on staff's plate, etc., but We basically want to bring up the fact that it's probably time to start thinking about some additional actions to conserve and reduce— further reduce bycatch of Chinook salmon.

Thank you.

Thank you very much for your testimony.

So Therese Vicente is up next, followed by Heather McCarty and Mateo Pazaldán.

Good morning, members of the council. Good to see you all. My name is Therese Vicente. I am the Policy and Programs Director for the Kuskokwim River Intertribal Fish Commission. I live full-time out in Bethel, Alaska.

The Fish Commission works to support the federally recognized tribes of the Kuskokwim River Watershed in salmon management, research, and monitoring as guided by our tribes' Alaska Native knowledge and values, as well as the best available Western science.

So for B reports, there's a couple things we wish to speak to, and the Kuskokwim Fish Commission wishes to first echo our partners on the Yukon and raise a massive massive red flag about the B10 Chinook genetics reports. It is incredibly alarming that the new genetic baseline and the genetic studies presented by Dr. Barry this morning show that Chinook salmon from the Kuskokwim and Bristol Bay stocks comprise nearly 50% of the 2024 Chinook bycatch in the Bering Sea pollock fishery, and over 60% last year. When you add in Yukon stocks, as Dr. Simon said, the 2025 proportions are nearly 70% from our rivers. Meanwhile, in 2024 and 2025, Kuskokwim subsistence fisheries were closed for the majority of the Chinook salmon fishing season in order to allow enough spawners to pass to meet escapement goals, which is the highest priority of the state of Alaska salmon management, and it's a principal target of our tribal federal co-management important in our strategy to rebuild stock abundance in our region. Amounts reasonably necessary for subsistence for Kuskokwim Chinook salmon were not met in either year, and in fact, they have not been met since 2010.

It is further immensely concerning that the overall proportion of at-risk Seawax stocks in the annual Chinook salmon bycatch has generally been increasing since 2017.

As Dr. Simon mentioned, this council has just wrapped up an extensive process to review chum salmon bycatch management measures, and you all repeatedly heard that every salmon counts. And that became part of the rationale around this table for recommending new regulatory chum salmon bycatch management measures to the agency, even while there was extensive acknowledgement that Western Alaska chum salmon stocks compose about 1/5 of overall Chum bycatch. So there ought to be extreme concern then at the high proportion of Western Alaska Chinook stocks, especially as they continue to be so depressed, leaving subsistence-dependent communities unable to feed, support, and sustain themselves from their own backyards. The Kuskokwim Fish Commission would like to know what the council will do in response to the new genetic baseline and understanding that the majority of Chinook bycatch in the Pollock fleet has come from the Kuskokwim River in Bristol Bay, our tribes urge you and the industry to take action to reduce this waste, waste in a way that is meaningful to our salmon restoration efforts.

Additionally, the Kuskokwim Fish Commission is concerned about and opposed to the federal agency's approval of processors turning bycatch catch into supposedly low-value products like fishmeal and fish oil, as noted in Item B.2. For one thing, without chum salmon genetic analyses across the North Pacific, it's unclear to us whether Western Alaska chum salmon bycatch are included in these products. But more critically, this seems like a loophole that allows industry to profit from bycatch, and that seems fundamentally out of compliance with the definition of prohibited species catch as non-target fish that are harvested but not sold.

Finally, the Fish Commission notes that the Pollock IPA and bycatch avoidance reports shared in item B9 are detailed reports of industry activities that our tribes and residents of our region are keen to hear and discuss with the pollock industry. However, they get buried in this council process, and they can also be opaque to non-industry folks and people who are not following this on a day-to-day or month-to-month this. It came up at the council's February meeting that alongside clear and meaningful regulations, an important component of accountability and transparency in the pollock trawl fishery is regular communication to tribes, tribal organizations, and communities affected by trawl operations. And in fact, increasing communications and reporting to Kuskokwim from residents and other, other communities of Salmon People became part of this council's recommendations for final action on new IPA requirements for chum salmon bycatch avoidance. So our Fish Commission would like to see these communications begin now as a critical step towards accountability in the fleet's operations.

We would like to have the council encourage industry to share and present on their reports directly to our tribes, our tribal organizations, our Salmon People in our region outside of this council process. And we are available to help facilitate the sharing of these reports with Kuskokwim River Tribes and residents. We welcome encouragement from the council to the IPA co-op managers to be in touch with our organization to do so. And with that, I'll thank you for your time. Thank you very much for your testimony.

See if there are any questions. Yes, Ms. Kimball. Thank you for your testimony, Ms. Vincente. I— on the last point, I think that's something that you've brought up to the council previously and obviously was included in the final CHUM action. So have you tried to reach out to request those kinds of presentations, or are you saying that that wasn't fruitful and so you really need the council to make some statements about how productive that might be in terms of providing the same information or a presentation to people in your group.

Yeah, thank you, Ms. Kimball. Through the Chair, we were in touch with industry towards final action on chum salmon bycatch, and it had— I mentioned it during our, you know, conversations with industry leaders and with the co-op managers that, hey, I, you know, your reports, it'd be really helpful for you to share those with our people. You could hop on our local radio station when we have our summer fish talk, you know, you could share, in different meetings outside of this process. Um, I have not followed up on that, so thank you for calling my attention to that, and I could do so. Um, but I do think it emphasizes, um, or adds extra emphasis to the industry when the council encourages the industry to do so.

Um, and I, I'm not exactly sure if it's your role to, you know, direct industry to do things, but you've, you've taken, um, efforts in the past to ask industry to come back with more information or to do this or that. And so So I think it could be helpful for the council to, you know, ask the industry to make an effort now, even while those chum bycatch regulations are not yet in effect, to start those chains of communication, just start the dialogue amongst our fishermen, because I think that is a really important, not the only part of accountability, but a really important part of it. So hopefully that helps. It does. Thank you.

Okay, thank you very much for your testimony. So next up is Heather McCarty and Mateo Pasaldan, followed by Wes Jones.

Good morning, Madam Chair, council members. I'm Heather McCarty from Central Bering Sea Fishermen's Association. And Mateo Pazoldán for the City of Saint Paul. We're going to address, Madam Chair, our letter to the council under B reports. As you know, CBSFA is invested in both harvesting and processing quota in the crab rationalization program.

We own and operate crab vessels, but perhaps our larger investment is in processing quota. We're the third largest owner of crab processing quota in the Bering Sea in aggregate. By regulation, we also represent the community of St. Paul as the ECO, the Eligible Crab Community Organization. We're truly all three legs of the stool, as the crab program has been characterized and has operated since its inception. First, we'd like to say that we recognize the challenges that both the Council and the agency face with the losses of resource and capability.

These are desperate times, but we've been around long enough to know that the Council process has been the pride of the nation and NIMS an example of responsive public service and cutting-edge transparent science and observation. We appreciate your efforts to continue that excellence in the face of these challenges. Changes. Second, we want specifically to thank the Council and NIMS for the focus on the concerns we had with the Emergency Relief from Regional Delivery Requirements program that we brought to you last December. We did have a crab industry meeting with NIMS in late February, as the Council asked.

As this is the first Council meeting since then, we assumed there would be a mention of this meeting in the NIMS report, and that's why we submitted our letter under B report. Wards. As NIMS made very clear at that meeting, it was not about policy. It was not the anticipated forum that we had hoped for, for discussion of improvements to the process, but rather how we might work more efficiently within the current emergency relief framework. It was also clear that some of the issues with the program could only be remedied by regulatory action, hence our letter.

Rather than repeat all we said in that letter, I'll talk a bit about the crab program in general and then be more specific about what we have suggested as helpful changes to the crab program overall and specifically to the emergency relief program. What we hope to do is illustrate to the Council that the crab program could be a poster child in the Council's quest for more flexible fishery management programs, ones that have the ability to respond effectively to ongoing changes in the environment, the ocean of the ocean and its fishery resources, changes that lead to changes in the economics of both the harvesting and processing of those resources and to the communities that depend on crab. As we discussed here during the Science Centre presentation yesterday, economic analysis is an important component of the Council process and invaluable in determining the effects of the management programs you put in place. St. Paul was one of the principal architects of the crab rationalization program. That was just before my time, time, but Matteo was with St. Paul during his development.

It's unique in its explicit community protection elements and also unique among rationalization programs in that includes processor ownership of quota. This was so unusual that it took congressional action to allow it. Because of this inclusion of both harvester and processor quota, the management program includes a relatively elaborate system designed to assure an equitable balance of benefits between harvesters and processors, including annual share matching, development of ex-vessel price, a price formula, and the availability of binding arbitration. In other words, the crab program includes significant, significant regulatory involvement in the economics of the crab industry. In this aspect, the crab program is quite different from other rationalized management programs.

And we have tried to make clear in our letter, ocean conditions can lead to low snow and king crab resource availability, which seems to be ongoing, which could lead to lower tax continuing, which lead to higher costs per unit for both processors and harvesters, which in combination with other rising costs can lead to loss or lack of processing capacity in one or both management regions, both the north and the south, all of which can lead to devastating losses to the crab-dependent communities and boroughs. And thus, This leads to the use of the emergency relief process with consideration of compensation for losses. As you can see from our letter, we would like to see a recognition of these economic realities within the CRAB program. An annual regulatory process to deal with price and other economic issues is already in place, and with some modification, as we suggested in the letter, it could include a more robust analytical element that could lead to more responsive management. Our position at CBSFA is tenuous.

With custom processing costs double what they were a few years ago, which is not reflected in the price formula, it is possible that if low tax continue in the next season, we may not apply for our snow crab IPQ. As the Council has heard in the testimony on binding arbitration, other processors, quota holders, could be in the same position. What is very clear also is that instead of just one processor sector, there has developed a subsector of processor quota holders who are dependent on processors with plants operating. That includes most of the CDQ groups and their, their investment in the crab program. Another emerging factor that affects the economics of the program: patches won't work if the program fails.

Similarly, since the emergency relief process is not designed to equitably handle this situation, it may fail as well. We'd like to see a more streamlined and durable process expressly designed to deal with low tax impacts and loss of processing capacity based on economic conditions. In our letter, we make some detailed suggestions. I'm happy to talk about them. Would be pleased for the council to at least have that discussion.

And in the very short time I have left, I can say that the red king crab hatchery that was mentioned yesterday is a project associated with CBSFA and Trident, the University of Alaska, ADF&G, BSFRF. I am the co-PI of that project with Dr. Ginny Ecker, and the Alaska Fisheries Development Foundation. And the temporary permit we are operating under for this year is in the name of a subsidiary of CBSFA. We are in the process of applying for the permanent hatchery permit, which will be held by BSFRF. And I hope that people ask questions so I can tell you a little bit more about it.

And Matteo, I'm hoping, Madam Chair, that you allow him time since we came up together.

Do you have a couple statements that you have to make? Sure, I will abridge this as much as I can. Thank you, Madam Chair. First of all, I wanted to thank previous testifier Ernie Wise for his comments about our respective communities' willingness to work together on this matter in the future. That is very much appreciated and certainly reassuring to the City of Saint Paul.

From our vantage point, we are standing in, in the council's large shoes the best way we can to address with this problem— address this problem. We are protecting the interests of the three legs of this stool and trying to balance the national standards, including providing for the sustained participation of communities under NSA. And that's not just Saint Paul, uh, the Sioux could be on the other communities foot in the future. And we're also taking into account the well-being of tribal members under NS4 and striving for optimum yield under very difficult circumstances. The original purpose and needs statement for this tool, for this emergency relief tool, was very clear and was premised on events that would prevent delivery by crab harvesters into a harbor, not on the current problem of low tax and associated processing capacity issues.

Um, well, to conclude, it feels like we are using a hammer to put in screws into a wood beam. As you all know, it can be done, but at some point the beam will crack and break. Thank you, Madam Chair. One more thing, if I may. We'd like to thank Mr. Tsukada for his service on the council and his work with the CDQ program.

We very much appreciated, Rudy, your accessibility and your contributions to the process. Will be For sure.

Thank you both for your testimony. I'll see if there are any questions. Yes, Ms. Baker.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you both for your testimony. And, uh, sorry, Ms. McCarty, I'm going to actually ask you about the regional delivery exemption rather than the crab hatchery. But, um, darn. So For the 4-year letter and proposing some changes to the crab rationalization program regional delivery exemption, because that is one of the lesser regulated components, it's, it's of the crab rationalization program, I think many of us around the table lack familiarity with the details of how that works, so I'm going to try to keep my question out of those details and just ask a basic— my impression of the current regional delivery exemption framework agreement is that it is very flexible in terms of what, what can be agreed to, because it's, it's the certain provisions of the agreements are not regulated.

It's essentially subject to negotiation of the parties. Are the changes that you're proposing— would they make it less flexible in terms— and more regulated, I guess, is the really basic question that I have, just so for some of us around the table to really just try to— because I grapple with that in terms of more regulation usually means less flexibility, but sometimes that's appropriate. Can you help me with that?

Madam Chair, Ms. Baker, I don't know if I can help you because I have the same back and forth, you know. Um, I think Matteo very well said what the main problem is, and that is this was a tool that was developed for an entirely different set of emergency circumstances. And knowing that, and knowing that the problem statement for the development of this program, the emergency relief program, was designed in a completely different circumstance and condition in the crab industry. It did not imagine that it would be dealing with the economics of the crab industry. And I think if something recurs over and over again in what we're saying, it's economics, economics, economics.

It was about ice when it was developed. It was about potential for storms and things cutting out the ability to use a certain port. It wasn't dealing with the economics.

And yes, it would be more regulatory with our suggestions. It would be. Because what we see is that there needs to be a different trigger for the for the use of emergency relief, as you saw in the letter. I didn't go into all of that in this testimony, but the problem now is low tax, the economics resulting from that, and the inability of processors in some cases to operate in whatever community because of those economics. And so there needs to be a really clear trigger that starts the emergency relief process with the understanding that it's all about that economic problem.

And that hasn't been talked about enough. It's a problem that we think may continue. We don't know. It's very unpredictable. And the other thing is— and this gets into sort of sensitive territory in a way, because as you said, it's open to negotiation every time.

There is no sort of framework other than we have this sort of loose crab committee that is made up of all the stakeholders, communities, processors, and harvester representatives. And I think as St. Paul, we've been sort of leading the way on that because in the past, or currently, we have sort of the most to lose in St. Paul. And so we've wanted to make that process work as smoothly as possible. And frankly to recompense the community of St. Paul for the losses that are going to be clear to everyone with no crab processing there. And so we're in kind of the weird position of being a party to that negotiation, but also trying to sort of honcho this whole program because there isn't any regulatory, um, person or entity that is doing it.

It's just us. And while there are advantages to that and some flexibility, it also can be divisive, frankly. Um, you know, and we found some of that this last go-round. There was some divisiveness amongst the communities, which is the very last thing that we all want in tough times when everybody's suffering so much in the Bering Sea. And I think that if there were more clear boundaries and more clear goals, and frankly, a clearer problem statement that we could address, it might provide a less divisive and a less difficult and lengthy sort of negotiating issue.

And so we're in that position not because we want to be, but because we just are. And so So yeah, I mean, we'd love it if somebody would sort of say, okay, we'll run this thing, you know, we'll take care of this, we'll be the facilitator, but we don't have anybody like that. Everybody that's involved is a stakeholder and thus a party to the negotiation, and it's just an awkward situation, especially when it's a tool that's not really designed regulatorily to be used for these purposes. I hope that helps. Can I take a crack at that?

I'll be brief. So the Amendment 41 regulation states that each applicant must certify— it's not, you know, optional— each applicant must certify through an affidavit that the applicant has entered into a framework agreement that spells out a number of conditions, specifies the actions the parties will take to reduce the need for an amount of an exemption, specifies the actions that the parties would take to mitigate the effects of an exemption, specifies the compensation, if any, that the party would provide to any other party. So one problem with that is that NIMS has said they don't need to certify or verify whether these conditions are met. All they need is an affidavit signature saying that's good. So, you know, there could be problems down the road when there are disagreements among the parties over what's required in the exemption contract, but there's nobody on top, you know, there's no authority supervising, for lack of a better term.

The second component is that the compensation that was envisioned 20 years ago was compensatory deliveries. That's what we really focused And so a lot of the provisions in the framework agreement were designed, first of all, to mitigate, to avoid the need for compensation. And that was achieved through reserve pool among harvesters and through the co-ops. And that was, and that worked really well. I mean, we had a few ice situations in those years and the co-ops figured it out.

And so what we did was we did in-season deliveries. You know, if the St. Paul shut down for a few weeks, they'd go south. South, then ICE left and the deliveries were made in the north. So that's how we addressed that. Right now we're doing it— what we're doing is tax agreements among communities, and that's a whole other world.

I mean, we're making it work and there's a willingness to do that, and again, thanks Frank and Ernie and their communities for all the work they've put into this. But that— and that involves state tax authorities. That's another realm. But we're making it work because that's what the council has requested, and we understand the situation the council's in. We would simply appreciate guidance and maybe some, some, some framework to the de facto understandings, the de facto way we are working things out.

And it seems to— there seems to be improvement even from last season. Again, we heard Ernie's comments for Lucian C. Spiro. So that's a step forward. You know, can we sustain this into the future for 5 to 10 years? We'll see, right?

But I think it would be helpful to have a framework that keeps in mind the national standards. We're trying to do it on the fly as communities, respecting all these national standards. But if we had a framework that kept, you know, that was consistent with those standards to approach this new situation, that would be certainly for St. Paul very helpful and reassuring.

Yes, Ms. Kimball. Thank you. I mean, I guess I question the need for the federal government to get more involved in that agreement. Setting up the agreement as an option in regulations means it did go through the process to determine that it was consistent with national standards. But is what you're looking for is an agency doing more than just verification through affidavit that those types of components were included?

We do a lot of things, or they do, through affidavit, so that's not an unusual circumstance. Or is it to be more involved in the basic terms of— and I'm going from your letter— compensation among communities? Because I don't think we have that authority, or the agency has that authority to get involved in the taxing authority, like you mentioned. So I'm trying to nail down, like, where's the value add? And I, if you already just explained it in that other, I can just absorb and think about it.

But I really am trying to see what else the agency you think would bring to the table. And in part because the framework agreement, well, it might not have been created for this circumstance. It is being used in this circumstance. It is being allowed to be used in this circumstance. So I'm just seeing where you think the value out of the agency is in particular.

Do you want to? Sure. Yeah. If, you know, I could rub the genie's lamp and ask for what I wish for, we need a new regulation or a modified regulation that includes a problem statement, a new problem statement. And a new set of criteria for a framework agreement based on that problem statement.

And then the agency can just sign off on the affidavit as it does on other things, but we need, we need clearer boundaries to the situation that we're facing now, understanding that the tax part of it is perhaps out of this body's hands, but there are other aspects that could, would benefit from greater clarity. And the participants that would be part of that, you know, new framework or modified framework. May I? And so, Madam Chair, Ms. Kimball, I think you bring up good points. We're not asking for more agency oversight.

We're asking for a remedy for the problem that exists now, not a remedy that's been manipulated to try to address the problem we have now. The Framework Agreement was rewritten when we first used this 2 years ago to reflect the circumstances that we now face. But the Framework Agreement is not regulatory in its content. It's only required regulatorily to be participated in by everyone who might wish to use the exemption process during the season. It's a pre-season agreement, and we had to completely rewrite it.

And, you know, the council didn't see that. Um, it just happened because we were told that we needed to use this tool, which we had available, and it made sense to use we were in a situation where we didn't have time to develop another one, basically. And so, what we're asking is that there be a discussion, a discussion paper probably, about how a new regulatory process could be put in place to address the problems that we currently are having, not one that's being twisted and manipulated and made to work framework. For some, you know, it just, it's not, the tool is not created to solve the problems that we're trying to solve now on an annual basis. I like the flexibility of the idea that people can join the framework agreement or not.

The reason, you know, the Aleutians East Borough was not part of the framework agreement discussion was because we didn't know at that time really what was going to happen. And so As soon as we did, we included them in that discussion. So, you know, it's just a— it's an unwieldy and difficult tool for stakeholders to use when there's no real regulatory boundaries and goals that have been laid out because it wasn't meant to be used in this way. I don't know how many or any other way that we can say that.

Thank you. Thank you both for your testimony. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you.

You can see me in the hall on hatchery stuff.

Wes Jones up next, followed by Duncan Fields. I think Wes is joining us remotely. Yeah. Yes. Good morning.

I'm Wes Jones. I'm the NSCDC quota manager. Thank you for the opportunity to provide a comment on agenda item B2. Under the CDQ program, the Pacific cod allocation is not further allocated by season, providing groups the flexibility to use it across gear types. Peacod is an important species for both direct and indirect harvest by the— for the sector.

While there is no seasonal allocation, there are seasonal limits by gear type, making allocations schemes challenging and inevitably leading to underutilized quota. In many cases, they are more restrictive for the CDQ sector than the non-CDQ sectors. The CDQ sector has been considering the potential benefits of removing the seasonal apportionment restrictions on the PCOD allocation. The elimination of seasonal apportions would clarify the current regulation outlined in Amendment 85. B5, providing the sector with greater flexibility and potentially improving utilization, therefore meeting the objectives of the executive order.

Analyzing of this idea is likely to be requested by others in the sector during the staff tasking, but it is also germane to B2. Thank you for your time. Thank you very much for your testimony, Mr. Jones. I'll see if there are any questions.

Questions? Seeing none, thank you for joining us.

Duncan Fields is up next, followed by Peggy Parker.

Madam Chair, members of the council, I'm going to take off my Fisher's Advocate hat and talk to you as a member of the Kodiak Island Borough School District School Board. Board with regard to PSC use within feeding programs such as the Seashare program, and follow up on Hannah's comments yesterday. Real-life situation, we've been working with Seashare for a couple of years with regard to obtaining fish for the program for our lunch— lunches— Kodiak Island School District. Um, I was flabbergasted to hear from Hannah that because a few of our students pay for their lunches, there is concern about use of PSC in our school lunch program. The program is subsidized by about half a million dollars annually by the Kodiak Island Borough School District.

The amount of money that the kids pay in terms of the cost of their program is de minimis. Most of the students, particularly in our remote locations, are 100% free lunches. Nevertheless, there's a chilling environment throughout the industry, and it's impacted the C-Share program with regard to how PSC can be used and what constitutes entering into the stream of commerce. So my comments are simply to encourage and further motivate the agency and the council to clarify how PSC can be used for the general public good in situations like school lunch programs. And there must be a host of other programs.

My mind kind of spins out in terms of how far stream of commerce could go if a recipient a recipient of C-Share pays freight, is that stream of commerce? If a recipient of C-Share pays labor to unload the food, is that stream of commerce? And your imaginations can start to go down the stream. Let's solve this problem. Let's solve it sooner rather than later.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you very much, Mr. Fields. I'll see if there are any questions for you.

Okay, seeing none, thank you for your testimony.

Peggy Parker is up next, followed by Loretta Brown.

Can you put your microphone on, please?

Good morning, Madam Chair, members of the Council. My name is Peggy Parker. I'm the Executive Director of the Halibut Association of North America.

Our members are processors in Alaska, British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon who are first buyers and processors of Pacific halibut. We have worked since 1961 to create and hold a market that regards halibut as the premium seafood that it is. Excuse me. We have collaborated with universities on quality issues and have worked closely with the IPHC and with the Council in their management processes. As a group, we value sustainability and precautionary principles in the face of uncertainty.

It is with this in mind we want to provide some feedback on Pacific halibut prohibit species catch being allowed to be processed and sold as fishmeal, an issue discussed under agenda item B2. Allowing processors to use PSC as a donation to a fishmeal plant, which will use it as a commodity to be sold in global commerce, is not good policy and not good management. We support and request a full review of this current practice this and the potential for its expansion. It is important that we have a full review so we know exactly what and how much PSC is being used for this product, the state of the halibut when it is harvested, where it is taken from, and how the product is ultimately distributed. We support— excuse me, we're not distracted by the amount of halibut PSC being tiny.

Sorry, my computer crashed just before this, but I've— it's come back. Thank you, God. Um, we're not distracted by the amount of halibut in PSE— halibut PSE being tiny compared to the groundfish caught, or of fishermen being paid so little or nothing that it doesn't matter. What doesn't matter is if the PSE is donated by every single link in the supply chain If it is sold once, it is a violation of a long-held protection that Pacific halibut may not be harvested by trawl gear and sold into any market. As I said in my letter, we really support SeaShare.

We think it's a great program, very happy that halibut is included in it. It is not sold in that program. Uh, we understand that a large, perhaps majority percentage of this PSC is sublegal or under 32 for the directed— 32 inches. We know the Gulf of Alaska is home to many areas that are important for recruitment to nearly all regulatory areas for the IPHC. In recent years, for the first time in decades, we've had successive years of no recruitment and no obvious explanation for it.

The council routinely measures PSC by how efficient the trawl gear is. PS, how many kilos per metric ton of harvested groundfish. This is not a true picture of sustainability. It is helpful to assess the cost of prosecuting a groundfish fishery and comparing which groundfish gear is more efficient than the other.

It is informative in a small way to the financial impacts of the larger fishery, but it says nothing about the sustainability of C. The council can look at this differently in these analysis— analyses. It can use the halibut PSC catch as a percentage of the TCEY, total constant exploitation yield, analogous to a recommended TAC in that, um, do this in that IPHC regulatory area. To do that correctly, there needs to be a separation of sizes. What is legal what is legal and what is sublegal. As looked at by the Director of Fishery, the IPHC uses U-26 and O-26.

That's all I have to say on this. Uh, thank you very much for the opportunity to testify, and I'm happy to take some questions.

Thank you. Uh, Ms. Vanderhoeven. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Ms. Parker. Um, I guess maybe I'm a little I'm a little confused.

My understanding is that we're only talking about vessels who are participating in trawl EM and are therefore required to bring that PSC back to the dock to be fully accounted for. So they are already dead when they come in, and so the choice is to either they're, if they're not food grade and don't qualify for SeaShare, they can either go to Fishmeal or they can be taken back out to sea and dumped dead there. And it's a pretty small amount, and I know you said the de minimis amount doesn't matter, and so I wasn't tracking with your comments because these, these fish are already dead, so not contributing back to the stock. And so I'm, I'm not sure what I'm missing and, and why it's a problem. Thank you.

Through the chair, Ms. Vanderhoeven, I'm sorry I wasn't clear on that. Um, taking them out to sea does not require selling them. Uh, giving them to a fishmeal plant does require selling them at some point along the road of them being processed into fishmeal. I think what I'm asking is you broaden the frame a bit, I find myself shockingly in alignment with, um, some of the people who have testified already today— Glenn Merrill, uh, one of them— that there needs to be a bigger look at how regulations can impact current usage. This use in the fish meal plant is not has not happened for a really long time.

It is happening now. I don't know how long it's happened. Again, I say it's not important that it's a small amount. It needs to not happen. If the fishmeal will sell— fishmeal is going up every month for the past 6 months.

It's gone, um, up about $600 a ton, $600 a metric ton.

Fish meal is the best of the best. It's got the highest protein. Plant meal doesn't do it. The customers are aquaculture, the aquaculture industry, which is a very fast-growing industry globally. So this may be looked at as a We've got these two competing regulations.

One is halibut can't be caught by trawl and then sold. And the other is that these fishermen are required to bring it in no matter what it is, including halibut. I don't have the answer, but I think that we should not try to have a quick fix on this. I think we should take some time and figure out exactly what's at stake here. I've done and, you know, ask some questions and try to do a little bit of due diligence.

And I found there's more— that more questions than there are answers for this. So, so that's what I'm asking, is to take a little longer look than just tweak some regulations, if that was what was considered. Thank you. Yes, Mr. Ritchie. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you for your testimony. Um, I guess I'm a little confused on your comments about U-26 and O-26, um, bycatch with how— but I think that information is available in IPHC reports and things. But are you asking that that information be readily available in reports that the council and, and this process receives as well? Thank you, Mr. Ritchie. Through the chair, I don't know if I'm asking that.

It would be great if we could have that. My understanding is that, um, as I said in my testimony, the Gulf of Alaska is— has been considered a source for recruitment. My understanding has been that much of what is delivered to the processors that they cannot use, they offer it to Seashare, and sure can't use it because it is such small fish.

So I don't have— I barely have a correlation there. I definitely don't have a causation. But we haven't seen recruitment for 5 or 6 years in the halibut resource.

So that's why I say whatever we can learn, we can use. I think it would be important to learn as much as we can. And if If that's not being done by the agency, that's fine for IPHC to do it. Thank you. Thank you for your testimony.

Thank you. So Loretta Brown will be our last testifier, and she's joining us remotely.

Hello, can you hear me okay? Yes, we can. Hello. Excellent. Thank you.

For the record, my name is Loretta Brown, and I am testifying today on behalf of Salmon State. Salmon State is Alaska-based conservation effort. We live and work throughout Alaska. We work alongside Alaska Native groups, commercial fishing entities, and sport fishing groups to keep Alaska a place wild salmon and the people who depend on them thrive.

Thank you for the opportunity to comment in front of you this morning. We all have a very long meeting ahead of us, so I'll keep my comments pretty brief. G'wif. I want to testify on two B report topics this morning. First, first off, Salmon State supports those comments and requests put forward to you this morning by both the Kuskokwim River Intertribal Fish Commission and the Yukon River Intertribal Fish Commission regarding B10, the Chinook bycatch reports, genetic reports.

In addition to that, I also would like to point out that those reports were not posted on the E agenda until after written public comments were due, and that made it impossible for interested parties to submit meaningful comments for your consideration. So I would just like to ask that in, in the future that reports are made available so that the public can meaningfully comment on them ahead of the meeting. Second, I'd like to speak to the use and disposition of the prohibited species catch as fishmeal that is sold. Salmon State submitted written comments on this issue under B2, our North Pacific ecosystem is in crisis. Chinook salmon, chum salmon, halibut, and crab have all experienced significant population crashes.

Subsistence users, small boat commercial fisheries, and sport fish operations have all either been closed or under severe restrictions for all of the Chinook, all of them, Chinook, chum, crab, and halibut. For the last 5 years, and in some cases even over a decade, These same species, Chinook, chum, crab, and halibut, as well as herring, make up the PSC species. Any disposition of bycatch that includes any of these species should not result in any revenue generation. While it may seem convenient for processors to grind this bycatch and sell it as fishmeal for farm fish food, this is a slippery slope and opens the door for revenue generation from the sale of bycatch, while those that depend on those species for food security and livelihoods are standing down. I urge the Council to request a full review of the PSC catch and all commercial transactions associated with it.

The subsequent report emerging from this review and any proposed regulatory changes should undergo a rigorous public review process. Thanks.

Thank you for your testimony. Are there any questions?

Seeing none, thank you again.

So that'll take us to, I think, a good time to break for lunch. Um, we will have our SSC reports right after lunch, and then we'll circle back to see if council members would like to take any action or if there's further discussion needed on our B reports before moving into C1. 1. So we'll come back at noon and begin with our SSC report. Thank you.

At 1, sorry, I was looking at my Alaska computer here. So yeah, well, everyone hurry up. Got 3 minutes.

Council members, please come back to order.

Welcome back from lunch, everyone. So we will be beginning this afternoon with our SSC report. Then we'll circle back and see if the Council would like to take any action or have any additional conversation on the B reports in totality, and then we will move on to our C1 agenda item. Welcome.

Good afternoon, council members. For the record, Ian Stewart, and I have with me co-chairs of the SSC, Dr. Sherri Dressel and Dr. Jason Gasper., and we'll be presenting, presenting to you the SSC report in full.

The SSC began its meeting with an administrative discussion. We received a report on these items from council staff. Ms. Henry highlighted that the SSC will be recommending groundfish specifications in both October, in both the October and December meetings. We note that we are following the standard process for review, but have an additionally heavy load this year given the events of last year. The SSC wanted to express its deep gratitude for Maria Davis, noting her many years of work, and wish her well in her retirement.

In our executive session, the SSC also discussed membership needs. And noting that we are currently at 18 out of 20 potential seats, uh, we request the Council consider filling at least one position for 2027 and possibly two. The SSC recommends that should the Council choose to do so, the priority would be on the following: first, an expert in stock assessment, statistical design, or modern statistical modeling methods; and second, either an expert social scientist with background in anthropology, sociology, human geography, or related field, or an expert with experience in climate, ecosystem, and generally broad integrated thinking.

We—. For our next item was C2, Bering Sea and Aleutian Island crab harvest specifications. We had two stocks docs that were our standard harvest specifications, a number of proposed model runs, and a crab plan team report that covered a variety of different topics. I'll take these in, in roughly that order in this presentation. The SSC begins by thanking the outgoing crab plan team co-chair, Dr. Mike Litzell, for his work as co-chair of the crab plan team, and the SSC supports filling that co-chair position as quickly as possible acknowledging that if another co-chair can't be found fairly quickly, this will provide— have a significant impact on the crab plan team's capacity and ability to get the variety of things done that they need to tackle in each meeting.

The SSC was also briefed on potential for collaboration between the crab plan team and the scallop plan team and supported them working together specifically to provide technical review for the scallop stock assessment, noting that there would be, could be various approaches that, that could make this work. The, we noted that the Western Aleutian Island red king crab assessment has been postponed until 2027 due to capacity constraints.

The first stock that we took for full specifications was the Aleutian Islands golden king crab assessment. This was a full assessment assessment. We recommend the— we support the author and the crab plan team's recommendation for Model 26.0A. We—. This— that puts this stock in Tier 3B, making it not overfished, and the overfishing determination will be done in October.

We supported the crab plan team's recommended OFL and the 25% ABC buffer, which was unchanged from the previous Alutian Islands golden assessment. We noted that the rationale for having this 25% buffer includes a reliance on fishery CPUE. There is no fishery-independent survey for this stock that's currently used in the assessment. There are retrospective patterns in the assessment. There are limitations to the spatial coverage.

And in addition, this year there was a convergence issue for the Western Aleutian model.

We had— we generally supported the research recommendations made by the crab plan team. In addition, we recommended developing or at least considering area-specific risk accounting, noting that there are some different trends in these two different areas in the eastern and the western areas. We recommended investigating the source of the convergence issues that came up in the western evolution golden model this year, as well as continuing to develop a draft risk table framework for this stock, as, and as you'll see for all crab stocks.

We also had a number of technical recommendations that I won't read out here, but you can see them on the slide in our report.

The next specifications stock that we looked at was Pribilof Island's golden king crab. This is a triennial assessment last conducted in 2023. The, this stock relies on the mature male biomass estimate from the Eastern Bering Sea Slope Survey.

This uses a slightly different approach than some. It's a blend of the Tier 4 and Tier 5 calculations. It's more similar to a Tier 5 groundfish analysis. Based on this approach, the SSC determined that overfishing, or the SSC recommends that overfishing did not occur and the overfished status cannot be determined at this tier level. We support this Tier 5 calculation for the OFL in agreement with the crab plan team and the author.

For this stock, along with the crab plan team and the author, we recommended a 30% APC buffer, which represents an increase from the 25% used in the last SOC assessment, and the rationale for that increased buffer included the fact that it's been 10 years since there's been any new data collected on the primary survey that feeds into this assessment, and that leads— and that and the sparse nature of that survey time series leads to about a third of the information being interpolated values, and also following the recommendations of the crab plan team who had discussion about making evaluation of the buffer more consistent with other crab stocks.

Also for Pribilof Islands Golden, we note that we— the SSC is looking forward to the Eastern Bering Sea bottom trawl survey modernization efforts, which will hopefully add back stations to the upper continental slope, which could overlap with the area for golden king crab and actually provide some new data for this stock.

Moving then into model runs, the first species that we looked at model runs for was snow crab. This is an annual stock assessment. It has previously been done in Tier 3 with a length-structured model. However, last year we— the SSC recommended recommended a Tier 4 model due to instability in the Tier 3 approach and challenges with that model framework. This year, a number of different models were brought forward to try and address the stability and convergence issues, but these had limited success.

Therefore, the SSC recommends that the authors bring forward just the Tier 4 model for this October. The idea behind this was to give the new author time to explore the model structure more before the 2027 cycle starts, to focus on developing a simpler, more stable model before adding back complexity. And we had a few recommendations to add a convergence diagnostic section, to continue to develop a yield per recruit analysis, and we also asked for a rebuilding update section in, in this fall and in future documents.

The next species we took model runs for was Tanner crab. So the Eastern Bering Sea Tanner crab assessment is done annually under Tier 3, and the last full stock assessment was in 2025. We received a briefing on a number of different models and recommended the following models come forward: the current model, which had some improved maturity data workflow as well as updates updated survey and fishery data that will be available for this fall. We also requested to see a matching GMAX model, which would, could potentially move this assessment into a framework that's closer to what's being used for most of the other crab stocks. And we would also like to see the Tier 4 fallback calculation, as we've been provided in, in recent years.

Following the request for these these two main models to be brought forward, the SSC requests that we'd like to see a bridging table comparing the differences as these two models are lined up across a range of different things. Generally, these models are providing very similar results. However, there was a difference in the OFL calculation, and the SSC requested that that be resolved and reconciled technically. And so we look forward to the results of that effort. We also noted that there's going to be a CAE review this June for this stock assessment, and we requested that we see a summary of that, that CAE review, both from the author and the responses, as well as the report from the CAE itself.

And generally, the SSC supports the crab plan team recommendation that the treatment of maturity considered across both the Tanner and the snow crab assessments and included— the treatment of that be included in the future January crab planting modeling workshops. Again, just to try to provide consistency across the Chionectes species.

The next stock that we had proposed model runs for was the Bristol Bay red king crab stock. Excuse me, Dr. Stewart, question, Ms. Gowan.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you for the presentation. I'm curious if the SSC had discussion on the treatment of hybrids between the Tanner and snow crab stock assessment models and what to do with the hybrid population of crab between those. Through the chair, Ms. Gowan, yes, we did, and I think maybe I'll hold until I get to a slide— I have a slide on the hybrid topic. If I don't answer your questions there, please ask.

So further on Bristol Bay Red, this is an annual assessment done under Tier 3, the last full assessment being last year. The SSC supported the crab plan team and the author's recommendations to bring forward 3 models.

The SSC had some technical recommendations, um, for this model, and there were a number of changes made that we supported. These recommendations included reconsidering the molding probability matrix in light of some changes that have been made in the proposed model this year. We continue to recommend the, the development of model-based indices, which could allow for for some insight into the abundance in the Northern District for the stock. Consideration of differences between the survey and fishery CPUE metrics. There's further work to do on selectivity and catchability.

And then another recurrent recommendation the SSC has had is to continue to work toward treating the Bering Sea Fisheries Research Foundation data, which is available for all three of snow crab, Tanner and Bristol Bay red is to find a common framework so that can be analyzed in a similar manner and treated in a similar way in these, these 3 assessments, because the data all come from the same set of experiments.

The next model runs were from Norton Sound red king crab. This is a Tier 4 stock, again assessed annually, with the previous assessment last year. This utilizes a size-structured male-only GMAX model. The SSC was very pleased with the work that was done on this stock assessment. There were a number of improvements made.

We recommend— we recommended several models that reflected all the work that was done for the proposed model runs to come forward and really see some progress being made here and some potential for model development in this cycle.

We did have a few requests. These included looking at the sensitivity of the index, the newly created model-based index, and the reference points from the stock assessment to the choice of the prediction area being used. This has been a longstanding challenge where several datasets overlap in different ways in this area, with the long-term goal being to reconcile those all over the appropriate spatial area in one analysis. And the author made a lot of progress on this this The second was mainly a question to explore whether the treatment of depth in this model could possibly be soaking up some of the difference between the surveys. So that was more of a— just a question to understand how the standardization was working.

And then also a request to reconcile conflicting model selection metrics, as in many cases there's not necessarily always a clear winner among competing models, and this was another way for us to evaluate that. Evaluate the relative merits of different approaches to analyzing these data. But we did support the crab plan team recommendation to evaluate this model-based index both with and without depth as a covariate. So again, lots of progress on this assessment.

I think the last set of model runs we saw was for St. Matthew blue king crab. This is a Tier 4 stock, again, a set, assessed biannually, with the previous assessment 2 years ago. The SSC recommended 3 models to come forward, again, in agreement with the crab plan team and the authors. We did ask for additional information on the model-based index that would be brought forward in a final document to allow us to select between these 3 models, and generally, we supported the crab plan team's research priorities for this stock. Again, this is another case where there was a lot evaluation done on creating a model-based index to evaluate the survey data in this area, which is fairly sparse, and the SSC was pleased to see the progress here.

Okay, we'll now— I'll get into the balance of the crab planting report. We saw a number of different topics. Some were presented to us and some we commented on from the report. We definitely appreciated and support the work to create a set of SAFE guidelines or to streamline the information and, and provide guidelines for the assessment authors for setting crab specifications such that it'll be easier to look in these assessments and extract the same information quickly out of all the assessments and see the same types of products. We supported the work that was done to support the ESPs.

In particular the development of dynamic structural equation modeling, which sounds complicated and is, but is actually a very intuitive way to think about trying to figure out which parts of the ecosystem are affecting others and how those could be operating at the same time. It's a very forward-looking technique to, to reconcile a number of different things at the same time.

We had some recommendations following the crab plan team's guidance on snow crab size at maturity. We appreciated getting the research updates on what's been done. We highlight that the high exploitation rate for large males in directed fisheries can create a feedback loop that results in declining male size at maturity. We—. And we recommended that the crab plan team consider the parallels with the management approach taken in Eastern Canada on this topic?

With regard to risk tables, the crab plan team—. Sorry, Dr. Stewart. Mr. Pamplin. Thanks, Madam Chair. Could you just explain a little bit about the parallels with the management approach taken in Eastern Canada?

What is that? What are you referring to there? Chair, thanks.

Yes, through the Chair, thank you for the question, Mr. Pamplin.

So there's a snow crab stock in eastern Canada, and it has definitely has some similarities to the stock in the eastern Bering Sea. We noted that there, there could, could be areas where the management in Canada is taking into consideration the cyclical nature of size at maturity, in that there seems to be large swings in the proportion of males maturing at different sizes. And this is not new. Both the author and the crab plan team have noted these parallels in the— potentially in the biology, and I think our recommendation here was mainly to see whether there was anything we could learn from the management approach there that might help us better understand the feedback that we, we could be seeing here in the Bering Sea. So with regard to risk tables, the crab plan team spent a considerable effort further developing their approach to risk tables.

This has been— this is an iterative process that took us several years with groundfish, and we we're well into it with the crab plan team, they proposed a tiered approach where instead of, for groundfish, we have just one set of entries in the risk table, for the crab plan team proposed that they have a two-tiered approach where they have one set of entries that describe the persistent sources of uncertainty that are generally related to the buffers that are applied on a year-after-year basis for crab, and then to have a second section of the risk table that describes the temporary concerns that would be things that would come and go, more similar to what we would see in the groundfish risk tables.

The SSC supported this proposed approach for risk tables for the Bering Sea crab stocks. We noted that there may be refinements needed and that this is something that, as we did for groundfish, we may have to feel our way as we go through this process. Process, but we did feel that it was time for the authors to bring a full set of risk tables forward for each stock. So we did make the request that the next time we see each assessment, it should be paired with a, with a risk table. And I think that this format that the crab plan team has proposed will provide us a pretty standardized way to look at those tables and begin to use the risk table approach more similarly for crab as we have for groundfish.

English. And now getting to the hybrid topic, the crab plan team again had considerable discussion and we heard about that from them. Their recommendations from the crab plan team were that the hybrid catch data should not be included in either the snow crab or the Tanner crab assessment at this time. The SSC agreed with that, and also— but also agreed that hybrid abundance needs to be tracked. And we found that we would be able to see that information through the presentation from the Eastern Bering Sea Bottom Trawl Survey and the associated tech memo, and that was the identified pathway to get this information into the process.

And we noted that the uncertainties associated with hybrids should or could be dealt with using the existing flexibility in the FMP by the buffer setting process, similar to what was done last year, I guess.

Further on hybrids, the SSC did recommend some additional research. The first is just continued research into the biology of hybrids, better understanding the dynamics of hybrids, the parent population, snow and Tanner crab, the genetics, the life history information, all of this, there's more to study on hybrids. The SSC also encouraged continued communication to align how hybrids are defined across agencies and data streams. We did note some differences in the way they're classified between state observers and federal surveys, and we noted that this, this different approach to hybrids can create some challenges in trying to make these data streams consistent.

We, and so although we support the basically the current approach moving forward, we did note that if hybrid abundance continues to be high, that we may need to reconsider this approach and reevaluate. We did see some sensitivity runs in both of these stock assessments that indicated that it—. The—. That hybrids weren't having a large effect on the stock assessments for Tanner or Snow at this time.

Okay, moving then out of C2, our next agenda item was C3, our scallop harvest specifications. We reviewed the full assessment for scallops, the last one being 2 years ago. We recommended the FMP-specified OFL, which is based on historical catch from 1990s along with the ABC, and this is consistent with the author and scallop plan team's recommendation. The ABC in this case is 90% of that OFL and set equal to the maximum ABC. Overfished status is not available, and overfishing was not— we did not recommend that overfishing occurred.

The SSC agrees with the scallop plan team that we should move this assessment into a triennial cycle. So we anticipate not seeing this assessment again for 3 years.

We recommend that the current assessment approach is appropriate for scallops, but we did support the continued development of a model-based approach, which we did not have time to review the technical detail for at this meeting, as resources allow. As I mentioned earlier in— under the crab plan team, we do support support some sort of a joint approach between the crab plan team and the scallop plan team in order to provide adequate technical review for the scallop process.

And finally, the SSC suggests that the scallop plan team might consider exploring the potential to draw assistance from other areas, namely the Northeast Fishery Management Council's scallop plan team, with a large amount of potential pool of experience and expertise there to draw from.

Yes, Ms. Gordon. Thank you, Madam Chair. I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit more to what you envision here. Like, do you envision blending the crab and scallop plan team into one plan team, or just leaning on the crab plan team expertise. Through the Chair, Ms. Gowan, thanks for the question.

I don't think the SSC had a specific recommendation for logistically how this would work. We just note that the crab plan team has the technical expertise to potentially help the scallop plan team with that review. And the, the big gap in our— in the process now is just the scallop plan team not being able to provide that full technical review review. And that's critically important because, for example, in this meeting, the SSC was unable to review the full technical document associated with the assessment that's in development because we were lacking that layer before the SSC.

Dr. Dressel.

Through the chair. Through the chair, Ms. Gohan. Uh, yeah, and I agree with everything that, um, Dr. Stewart said. The only specification I think that we included in our minutes— obviously we need the technical review, but because scallop biology is so different, um, as, um, Ian expressed, we did note that in the review process it would be helpful to have we think it's actually critical to have some SCALOP expertise involved. And so the SSC didn't feel that it was our position to recommend how council committees are formed.

And so as the council chooses whether this is emerging, whether— how this is done, we were leaving that piece to the council. We were just trying to identify that we did not disagree be with having the crab plan team help out to give some technical review as long as there was some scallop expertise involved somehow.

Okay, the next item that the SSC took up was C5, the goa tanner crab protection measures, for initial review. The SSC commends the work of the analyst to make the document organized and approachable. There was a lot of material in this document, and we did discuss a number of ways to continue to improve the clarity of this document in the future. The bottom line is that the SSC finds that this initial review analysis was not sufficient to inform the Council for final action at this time. And so we provided a number of recommendations to help them move toward that that.

The SSC notes that this portion of the Tanner crab stock is linked, is persistently linked to the habitat and the specific location that were, that was discussed here, and this makes the potential for fixed closures an appropriate conservation tool in contrast to some cases where the environment is highly dynamic dynamic, and the utility of a fixed closure might not be as clear. So we did identify that as somewhat unique in this example.

The SSC— we provided a number of recommendations to improve the analysis. We recommended clarification of the objectives around Alternative 2 closures. In particular, there— we were unclear if preserving the structure and function of the habitat was an actual objective of this analysis or if it was more related to reducing observed or unobserved mortality. We discussed whether this action was anticipated to improve the Tanner crab stocks overall across their, their range in this area or in just in this localized action area. So we asked for some clarification on, on both of those We also recommended a number of analytical improvements.

The first, and this is probably the most important, was the development of quantitative effort displacement scenarios. So essentially looking at if effort was moved out of the closure area, where would it go and what would happen when it got there? What would the effects be? And those effects could be not only on Tanner crab, but also on PSC and groundfish. So we recommended that the analyst draw on local and traditional knowledge to inform likely behavior, and then that they frame this— these displacement scenarios in the form of a retrospective analysis.

So looking back to see, had this— had a particular closure option been in place, what would its effect have been in recent years as a way to, to better evaluate this? This is similar to what was done in recent Council analyses to evaluate Bristol Bay red king crab closures. As part of this, we recommended at least two cases, one being a worst-case scenario where the effort would be displaced to immediately adjacent areas, which at least according to the information that we saw, might actually produce higher PSC rates. And then also a most plausible scenario, which would again be based on the local and traditional knowledge to see where are people likely to go, as well as based on the historical distribution of fishing effort in this area, noting that the distribution of fishing effort, particularly for tanner crab, has been highly dynamic in this area.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Dr. Stewart, for the presentation. I— forgive me, I haven't had a chance to read the full report on this item, and I appreciate the reference for this recommendation for displacement analysis referencing the action for Bristol Bay red king crab closures. I honestly can't remember if the SSC reviewed, uh, the initial review analysis for the chum salmon bycatch action, which also had, um, for one of the alternatives, a sort of modeling scenario like this to try and figure out displacement? And did the SSC have any discussion in this particular agenda item— I really am going to limit my question— relative to some of the challenges that have been encountered with those analyses if there is no displacement effort in the most plausible scenario to use.

Did, did you talk about that at all, or was this just a recommendation that from an analytical perspective this would be good to have?

I'm gonna— I, I do not recall us having a specific discussion about that, but I'll defer to my co-chairs. Maybe one of them remembers.

Through the chair, Ms. Baker.

So we did, we did review the initial, an initial review of the CHUM analysis, um, and the analyst did explain to us that there was not much information discussion. But my understanding of the discussion was that the way that it was described by one of the leads, the SSC leads, was that it seemed like the description that they were talking about was actually a bit simpler than a full-blown analysis like for the Bristol Bay red king crab. I don't know how explicit that was in our minutes. But I know that we did hear, I know that we did hear that there wasn't a ton of information, and that could be why two scenarios specifically were picked out. And I remember the SSC member saying to the analyst of using even their judgment, they mentioned areas, areas of high, areas of high effort, and so it was using their qualitative information to make some choices, but I remember my understanding was that it was a bit simpler than what we've seen in those other— that in the Bristol Bay red king crab analysis.

Yeah, through the chair, Ms. Baker, maybe just to add a little bit based on my recollection and some of the points that we'll discuss later, there was discussion about the datasets datasets that were available to look at this information. We do have some recommendations in regard to use of those datasets, so we'll get to that.

And just generally, you know, the analyst conveyed in the document that there was certainly a limited amount of information to do this.

Thank you.

Thank you. And on the same slide, and hearing the reference back to the Bristol Bay red king crab analysis, my recollection from that analysis was that it didn't have an equally robust analysis of the potential benefits to the crab fishermen. So it looked at the impacts to— of displacing the groundfish fleet, but not necessarily the benefits of the action to the crab fishermen.. So I'm wondering in this recommendation that you put forward, is this just looking at the impacts to the groundfish fleet, or would it also look at the potential benefits to the Tanner fleet?

Through the Chair, Ms. Gowan. Yes, I think we did have some discussion about trying to align these scenarios so that all of the metrics that were being looked at would be consistent across the scenario. So I think it It would include whatever sources of benefit and effect on other species would be lined up so the social impacts, the ecological impacts, and the fishery impacts would all be framed around the same scenarios.

Thank you, and two more questions, but they're on earlier slides. The slide before, Oh, is it much earlier? Because I think we have some other questions. Okay. It's, um, okay, go ahead, Tanner.

So the slide before, um, your second bullet there where it says unclear if preserving structure and function of habitat or reducing observed and unobserved mortality. I'm wondering if that or is intentional or if it could be an and/or, or is it, is it only an or that you're envisioning there?

Through the chair, Ms. Gowan, I believe that was just just a— it could be an and/or. We were just noting that there are multiple potential objectives, and we weren't clear which ones were the most important or should be included in the list. We didn't see those as mutually exclusive. That's helpful, thanks. And then one slide earlier from that one, the SSC finds— second bullet— the SSC finds that this initial review analysis is not sufficient to inform council final action at this time.

Does that mean that we could move the action on to final action at a future meeting? But so it doesn't need to be another initial review analysis necessarily, but it's not ready for final action at this meeting.

Sure. Um, sorry, through the chair, Ms. Gowan. The SSC— so at initial review, we really have 3 options. One is that it's ready as is to advance to final action. And the second one is that it's not ready to advance, but there are some suggestions that the analysts can do and that it wouldn't necessarily come back to the SSC.

And then the other one is that it's, it's not ready to move forward at this time. And so this Even though it's written, I see, I see the difficulty with the words that are there, but what it means is that the SSC essentially is requesting to see another version of an initial review, or that there be another initial review, even if the Council chooses not to go back to the SSC.

Thank you. And Miss Kimball? Thank you, Miss Goins. Questions spurred questions for me. I— on the slide 27, the SSC is not making a statement about what the objectives for the action should be.

You're clearly just saying it's unclear to you if it includes habitat or not. Okay, thank you. And then my second question that I was confused by— her question is on slide 28. I, I thought what the SSC was asking for is this displacement analysis in order to understand how PSC would change, not benefits, revenue, or anything like that to groundfish or to crab fisheries, but how PSC, Tanner crab PSC, would change under these displacement scenarios. So if it's broader than that, can you help me understand that?

Through the Chair, Ms. Kimball, yes, I mean, we— I think the focus of much of the discussion was on PSC, but I think that we did broaden that out. And as I mentioned, for across our discussion, we saw the value in looking at the effects of all of these various facets of the problem. So I think where we landed was that all the components could be included in this., look at potential displacement scenarios. But again, the caveat here, as was mentioned, is that the data resolution— the analyst told us that we were—. That this—.

The resolution in the data was maybe not sufficient to do much in the way of detail here. And I— we were mentioning specific stat areas, but getting below the level of stat areas is probably beyond the data that's available. Jason, if you want to add.

Yeah, through the chair, Ms. Kimball, we certainly had discussion about how displacement would affect PSC rates more or less potentially. I do recall discussion too about displaced groundfish catch and what that might mean for the fleet. So if they're closed out of the area and they're displaced, what does that mean in terms of the fleet. So we certainly had discussions, and I think there's bullets in our presentation later that might provide more information on that as well. Thank you.

I can wait. Thank you.

Let's see. Okay, so continuing on with some of the analytical recommendations that we had, the first was disaggregating vessels, particularly CPs from CVs. And as well as delineating processors from or harvesters landing in Kodiak specifically in order to better understand the distributional benefits of area fisheries and possible costs of the closure. So beginning a little bit more resolution on the fishery side of things.

The next was in the using— applying a consistent treatment for the spatial scale of tanner crab stocks. And this is what I was alluding to in the answer to the previous question, was trying to reconcile or line up the analyses such that the biological effects and the socioeconomic effects would be evaluated at the same level. Levels, same spatial resolutions. We also ask for a better representation of the area trawled, noting some potential improvements that could be made in the way that was described in the initial analysis. We recommended identifying performance metrics, a monitoring and evaluation schedule, and data streams to evaluate the effectiveness of the spatial closure, and I've got more on this on another slide.

This is sort of duplicates something we have in a subsequent slide, so I'll speak to that a little bit more. And then also to bring into this analysis a discussion of the effectiveness of some other recent trawl gear modifications and how those might play in or be related to this effort.

Question, Dr. Stewart, Ms. Baker. Thank you, Madam Chair, and please just tell me if this is more thoroughly covered in the full report. Um, the— when I think of recent trowel gear modifications, I don't know how recent it is, but I think of the elevated trowel sweeps for non-pelagic trowel gear. Were there other specific trowel gear modifications that the SSC was referring to in this particular bullet?

Through the chair, Ms. Baker, thanks for the question. Um, we were in fact referring specifically to the 2014 change in trawl sweeps. We did hear in public testimony that there have been other changes, including shifts in the type of doors being used, and we had some curiosity about how those might also affect this.

Thank you for that. And in terms of discussing the effectiveness, it strikes me I don't know that you would be able to quantitatively do that. Where was the SSC thinking more just in terms of the likely change in how the gear was operating and what that would likely result in? I don't know if you could just, um, how would— how was the SSC envisioning maybe that the analyst would go about discussing the effectiveness of those modifications?

Through the chair, Ms. Baker, I'm not sure we got to that level of detail in our, in our discussion. I think we noted that these, that the trawl gear modifications could have an effect on interaction between non-plagic trawl gear and crab, and I think mainly we, we put this in as a note for the analyst to, to just explore this more. I don't think we had a specific thought there that I'm remembering, unless one of you does.

Okay, thank you. And Ms. Cohen. Thank you, Madam Chair. And similarly, on the bullet before that one, did the SSC have a discussion on the— how to evaluate the effectiveness of the spatial closure?

Through the chair, Ms. Cohen, I believe I have another slide that has more on this bullet. So let me see if I get there.

So some additional recommendations, the SSC recommended a comparison of Tanner crab abundance and annual or seasonal Tanner PSC within the proposed closures to the overall Tanner abundance and also relative to the total commercial removal. Basically looking at the scale of abundance and biomass relative to the total amount being extracted. We also recommended exploring the relationship between PSC and Tanner abundance at size. We noted that there could be— there was size information available for the PSC of Tanner in order to characterize the interaction between the gear and the stock. Stock at more of a life history stage.

We had some discussion about the reliability, or we recommended adding some discussion about the reliability of the observer data in representing the distribution of overall fishing effort, specifically the availability of observer data in the areas proposed for closure versus across the entire fleet or across a broader geographic area. We recommended including potential impacts on non-crab PSC species, and we recommended consideration of the role of natural stock variability for Tanner crab in the effectiveness of a time area closure, namely the large swings in abundance that were documented for this crab species.

And here's, I think, where I'm going to, yeah, skip back to that point. So we recommended developing performance metrics, a monitoring framework, and identifying the data streams necessary to evaluate an effectiveness of a spatial closure. This is essentially the other bullet rephrased.

The point, I think, being that this is something that ideally one would do for any potential closure, but that this was beyond what what the SSC could accomplish at this meeting, and we noted that this— that some sort of a process for an iterative conversation among SSC, Council, and analysts might be necessary to actually start to work toward this. We honestly didn't get very far into figuring out how this would look. We just noted that this would be the ideal approach for a spatial closure, would be to figure out what performance metrics you'd want what you were going to monitor and, and what data sources would provide that.

Uh, the SSC, with regard to Alternative 3, we could not recommend specific performance metrics without knowing better the objectives of the council, but we did provide a set of examples you'll find in our report of things that could be looked at, not as this is what you should be looking at, but these are things that we thought could be used.

Finally, the SSC recommends that all of the various components of the analysis, the human components, the ecological components, should be clearly identified. I think we even recommended doing this in the form of a table in the document, and an attempt made to characterize the linkages between those components. So when one thing is affected that it infects something else and down the line.

I'll pause there in case there are any other questions on goa Tanner.

Thank you, Ms. Kimball. Thank you. Thank you for that, Dr. Stewart. And so what do you think that table looks like? I mean, it is a big document, and I'm always trying to find ways to concisely understand kind of the primary points is this— what I'm worried we would see is if this saved Tanner crab PSC, then you would have a directional change, you know, lower groundfish revenues or higher Tanner crab revenues, or— but it doesn't tell you, like, the likelihood of that happening.

It's just very blunt and directional. And I don't know if that's what you're— that kind of table we've been seeing in analyses lately. If that's what you're referring to or something different. So if I'm totally off base, just stop me there. I'm— I just don't find that kind of table very helpful because it's still an if-then scenario without any likelihood of the if applied to it.

Through the chair, Ms. Kimball, I think that this particular recommendation was more focused around trying to understand how these pieces, uh, affected each rather than necessarily the results of a potential scenario. So this would be understanding which fishery components and which ecological components were likely to have effects and which direction those might flow. Obviously, the strength of that and the conclusion would be part of the results, but I'm not sure we were necessarily asking for that level of resolution in this particular request.

Thank you. And Mr. Ritchie? Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you for the report. Um, reading the report here and in these slides, I'm going to try to find a good way to ask this.

It seems like your scientific advice regarding C5 is kind of— it's similar to what we've heard in other management decisions we've had where we've out of a lot of uncertainty. And that— am I reading this right, that you're asking us to think of this more as an experiment and that we need to— we have a desired outcome that maybe we could think of as our, like, hypothesis. We need to define together the measurables that we would have to inform whether we're meeting that or not. That maybe at this point we're not ready to do that. Am I, am I reading this right?

It seems like what, what we're being told is that this, with so much uncertainty in what the outcome would be, we need to reframe how we're thinking about this as a decision and maybe think about it more as an experiment.

Through the Chair, Mr. Ritchie, We weren't making a recommendation of how the council should think about this necessarily, but I think that you're— we did definitely did have a discussion about the relative merits of observational data that's just collected as something unfolds versus developing an actual experimental design to try and get an answer that's scientifically more rigorous.

We, we—. I think that we saw a potential path forward under both of those scenarios, noting that, for example, for Alternative 3, many of these areas have been closed for some time, and there was an expectation that there's information there about what's happened, but that perhaps we, we weren't shown the data from that observation or that, that time to, to allow inference to be drawn from that. So I— we did it. We did have that very discussion about observational data versus experimental data, and certainly in a perfect world, having a true experiment would be the simplest and clearest way to determine the efficacy of something.

Thank you. And Ms. Baker.

Thank you, Madam Chair, and a somewhat related question that I'll start out by saying my memory is that we asked— we, the council, specifically asked the SSC and others to provide examples of performance metrics and things like that. So I feel like you were very much responding to a specific request that you got, and I just wanted to note that. So thank you. But my question is on the slide, and I feel like the, the second bullet, in terms of those very performance metrics that you referenced— I was able to listen to a little bit of the SSC discussion, but not, not the whole thing. And so I feel like that's a very relevant comment.

And, and, but wouldn't that also apply for the recommendations for the analyst under Alternative 2 to provide, you know, examples of performance metrics and data streams available? Is that not also incumbent on on the council more clearly identifying the objectives it wishes to evaluate. I just wanted to ask if that's a fair statement to, to also apply that to Alternative 2 recommendations.

Through the chair, Ms. Baker. Yes, we definitely had that discussion that this discussion of performance metrics could apply to closures in both Alternative 2 and 3.

Thank you.

Moving to our next item, we took a report on the 2025 GOA trawl survey. The 2025 GOA trawl survey was redesigned in order to implement an improvement in the spatial alignment of that survey and to be able, looking forward, to maintain an index, a quality index, under variable levels of survey effort in the future. So this, this redesign was implemented during the 2025 survey. As when the results of that survey came back, we were presented with guild-level shifts, meaning groups of species, flatfish, gadids, and rockfish, that all seem to be showing trends in certain and fairly clear directions. So flatfish and gadids went up, rockfish generally went down, across those survey results.

And this also occurred in tandem with a 17% reduction in stations in the 2025 survey from, from the previous year. This—. The level of coherence in these guild-level changes was such that there were a lot of questions, and we had, we had some initial questions last fall that we expected to address in actually in December, I think, when we saw the first assessments come through through. Of course, we didn't see those assessments in December. Dr. Pete Hulson presented us with some preliminary analysis on Pacific cod at the February meeting, and then this was really the follow-up to give us the, the more thorough look across all the species.

What was—. What we found, or what the analysts found and presented to us, was that depth and habitat sampling across 2025 was actually broadly consistent with historical surveys, that the correlations among species didn't show a meaningful change in 2025.

And that if they went back and post-stratified the old surveys using the new design, that they didn't get an appreciably different answer. They also did some simulation work to see if under hypothetical scenarios of reducing the effort to lower and lower levels, where, where might bias pop up, and they found that for flatfish and gadids, there wasn't much bias that showed up even to a fairly small survey design, declines, but rockfish were more sensitive as the total level of effort declined in those simulations.

So in, in a nutshell, we find that the divergent guild trajectories for 2023 to 2025 appeared to be within the historical variability and not attributed to the redesign. And in the end, we have confidence that the 2025 survey results are good, and we find no reason to dismiss them or avoid using them. So we recommend that the authors go ahead and use them this year. We did have a number of recommendations, though, for things for authors and the survey team to, to keep track of as they move forward. Some of these relate to moving forward in general with this new survey design, and some are specific to authors as they begin to use this information.

So we recommended a few things to help with the annual reporting. Moving forward. The first is we recommended the survey team report the number of stations sampled and to stratify that across depth and rockiness grades or habitat categories in order to identify— and also to identify a broader range of static habitat metrics to compare across years. Essentially, we're asking for a little more resolution about the distribution of stations on a year-to-year basis. We also requested that particularly for for deep species that the authors examine and describe how the historical estimates operated and how those may or may not be replicable under the new survey design.

The challenge here is that there's a deep strata that was only sampled in some of the historical years, and we, we wanted to understand better how that, how that has been treated and how it will be treated moving forward. And of course, we'd like to see what, what potential effect that might have on the assessment. The SSC recommends that future analysis of survey changes consider not just the trend, but also the composition information, the length and the age information going forward. And that would apply to other surveys as well, where there are changes in surveys, such as the Eastern Bering Sea.

So finally, we recommended that for stocks where where sparse sampling is an issue, for example, rockfish, it's important for authors to consider whether these survey changes could affect their species of interest and to document any discontinuities in the index or the composition data as part of the SAVE reports. This is really something that we would kind of expect authors to do anyway, I think.

With that, I'll move into item E2, which was the presentation to us of the— an update on the climate work plan, as well as a paper on the status of the evaluation of harvest control rules. We, we received the— this update and the, the full discussion paper. We, with regard to the update itself, we supported the work plan tracking sheet. We found this very helpful to see how progress was being made, and we look forward to receiving updates on that. We noted that it would be helpful to provide some consideration of how these climate change research projects were going to be introduced into the council process, whether this was through workshops or informational presentations directly into the ESRs or ESPs these, we struggled a little bit to see exactly how these, these were going to fit into the on-ramps to the council process.

The SSC, moving then into the harvest control rules, we appreciated the detailed description of the existing harvest control rules, and we heard from the analysts that they've, they've received this feedback from others as well, that better understanding how the current system works is sort of fundamental to understanding whether any changes need to be made. The SSC noted that given the success of the current system, that we would recommend any potential changes to harvest control rules be considered on a stock-by-stock basis and not just a sweeping change to the harvest control rule approach that's been used by the North Pacific Council.

We recognize, however, that there are a number of stocks for which there are concerns with the current management approach, and And we— these were categorized by the analysts into several different categories with some examples for each, noting that perhaps not all of these examples were able to be evaluated immediately, but this was sort of the priority list of stocks. And there are factors associated with each of these groups as to why they would be useful to evaluate in this framework.

So generally, the SSC finds that a broader suite of harvest control rules could help in several ways. The first would be to address the need to respond to long-term and persistent changes in productivity. The second would be to increase resilience of the management system under projected climate change. And then the third would be an improved response to abrupt shocks to the system., and I think the example that was provided was the natural mortality event around Pacific cod in the Gulf of Alaska roughly a decade ago. We had considerable discussion about the, the role of crab, and we ended up recommending that Bering Sea and Aleutian Island crab have its own timeline due to the complexities for crab.

We didn't want to lose sight of the fact that crab are important and needed to be included in this, but we, we saw there were— this was going to be potentially more challenging to do for crab than for some of the groundfish examples, which are already much more fully developed.

So with regard to the specific harvest control rules in the document, the SSC had some fairly specific recommendations. The first would be to combine and simplify harvest control rules 5 and 10 10. We saw some ways to try and make this analysis a little bit smaller and still retain the ability to evaluate these different things.

We noted that this generalized combination of 5 and 10 would be— could be used to approximate the system where there's a cap on the total amount of catch, such as the Bering Sea, and approximate how harvest might actually— or the harvest rate might actually decline at higher biomass levels. We suggested the initial focus be on Harvest Control Rule 1 and this combined 5 and 10, since Harvest Control Rule 7 is considerably more general and maybe more difficult to implement. More on Harvest Control Rule 7 in a minute. And we suggested that these evaluations focus to begin with on EBS, Ngoa, pollock, and Pacific cod, as well as sablefish, and perhaps to, to postpone work on Pacific Ocean perch. So we're really trying to give the analysts some guidance on where to start, not that the other species weren't important, but this would be an appropriate place to start.

So with regard to Harvest Control Rule 7, we noted that a couple things. The first was that The examples provided all used a biomass limit of 20%, but we noted that that should probably be removed as part of the modeling of the ABC control rule.

And also that because it doesn't apply to all species and doesn't actually affect the ABC directly, we also recommended that Harvest Control Rule 7 could be simplified by linking some of the parameters. So they're basically just making fewer moving parts on that. That. Importantly, the last bullet here is that Harvest Control Rule 7, unlike 5 and 10, would not be one-directional. It would potentially allow for fishing mortality, the fishing mortality rate to be either higher or lower, given the, within the current maximum permissible fishing mortality, so within the OFL, it could go up or down depending on the environmental conditions, and we felt this was important thing to highlight.

With regard to performance metrics for the harvest control rules, we recommended that a small set of performance metrics would be preferable. We, we noted that you can have a lot of performance metrics produced in a document, they can go into an appendix, but for people to be able to digest this, it needed to be reduced to a relatively small subset. We did encourage further exploration of the possibility of adding social indicators to these evaluations. We also made a specific request to be— to review the experimental design before the modeling work begins to know more about the technical setup of these simulations. And then finally, we recommended that if possible, all of the initial and final analyses should go through both the plan team and the SSC to review.

This is going to be a very complicated simulation, and I think we wanted to ensure that, that our standard process for technical review is in place.

And with that, I'm going to pass to my co-chair for the last section here. Excuse me, we have a question before moving on. Yes, Ms. Kim. Thank you. Um, I just had a question generally about like the feasibility of doing this work, which which I very much support, but it seems like we have— we're relying a lot on the data streams that we have, or even increased data to support at least the environmental variables that would come into play.

And then, and then we also need to understand the relationships between those variables and the stock that you've, that you've noted, the 3 to, to proceed with first. So did the SSC have that higher-level discussion at all, or was it really in the technical side? About whether we have enough understanding of the relationships to really see or do a test that these harvest control rules would improve performance over status quo. And I understand that we need to define those objectives to say what's an improved performance or not, but— or was it very much technical in the weeds? And then again, I can leave my question for another time.

Through the Chair, Ms. Kimball, we didn't have a have a lot of discussion on that at this meeting, but in previous iterations— this is, I think, the third time we've seen an update on this effort— we did actually have some discussion around the data needed to support this. And in fact, in one of our previous— I don't recall if it was February or last June— we did make a recommendation to evaluate scenarios where there was actually reduced data availability in the future, noting that that is a potential scenario. And, and because we were concerned with that very question of whether we would have the data in the future to support these sorts of detailed harvest control rules. So it didn't, it didn't come up specifically, I don't believe, at this meeting, but it has, it has come up in SSC discussion.

Through the chair, Ms. Kimball. I agree with Dr. Stewart. We didn't talk about it in the big picture, but I think that that was actually part of the thought thought towards the species that were chosen for these analysis and the fact that really, I mean, the harvest control rules in general are working quite well. There's a handful of species that have had issues, and then those specifically, um, there were certain ones that there was data available to do this. Um, and so I think the staff may have even sort of narrowed the focus of doing it all Tier 3 to, um, smaller and smaller chunks, and I think one of those actually was species for which there is environmental information that is known to be linked to that stock already.

So there is a limitation there.

All right, the next, the SSC took up, um, We reviewed the Groundfish Economic Safe and the Annual Community Engagement and Participation overview. I recognize this was not— this is not directly on the council's agenda. This has been a continuing process. I know that the council had a motion on social indicators in 2023. This was part of the work when we went to the National SSC.

Meeting and came back and we're working on IRA funding. And so this was actually— we were planning initially, you'll get— we got sort of some background on this and the SSA was actually going to see sort of a brief overview of this last December until we had the government shutdown. And so this meeting we were looking at the structure of the documents and how, in what ways were they helpful, and then in December, I'll explain in some bullets, we'll see some results from this. But this is why the SSC took it up sort of off-cycle, not during assessment season. The SSC appreciates the team's continuing efforts to advance the integration of economic, social, and community information into the management, um, informing management process and the recognition of the diverse audience for these data.

Uh, one of the things that we were asked, um, was if we had recommendations regarding the timing of future SSC reviews, and the SSC supports this— the council staff plan to, um, bring forward, um, this item on social and economic information relevant to the best scientific information available standard. That's sort of our— the SSC's nexus for tax setting at the December meeting. And then my understanding is that it'll be sort of in the introduction context for stock assessments section, like where we have the ecosystem status report.

Uh, the SSC also then recommended reviewing structures and the product development like we did at this meeting at a meeting outside of December that has a less constrained time, time schedule.

The SSC discussed how social and economic products can be used to identify the status and vulnerabilities of different entities across multiple scales, communities, fishery management plans, fisheries fleets. The SSC then provided a number of recommendations, and I didn't list them out here just for consideration on your schedule. They are in our, in our report. And these recommendations with a goal to better inform tax setting in the current year and make the economic and community information more responsive to current management needs. As, as you know, a lot of the economic and social information is historical, and so to try to bring that forward during tax setting, which is a very current-year process, a lot of our review and recommendations had to do with ways that we could possibly— that they might possibly mix into this, I guess, time schedule.

So a couple of examples were improving the timeliness of the economic brief, um, as proposed by those authors. Efforts for greater automation of the Annual Community Engagement and Participation Overview, the ACEPO, that could enable use of more current data and a more synthetic approach. And then using species-specific information if it's possible and there is staff time, um, integrating that into the ACEPO since obviously tax setting is a very species-specific approach.

The SSC supports prioritizing work that identifies substantial changes in fisheries and dependent communities. The SSC also supported collaborative work that would combine or relate the Economic SAFE and the SEPO products, noting that collaborations like that could actually tighten the link think or be more informative for tax— TAC decisions and implications for communities. And finally, the SSC supports ongoing efforts to improve the socioeconomic information used for the ecological and socioeconomic profiles. That was not a— that was not part of the presentation we got at this meeting, but it works hand in hand with the Economic SAFE and the ACEPO, and it's the more species-specific piece that, that they've been working on and have been doing some really exciting work.

Thank you. Are there any final questions on the SSC report?

Seeing none, thank you very much for your leadership and all of your work, as well as Total SSE membership. Thank you.

So we're gonna circle back to discussion on our B reports. I'm going to take a quick, uh, 5-minute stand down. I'll ask council members to come back with any items to follow up on B reports, and hoping that we can have a very productive but concise conversation before moving on to C1. We have some staff leaving, so we'll, we'll want to get through our C1 presentation today. We do have an executive session scheduled for 3, but we'll push that back until we get through that presentation, and then we'll break for our executive session.

So let's do a quick 5-minute stand down and come back at 2:25. I guess that's 8 minutes.

Council members, please come back to order. Oh, there.

And we have concluded our B agenda items, and so we're at the spot of our agenda to have any motions or any follow-up discussions. And again, I— we are about— we're a little more than half a day behind, so I encourage council members to have a very focused discussion so we can move on to C1 agenda item. So, Miss Vanderhoeven, thank you, Madam Chair. I have a brief motion that I sent to staff, and it's brief but long enough. I'll let it come up on the screen.

One moment, please.

Okay. Motion reads, the council supports using Section 305 rulemaking authority for the specific actions outlined in the June 2026 discussion paper to respond to EO 14276. Separately, the council requests NIMS identify specific updates to the regulation that reflect how current monitoring systems such as flow scales, observer data, electronic monitoring, and integrated catch accounting systems are used as the measures of catch, total catch in the AFA Catcher Processor and Mothership sectors, improve requirements for the allowable retention of pollock roe, and reflect how NMFS uses retained catch estimates from daily production reports and production transfer in management, and with a second, I can speak to it briefly. Thank you for the second, Ms. Kimball. Ms. Vanderhoeven.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Ms. Kimball, for the second. The NIMS management report asked, and my motion affirms our interest in pursuing 503 authority for those issues. My motion is specific to the ROE issue noted in the report. And as highlighted by, by recent enforcement actions.

Clearly, those regulations need modernizing to reflect how the fisheries are managed now. My motion requests NMFS come back to us with how best to do that.

Noting the question of addressing roe retention issues versus a more holistic look. Um, it just— it wasn't that long ago I actually had a conversation with Mr. Kerlin, um, and we had the very same question. We've kind of been playing whack-a-mole with things as they've popped up, um, and while I would love to take on a holistic approach at this time, it's time-consuming and resource-intensive.

However, I am optimistic that this exercise to modernize the ROW retention regulations may provide a template, or at least an opportunity for lessons learned, how to address other outdated regulations that need modernizing and move in a more expeditious manner to do those as part of our continuous process to improve regulations. And I'd be happy to answer any questions. Second. Thank you very much. Are there any questions on the motion?

Yes, Miss Kimball. Thank you. Thank you, Miss Vanderhoeven. I, I guess, um, I appreciate for brevity putting these two things together, but the sentence that starts separately is your intent there that, that we would then receive a reg amendment package or something very specific to address those things, and that would come back through the council, not included in this secretarial review draft bucket of actions that we've identified in the EO. Thank you, Ms. Kimball.

Um, through the chair, yeah, I, I, sorry, that's a really good clarification. That would be my intention.

Thank you. Any further questions?

Any amendments?

Yes, Ms. Kimball. I have an amendment.

And I did just send that.

That's it. Thank you. It reads, the Council supports further work on solutions for two issues included in the EO discussion paper. One, under Section 2.2, to meet the intent of requiring electronic monitoring cameras to be on during the entirety of fishing but not during the entirety of transiting from port to the fishing grounds. And two, under Section 2.8, on modifications to the statement of projected observer assignments that must be submitted by the observer provider.

And with a second, I'll speak to it briefly.

Thank you for the second, Mr. O'Toole. OK, thank you, Mr. Ritchie. Um, these are two fairly small things, but they came up in, in public comment, and I really feel like that discussion paper from the agency was putting forward these are the changes we're going to make. Do you have any further input or discussion, or are we on the right track with those things? Um, the one under Section 2.2, we did get some feedback on kind of the almost ridiculousness of having to turn your camera on to transit from Petersburg to Sandpoint if you're not fishing.

In that time period. And so this is really just direction of, can we have a little bit more thought into that potential reg change to make it a little bit more reasonable? And under Section 2.8, we did receive testimony from two folks on maybe some additional just discussions with observer providers on what might be a better modification to the statement of those observer assignments that are required in regulation to be provided by the observer provider. Better. So they're kind of two smallish things, but, but really I'm trying to respond to the agencies.

Hey, we're putting these out there. It is going through secretarial review. It just feels like there's a couple more conversations that could be had to clean these up a little bit better to meet the intent that the Council outlined, and that's what I'm asking for in this amendment.

Thank you for the— any questions on the amendment?

Any comments?

Yes, Lieutenant Commander, through the chair, on, on the amendment comments or on the original motion? On the amendment first. Yeah.

Okay, any objection to the amendment? Okay, seeing none, that amendment passes without objection. So we're on to the main motion. Any Any comments?

Thank you, Madam Chair. Through the Chair, the Coast Guard doesn't typically comment on motions, but since this motion addresses measures affecting compliance and enforcement and a Coast Guard enforcement action that gained national attention, I feel it's appropriate to comment. I support the motion provided by Ms. Vanderhoeven to increase fleet compliance and make at-sea enforcement clear. I've been in conversations with industry over the last few weeks to better understand industry practices and how they either align with or depart from potentially outdated regulations. The current system requires complex back-calculating from primary product to determine round weight equivalent, or RWE, based on standard product recovery rates, then calculate maximum allowable retention of polychro.

There could be errors induced in these calculations based on the misclassification of products, especially because they do not take into account margins of error or ranges noted by the authors of the standard product recovery rates in their 1993 report on recoveries and yields, from which Table 3, Product Recovery Rates for Groundfish Species, was derived. Moving to a straightforward calculation of allowable retention of pollock roe based on flow scale catch data with observer coverage in the required electronic logbooks would streamline this process for at-sea enforcement. We recognize that there is no economic incentive to misreport estimated product totals we still encourage industry to be as precise and accurate as possible with the production reports, since large disparities between real-time catch data and production data could prompt the need for an at-sea boarding or monitored offload to investigate these discrepancies. The industry process of truing up daily vessel production reports, which the industry currently considers estimates, to align with product transfer reports upon landing is still a very important step to ensure accurate landing information for both management and enforcement purposes. If this motion goes forward, I believe it will help the industry be more compliant during the course of any individual trip.

It will make at-sea enforcement of the fishery sector more effective. I also believe it helps align decades-old and well-established industry practices with current catch accounting measures that inform in-season harvest data in the AFA catcher processor sector. This concludes my comment. Thank you very much, Lieutenant Commander Oresky.

Thank you, Miss Vanderhoeven and Miss Kimball. Is there any objection to the motion? Okay, seeing none, that motion passes without objection. Are there any other motions? Yes, Mr. Pamplin.

Thanks, Madam Chair. Yes, I have a motion and just ask staff to call it up, please.

Thank you. In response to NIMS' suggested need to update regulations in the March 13th letter letter to the Council, the Council requests preparation of a regulatory amendment to review and clarify regulations related to the disposition of prohibited species catch, or PSC, to mitigate misinterpretation of or inconsistencies in multiple federal regulations that have accumulated over time. While historically vessels required to discard PSC did so at sea after monitoring, vessels are now required to retain and land PSC the DOC under several, under several regulatory programs to improve precision in accounting. A review is needed to identify and resolve any conflicting regulations. The council supports use of the Prohibited Species Donation, PSD program, to support hunger relief and reduce waste.

For PSC that a processor does not donate, regulations should clarify that processors may convert PSC into fish meal, oil, or bone meal and may sell those products to minimize waste and avoid having to return PSC to vessels for, for disposal at sea. This holistic review of disposition of PSC should include suggestions for improvements to the PSD program and clearly set out permissible options and requirements. All PSC limits, vessel prohibitions on the sale of PSC, and vessel requirements for PSC avoidance while fishing for groundfish remain in in place. This action is intended only to clarify what is allowable for disposal of PSE that has already been caught and has landed at the dock. If there's a second, I'm happy to speak to it.

Thank you for the second, Ms. Vanderhoeven. Mr. Pimblin. Great, thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you, Ms. Vanderhoeven, for the second. Um, yesterday we had heard about PSE disposition a few times, including the change in the landing Code, uh, the letter that Mr. Kerlin provided to the council this spring, and in the report on Executive Order 14276 for reducing regulatory burdens. This motion is intended to conduct a review and address the concerns holistically, consistent with the approach envisioned in Mr. Kerlin's letter and the EO report, including improvements for the prohibited species donation program.

This approach was further reinforced in public testimony this morning. I would like to emphasize the end of the motion that this does not propose altering any PSC limits, vessel prohibitions on the sale of PSC, and vessel requirements for avoiding PSC. This is simply a review on how to dispose of retained PSC in a manner that minimizes waste and reduces environmental and economic impacts. And while I think this is also clear, I'd just like to highlight that, that this does not result in any immediate changes. The requested analysis will come back to the council for a briefing, and then the council may consider further action at that time.

Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Pamplin. Are there any questions on the motion?

None. Any comments?

Yes, Mr. Kerlin. Just very briefly, Madam Chair, um, Thank you, Mr. Pamplin, for the motion. I recognize that statements from the agency taken together may have created some confusion on this issue, and, and really welcome the opportunity through rulemaking to try to clarify this across the board and, and as I indicated previously, put it to rest so the rules are very clear for everybody.

Thank you.

Yes, Ms. Watson. Ms. Watson. You, through the Chair, I believe Mr. Pamplin— apologies for not raising my hand so quickly for a question, but I do have a question for Mr. Pamplin. I believe he spoke to this at the end of his talking points, but just to make sure I understand, the idea is that we'd come back with some report, and at that point the Council would decide whether to go forward with a regulatory amendment that the Council would recommend under Section 303 of the MSA. Is that ultimately the idea, or is it that NIMS would then explore whether we could implement this through our 305 authority?

Through the Chair, Ms. Watson, I'm not sure I'm tracking the CFR references, but I believe what we're looking for here is using not the secretarial discretion, but rather the Council's rulemaking making, uh, procedure. Thank you. That, that answers the question. The, um, citation was to the Magnuson-Stevens Act, Section 303, is the Council's authority to recommend changes to regulations that implement the Council's FMPs. Thank you.

Thanks, Ms. Kimball. Thank you. And just a further question based on Ms. Watson's question, but the, the motion is very clear that it's requesting preparation of a regulatory amendment. Through the regular process, and, and that's what you're— okay, thank you.

Thank you. Any further questions or comments?

Seeing none, thank you, Mr. Pamplin. Any objection to the motion?

That motion passes without objection. Thank you. Any further motions?

Mr. Kerling. I'm sure I don't have a motion, but I wonder if I might just address an issue related to comments that we've heard throughout the, the B reports. We've heard quite a bit about prioritization of actions and some understandable frustration with how long it's taking to get things through and the difficulty in, in prioritizing and having timely implementation. This came up in the B2 report. We heard it under B9 with relative to seashare.

We heard it in, or saw it in written public comments submitted under the B reports and heard it in public testimony.

You know, certainly my goal is for the National Marine Fisheries Service never to be a bottleneck on implementing management measures that the Council would like to see advance. We have been in a frustrating situation of needing to really triage incoming work, and there are certain must-do items, as we've conveyed to the council in the past, things like monitoring fisheries, in-season management to make sure we're not having fisheries overfished or exceeding PSC limits, responding to litigation, a whole host of must-do items that rise to the very top. Beyond that, we really look very much to the Council and to other— to stakeholders, participants in the fisheries, other interested parties to provide input and guidance on what they believe the highest priorities are. If everything is a top priority, then nothing is a priority, and that puts us in a very tough position. So appreciate all the expressions of interest in various items, I guess I would just encourage continued input from the council and, and dialogue with stakeholders about what the highest priorities should be.

I could not be prouder of our Alaska Region staff, those who remain, in trying to implement measures as best they can and support the council process. They are dedicated public servants and are committed to supporting the fisheries on getting things in place as effectively and efficiently as they can. But we only have so many people, and in the absence of guidance on priorities from the Council and others, we use our best judgment about how to prioritize our available resources to try to get that work done. So again, really encourage continued input on priorities, and we'll keep doing the best we can. Thank you.

Thank you for those comments, Mr. Kerlin, and we'll certainly try to do our best and do better than we have in the past to assist in, in that process. So thank you. Mr. Muller.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Just briefly, just to respond to some of the public comments we heard, we heard quite a bit about the small sablefish regulation process and, and the delays in that, and, and I just want, for the benefit of the, the public, um, a conversation. I had on the sideline with Mr. Kurland relative to new personnel coming in with the agency, IT personnel, of which my understanding is that specific expertise that the agency needs in terms of some of the, some of the workload that's the agency is facing. So I guess if appropriate, Madam Chair, I just want to make sure that my understanding is correct there, that your new hires here are at least going to fill part of the work gap that you have at the agency relative to that specific issue.

Madam Chair, Mr. Mohler, we prioritized our list of desired hiring actions, and those were the top two on our list. Those are positions that are absolutely critical for our IT systems, including our catch accounting system, the systems that we rely rely on for management of the fisheries day to day and certainly for changes for new programs. So those positions are going to be really helpful. We also anticipate having a fishery management specialist position, but thus far we've been approved for, I believe, 3 hires compared to 38 lost since the beginning of last year.

Thank you, Mr. Moler. Mr. And any other discussion? We'll go to Mr. Sakata. Yes, so thank you. Just a quick comment.

I know that there was at least one comment from Ms. West Jones on the CDQ Pacific cod season apportionment, and I just wanted to—. I'm still— I've had some conversation, but I'd like to revisit that during staff tasking. And so I just wanted to kind of potentially bring that up as a possibility. Thank you, Mr. Sakata.

And Ms. Baker.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I do not have a motion, but I also just wanted to, um, express appreciation for all of the reports we received under the B agenda item, particularly for, uh, the report from C-Share and, uh, from the representatives of the cooperatives and IPAs. Those are a lot of work, I acknowledge and recognize and appreciate. And I just was really pleased to see— I've commented to a few of you that sometimes in past years attendance in the room was pretty light for those cooperative and IPA reports, and I always regretted that because that is the one opportunity that we have each year for the council and in the public to really ask questions, see how those cooperatives operate, see how the IPAs are implemented. And I, I just really appreciate the interest and engagement this year.

So thank you, Madam Chair. And relevant to that, I also wanted to acknowledge the specific request we heard during the IPA reports, or after the IPA reports during testimony, a request of the Bering Sea Pollock fishery representatives to share information from the IPAs and relevant operational input with tribal entity representatives to facilitate those communications. And just really appreciate— I think some of those communications have already taken place— and just really encourage that to continue to build those communication channels. I think there's willingness and interest on both sides. So thank you.

That's all I have on that issue. And then moving on, also we did hear some testimony about the Crab Rationalization Program regional delivery exemption. I really appreciate the economic challenges that we have, we continue to hear about, we heard about today, we've heard about recently, given the condition of crab stocks, low tax, etc. And particularly the unique economic challenges faced by crab-dependent communities. I, at this point, I'm suggesting that we continue to monitor the situation with the regional delivery exemption, recognizing we had really helpful testimony and feedback, particularly last year.

It was a challenging year due to some of the time constraints, but perhaps some, with, with a little bit of experience moving forward, some of those challenges can be worked through. It just, the current regional delivery exemption process may not be ideal for the current conditions, but as we discussed, it really doesn't include a significant amount of flexibility to really address the most urgent challenges, and I, at this point, point in time, with everything in front of us, Madam Chair, I will just recommend that we continue to monitor that. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Baker. And Ms. Gohen.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I don't have any motions, but want to echo Ms. Baker's comments there on the crab emergency relief. Definitely hear the stakeholders that are concerned and seeing some of the challenges that we're facing in that fishery, but just acknowledge that the system we have right now, while again not ideal, seems to be working. So, but continue to watch that. So just echoing the speaker's comments there and look forward to staff tasking for more prioritization on what rulemakings rise to the top here.

We are facing some incredible challenges with the council staff and with agency staff and just think we need to do a hard prioritization. So I look forward to that under staff tasking. Asking. And then also just want to echo appreciation for the co-op reports. Those are very informative.

Really appreciate it. Thanks.

Thank you, Ms. Cohen.

I, I agree that, um, we, you know, as, as Mr. Kerlin stated, he would, um, you know, certainly appreciate guidance from the council on prioritization. I, I do. I anticipate that being a pretty substantive conversation, though I'm not sure if it's going to happen at the staff tasking. But I think setting the stage and kind of talking about, you know, what we're going to be looking at as far as criteria of prioritization and getting members to start thinking about that towards the end of this meeting is really— would be helpful. But I anticipate that's going to be, you know, it's going to be an iterative process and Um, we'll have to revisit that at our next meeting.

So, okay, I'm not seeing any other hands up. Um, appreciate everyone's, um, concise conversations. Um, I also appreciate all of the valuable testimony we got from members of the public on our B report items. We had a lot to cover over the last day and a half, so that'll take us into our C1 report. We will— we're going to try to get through our C1 report and then take our executive session.

We'll probably aim for about 4 o'clock, and we'll ask members of the public to leave the room at that time. But we'll be a little bit flexible depending on how long this takes. So thank you, Ms. Cleaver. All right. Good afternoon, Madam Chair, members of the council.

For the record, this is Sarah Cleaver. I'm on council staff. Under this agenda item, you will be receiving two different presentations. The first is on the 2025 Observer Annual Report for the North Pacific Observer Program. Program, and the primary purpose of that report, which you receive every year, um, is to determine whether the annual deployment plan, the ADP, from the prior year, um, met its monitoring objectives and to provide guidance for the future ADPs.

And so the next one of those that you will receive is the 2027 ADP, um, that will come up at your October meeting. For presenters, we have Ms. Lisa Thompson and Mr. Jeff Mayhew, both from the Fishery Monitoring and Analysis Division at Alaska Fishery Science Center, as well as Special Agent Jacqueline Smith, who's from NOAA Office of Law Enforcement. And I'll note that the annual report is attached to your e-agenda, and both that and the presentation you're about to receive include the NMFS recommendations for the 2027 annual deployment plan, and the presentation will also includes some other monitoring-related updates such as budget information and potential changes that have been brought up previously at council meetings to the annual reporting structure. After the first presentation, which is the, the lengthier presentation, I'll provide a short report from the May Fishery Monitoring Advisory Committee meeting and whether that occurs this afternoon or tomorrow morning will be determined on how long things take. So that report will include the committee's recommendations on these presentations.

And as a reminder, the action before the council on C1 is to make recommendations on the annual report and any guidance or recommendations for the draft annual deployment plan. So I will turn it over to the main presenter.

Good afternoon, Madam Chair and council members. My name is Lisa Thompson. I am the Deputy Director of the Fisheries Monitoring and Analysis Division. I was functioning as the director for the last 20 months, which is why I'm here presenting. But as Dr. Foy introduced, Dr. Sean Lucy has taken over that position.

He's here, but since I was running the division for the past 20 months, I'm doing the presentation this year.

So I'm going to start with the introduction and fees and budgets portion of the presentation. Um, in 2025, we had 258 individual observers. 86 Of those were brand new, 172 were returning experienced observers. They collected data from 203 vessels and 11 processing facilities for a total of 25,891 observer days. And we just broke that down between full coverage and partial coverage.

Full coverage, and just a reminder for those of you that are not, you know, immersed into the Observer Program, full coverage is pay-as-you-go fleet where they pay their own coverage. Partial coverage are the smaller vessels of the Goa, Western Goa. They pay a 1.65% fee on landings. So when we're talking about full coverage, partial coverage, it's mostly about the funding mechanism.

Mechanism. Our EM efforts in 2025, we had 181 vessels approved to be in the fixed gear EM pool, but only 125 of those submitted vessel monitoring plans, VMPs, to FISH. 137 Selected fixed gear trips for EM coverage took place. We reviewed 123 fixed-gear EM, 57 longline, and 66 pot trips. 14 Were not reviewed at the end of the year.

Those were some unique situations that we were aware of them, and we are actually currently— we've already adjusted in 2026 and we're addressing those issues.

We had a— and then in 2025, It was our first regulated year of the trawl EM program. That program does stretch across full and partial coverage. We had 106 trawl vessels participate, and we had 2,072 trips reviewed, which were 74% of the trips submitted as of April 22nd of this year.

This slide just shows the different percentages of catch that were monitored in the pelagic trawl fishery. So Bering Sea, GOA combined was 89.9%. 10.1% Of that was in the partial coverage. All partial coverage trips were in the GOA, and 83.6% of their catch was monitored either by at-sea observers or shoreside observers. And then the regulated EM trawl program, we had 99.9% of those deliveries monitored.

One was missed due to a communication issue.

And then in the non-pelagic trawl sector for the Bering Sea and GOA combined, we had 95.9% of non-pelagic trawl catch was on trips in the full coverage category. And just slightly over 4% were impartial. And partial coverage trips occurred both in the Bering Sea and in the Gulf, with 42.7% and 13.4% of their catches monitored, respectively.

So I'm going to switch over to the full coverage fleet now. The total invoiced number that came in was $10.7 million for 27 or 23 3,789 invoice days. So invoice days differ from deployment days. Deployment days include days where an observer was onshore and was not being charged to the vessel. So they did not— yeah, the vessels wouldn't have been charged, but the observer for us was still deployed on their contract.

The average cost of those invoice days was $450 for full coverage.

Yeah, and that, that was a total decrease from 2022, in 2025 from 2024. Invoice costs decreased by 1.9% and invoice days decreased by 11.7%.

Looks like we lost the presentation, so just one moment. I'm sorry.

Dani, is this the one that the public sees, or is this one— oh, this is just ours. Okay, so I think we're still connected publicly. Okay, so we can, we can continue and we'll just work on our end. So thanks.

Um, the electronic monitoring full coverage fleet. Um, this fleet makes up the Amendment 80, the AFA fleet, where they supply their own EM equipment on board the vessels to monitor, assist the observers with monitoring. So it might be a camera out on the Amendment 80 deck for heli- deck sorting, the cameras on the salmon bins, and the AFA fleet. So it— that these vessels act as their own EM providers and arrange these services on their own, and we do not currently collect any of that cost information from the industry for the full coverage fleet. So I just wanted to point that out.

That's usually a big, um, black hole as far as when we are reporting costs. There's a large cost on industry that is not recorded because they are paying that on their own.

And this is just again about the TrolleyM 2025, was our first regulated program. Shoreside processors now have observers there to monitor the offloads. So for the, for the full coverage shoreside processors, those costs Those observers have always been included in the invoices for full coverage. The Alaska Regional Office, though— sorry, I'm mixing myself up. So for the full coverage EM review, the Alaska Regional Office is now collecting a fee, and I believe that was mentioned earlier, that that is a new cost fee that they are administering.

Administering to the vessels that are fishing full coverage trillium.

Now I'm switching over to the partial coverage fleet. Total expenditures this year, or 2025, was just slightly under $2.5 million for 1,551 days. That comes to an average cost of $1,600 per invoice, and that is actually a $38 per day reduction from last year, which is the first time that rate has actually come down. And this cost, it's inclusive of the cost of the observer's daily rate because it's a government contract. We reimburse travel costs, non-employee day cost, and then it also pays the contract for running the ODDS help desk for observer and EM deployments.

And these are just breaking down just how we funded some of the partial coverage EM costs. We had received some external funding, about $2 million in community-directed spending, to replace aging hardware and to outfit some new EM vessels. So that's included in some of these funds that are listed here. So expenditures for the fixed gear EM were $1.5 million, and expenditures for trawl EM deployments totaled just slightly over $1 million.

Okay, I'm going to switch over to Jeff. I'm going to try to go through these pretty quickly, so please feel free to stop me. And if you want any further clarification, quick recap, just highlighting changes since the 2024 EEP. There really were no large-scale changes to the deployment design. The really only big change, as was mentioned before, was that we had the trial EM transition from the EFP to the regulated program.

Program. So one of the big noticeable changes in this is that during the EFP, one-third of GOA trips were monitored shoreside. This changed to having all those trips monitored shoreside by observers, and also that those trips were not— those vessels were not able to opt out of trawl EM on a trip-by-trip basis. If you're fishing with plastic gear targeting pollock, all those trips are going to be under trawl EM. And I'll talk about this a little bit later too, but we made some changes to the odds logging system with how vessels that log trips for the observer strata, that we essentially removed vessel-level cancellations.

So I'll talk a little bit more later on what those— the results of that change.

So these are the strata that we had this year. Again, these were not different from last year. In full coverage, we— even though a lot of analyses are going to be regarding our partial coverage observer program evaluations, I do want to still— we want wanna talk about full coverage, we have our traditional full coverage strata. This is where most of our trips that are taken by vessels that either have 1 or 2 observers and all of them are monitored, as well as we have the EM trawl Bering Sea portion of trawl EM. And the partial coverage strata, we have 4 observer strata split by gear type, whether they're using fixed gear, pot, hook and line versus trawl, and whether they fish in the Bering Sea, Aleutian Islands, the Gulf of Alaska.

Kind of a similar story, but it's with EM, but it's whether you're using EM fixed gear, EM trawl, and where you fish. And then additionally, just want to acknowledge that we have a zero coverage strata. These are trips by vessels that fish with jig gear, fish under 40 feet, and no monitoring occurs in that stratum.

New this year, we're trying to highlight kind of— it's using this scorecard to talk about all the evaluations that are under Chapter 3. I think that just kind of want to highlight that, like, we're showing all the goals that were met, uh, were shown in green here, and the goals that were not met are shown in purple. So by and large, I think we met most of monitoring goals for this year. So I'm going to talk a little bit through each of these very rapidly, but as far as the budget is concerned, this is kind of a data quantity— did we get as many samples as we wanted— and the rest are kind of more so related to to kind of sample quality. Did the samples that we get meet the expectations that we set in the ADP?

So as far as partial coverage monitoring costs, you know, again, these were reported on by Lisa just previously, but overall, we underspent what we planned in the ADP by 3.6%. And so what we're trying to show here, this is new in Table 3.1 for this year, is that we are trying to highlight how much of our monitoring is split by costs that were paid for by the ex-vessel fees, but also wanted to highlight in this year the external funds, the external funding that was helping to support our monitoring in the EM program. And so, as was previously mentioned, we had $2 million that have been— that were spent since 2023. And it's my understanding, at least, that this money is going to be completely spent this year.. So I just do want to acknowledge that the amount of additional funding that's going to fund our EM trawl, we do need to kind of consider how that's going to be supported in the future.

So previously we were looking at kind of the data quantity here, but I also want to talk about here how much do we actually get from the money that we spent. And one kind of the big story this year as far as what— why we're not able to meet this goal is that we, during the ADP, we were not able to get a super accurate estimation on how many monitoring days you would actually get. So we, even though we actually underestimated fishing effort, we overestimated how many monitored days we would get, and this is kind of across the board in the At-sea Observer and in the EM Strata. So we'll talk about this a little bit later as to why this is the case, but there are kind of two big things this year. One of them One was the how we are accounting for, how we count sea days.

We had a slight transition between 2024 and 2025, and that we changed from a half-day accounting to an hourly accounting for at-sea observer days. And then also, we also, there's a monitoring effect where when vessels are monitored, that those trips are shorter. And so these were things that we noticed during the course of 2025. 5. And so we did make some corrections for the 2026 ADP.

That is, in this, uh, the ADP that's currently on the water now, we should not be overestimating the fishing durations of monitored trips. So we were ultimately unable to spend, uh, to deploy on 121 base days that were purchased. And so this is partially what's kind of why we're seeing that we spent pretty close to what we budgeted, but we weren't able to get as much as planned. So as far as looking at a full coverage summary here, we're expecting to have 100% monitoring. We were able to achieve that in full coverage, and so it's, you know, well over 2,500 drips that were occurring in the full coverage strata, and we met our expectations that we were going to monitor all of them.

Now, looking in the partial coverage strata, we met all of our monitoring goals as far as the coverage rates that we expect to be meeting the ADP. We do expect some variation around what we expect, so those coverage rates that are shown for a strata is in that one column there. And what we realized is shown just to the right of that, and all the at-sea observer strata, we met our monitoring rates that we were expecting. We had some discrepancies in our EM fixed gear and EM trawl GOA strata, so we were slightly under in the coverage rates achieved the EM fixed-year GOA stratum. And in EM trial GOA, we don't really have an expectation aside from having 100% monitoring here.

I would just note that there was this one offload that was not monitored shoreside by an observer, but this is something that we don't really expect to happen very often in the future. It's just really a miscommunication issue that we do expect to make improvements on going forward.

So as far as trying to explain why the Anfyc Sea of Gulf of Alaska stratum had a lower monitoring rate than expected, it's at least partially gonna be explained by just kind of dumb random chance that when the ODS program was selecting trips, that it selected trips at a slightly lower rate, selected them at a 9.34%. It's within kind of our expectation for randomness, but it was, just wanna acknowledge that it was slightly lower than what we would have hoped.

Previously I mentioned that we made some changes to ODS and how that works in 2025. Really kind of the long story here is that in 2023 and 2024, we had different kind of logging rules where when vessels were selected for logged trips, they were able to cancel those trips, thereby making the monitoring that they achieve occur on subsequently logged trips afterwards. This resulted in a delay of monitoring. So we made this kind of a big issue in the previous 2024 annual report. And so I just wanted to highlight here that we were able to remedy this issue with the changes that we made to the odds this year.

And I think that overall we were able to make sure that we are not only having the monitoring achieved when it happens, but we also had a lot fewer cancellations that did occur. So just want to highlight some of the successes that we made this last year. Last year.

So, when we're talking about sample quality, we want to make sure that the samples that we do get are distributed through time that match when the fishery occurs and also do this through space. So, really, the only thing I want to highlight here is that, as it was previously mentioned, the EM fixed-gear kōa stratum ended with a lower rate at the end of the year, and this kind of was going out throughout the course of the year,, but it was really at the end of the year when this occurred. So as far as temporal distribution of our samplings occurring this year, it was really just limited to our EM strata where we had some slight issues.

When you're looking at things spatially, well, the colors on the screen don't look super good, so, but all you have to know about this year is that we have very little spatial patterns. So where our samples were distributed through space, we really saw no large-scale issues. So I think part of this has to do with some of the changes that we made in odds as well, that because the sampling is being achieved when and where we want to, that this is why we didn't really see any issues at least with the— the Ahtsi observer strata this year.

What we're trying to show in these slides here is like we were trying to evaluate both spatially and temporally, did our samples— were they distributed through each of our strata when we expected them to? So the big key takeaway here is that, as I mentioned before, we had slightly fewer samples collected than we expected to, and this really manifested in the emphyxia goa stratum. It's in the bottom right facet. That we had slightly less coverage through that stratum as you would have expected. What we were evaluating here is we want to make sure that trips are either monitored or nearby monitored trip in space and time.

And what we saw this last year is that all of our samples were distributed through space and time that we would hope, that there's no bias in one time or space being overrepresented or underrepresented in our samples. But as far as kind of the quantity of the numbers of trips that were monitored or nearby in a monitored trip in space and time, that we were a little bit lower in that yanfuxiagoa strata than expected because we had lower than expected total numbers of trips monitored.

And lastly here, one of the things we also try to evaluate is when vessels are monitored, unmonitored, we would hope that those trips fish in a very similar way, and that is that the inferences that we can we make from observed trips should be valid and be used for the trips that are unmonitored. And so we do this evaluation every year, and we do kind of see some trends. And so what we see in the observer-fixed yoga stratum is, at least in this year, that those trips are shorter. Additionally, that those trips, when observed, had more species and a lower dominance of the most common species. So these are, at least with having shorter trips, this is something we've seen in this strata kind of year over year.

And this is what we saw in this last year was that monitored trips were 15% shorter when monitored than unmonitored. That's what's really kind of being shown in the purple highlighted boxes. What our orange box is showing here is that in our Hatziyev strata is that even though it's not statistically significant for some of these other strata that we do generally have shorter trips durations in our at-sea observed strata when they're monitored. And this is partially what contributed to what we saw earlier where we had fewer days monitored than expected. Part of this has to do with because of the fact that we're not accounting for this monitoring effect.

What we did in 2026 was we did account for these monitoring effects. That is, we used the delta between the difference in the duration between when trips are monitored versus unmonitored to apply a correction so that we we aren't overestimating monitoring duration when we're doing our ADPs. You also want to evaluate the timeliness of the EM data review, and so this is really regarding the EM fixed-year strata. In previous years, we had some issues with timeliness for the review as far as how long it takes for the reviewers to review the data. We saw some improvements or or at least no worsening of that timing this year.

So that's definitely good to see. I just do want to acknowledge that we did have some additional issues where after review was completed, that it did take some time for those data to make it into the CATCH accounting system due to a coding glitch. This also happened in the previous year, but it was a different glitch that happened this year. But that being said, we have better mechanisms to try to prevent this in the future.

Really quickly, I want to go over some of our conclusions in Chapter 4. I'm not going to go through these tables too much, but these were touched on a little bit by some of Lisa's summaries, but Tables 3, 4.3 here is showing how much monitoring was achieved for the both retained and discarded catch. Table 4.3, this is in the Gulf of Alaska. This, again, in the Gulf of Alaska, we have a larger component of this fishery within the partial coverage strata. So as far as the total monitoring that's achieved in the Gulf of Alaska, it's less here than you're gonna see in the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands.

But this is mostly for your reference to kind of see another way to cut where is the monitoring distributed based off of the kinds of vessels that fish and the kind of programs that are happening, whether it's with trawling or with rockfish. So looking at the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands here, you'll notice that the total percentage of monitoring in this— in the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands is very, very high compared to the Gulf of Alaska.

Finally, just want to give a couple updates on what we evaluate with fixed-gear EM image quality. Again, when these vessels are fishing, we want to make sure that the the quality of that video review, the video reviewers that they mark, that we can give immediate feedback to the vessels to make sure that we can make the most of that data that's being recorded on those hard drives. So we saw a slight dip in the image quality in 2025 relative to the previous years where we saw kind of a year-over-year improvement in the overall image quality. So this is going to be something that we're going to be focusing on. I think that I would just note that this lower proportion of high image quality I think had more to do with a fewer number of vessels.

So it's not going to be, I think, a widespread issue. But it's something that we should hopefully try to make some directed efforts to improve compliance with the guidelines that we have in place of making sure that the cameras and EM systems are being used as intended.

This is instead of looking at how much video review was of high quality, this is looking at overall by each vessel, how many vessels had issues. And we've seen improvements over the years with the Longline and POT EM systems that vessels generally have fewer issues and that has been improved over time. And so newly this year we're showing also withdrawal, which is shown in purple. So again, this is the first year of the EM withdrawal program that's being regulated. Reported that these vessels take a lot of trips, and so, you know, two-thirds of those chal— even chal vessels had at least one issue reported, but I would just note that a lot of those vessels, even though they fish a lot of trips, only had maybe 1 to 2 issues per vessel.

And so we do expect to see improvements in future reporting that we have fewer issues for each of these vessels, but what we're going to be considering maybe other ways of trying to report kind of the incidence of issues with the Trawl Program.

We'll pause for a question. Ms. Kimball. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair. I know you're rolling along, Mr. Mayhew, but in the appendix, I was trying to remedy this at the FMAC as well, that it notes of the 6,000-plus halls in 2025, 99% of those halls had medium or high data quality.

So you can still have high or, or medium data quality and have usable data, but still have issues, I guess. And so—. Correct. Okay, so this is just noting there were issues in the first year of this program, and is there a feedback mechanism to, to help vessels understand? Because they may just understand they're getting good usable data and not know what the problem is.

What's the feedback mechanism for them to improve on that statistic?

Thank you for the question, Ms. Kimball. Yeah, through the Chair, I unfortunately am not the best person to answer that question, but I think it's something that we can try to get back to you. I do know with the Fix Your AIM program that we generally have, you know, automated messages sent to vessels when we do have— when the reviewers are able to complete the review that they can give that feedback. But I don't know if you have any further on that. Yeah, they also are— there is EM service provider portal or something for all the EM vessels.

They get automated emails to whoever is listed as a contact for that, and all of these issues go directly to them the minute they're logged. The only problem we're finding is we're never sure if it's the actual captain who's listed or if it's the vessel owner. And if it's the vessel owner, does that actually get back to the captain to resolve the problem?

Thank you.

Good afternoon, Madam Chair, members of the My name is Jacqueline Smith. I'm a special agent with NOAA Fisheries Office for Law Enforcement.

First, I want to touch on our annual a-season observer operation that we do in Dutch Harbor. We do it every year in February. It's a very opportune time to encounter most of the catcher processors, at least. Some of the catcher vessels maybe not as frequently, but we have coverage in Dutch Harbor that would address some of those issues. This operation focuses mostly on sexual assault and sexual harassment of fishery observers, hostile work environment, any general safety type issues that we might see, interference and sample biasing, and failure to abide by catcher processor operational requirements.

And during this operation, we work closely with Workplace Violence Prevention and Response, the Observer Program, and Sometimes we will work with, um, the wildlife trooper who's stationed out there.

Want to touch on some of our statements that cover the highest priorities for the Office of Law Enforcement. The safety and security of observers are always going to be our highest priority. Our numbers don't have significant— or I wouldn't say significant— we don't have a high rate of sexual assault inside sexual harassment of observers in 2025, but that doesn't mean that it didn't happen, and it's not insignificant. Even one act of violence or harassment towards an observer is way too many. We do want to touch on food and accommodations, where we saw a rate of 2.42% of observer days.

Safety, which was 1.23%, and hostile work environment, which was 1.17% of observer days. And again, these are all potential violations. They're not yet verified. And then under the gear equipment requirements, our highest category was observer sample station with a rate of 5.24% of observer trips with a potential violation.

Other notable rates in some of our other, other categories would be under operational requirements.. For CMCP violations, we had a rate of about 15%, but then we, when we broke it down between the Bering Sea, Aleutian Islands, and the Gulf of Alaska, it was 11.74% reported in the Bering Sea side as opposed to 27.32% of offloads on the Gulf of Alaska side. Other rates that we wanted to report on would be under our false reporting subcategory. Category, which was 3.32% of offloads, marine mammal subcategory, which is 2.26% of reported marine mammal interactions, and the Gulf of Alaska salmon bycatch category, 2.01% of offloads, and catch weighing, which is 1.51% of hauls. I do want to note that for the Gulf of Alaska salmon bycatch, these numbers are relevant to the shoreside processor and catch weighing would be pertinent to the catcher processors.

I'm gonna just go really brief over this slide because at this point we only have 2 solid years under our new database, so it's gonna take a couple years for us to have really relevant data where we could really examine trends over time.

This is a table adapted from Table 5.3 that's actually in in the report. It's noting the investigative status of the statements in some of our highest priority categories. So observer safety and work environment, interference with duties and operational requirements, and gear and equipment requirements. So for observer safety and work environment and interference of duties, both of those categories, we still have about half of them that are still in an open status and we're actively investigating. And for operational requirements and gear and equipment, we have about a third of them still open.

Last thing I want to touch on is the cooperative relationships that we have with the fishing industry. Prior to the start of 2025, we held several individual outreach meetings with different vessel companies. During these meetings, we cover what we have seen in the entire fleet or that particular management program, and then we work closer and we to talk about what we've seen on those specific vessels. These meetings are completely voluntary. We did have fewer meetings in 2025 than we did in 2024, and we also did a couple of trainings on ensuring a safe work environment for observers.

And then in 2025, 50 of the statements that we had received for investigation resulted in compliance assistance rather than the issuance of a formal enforcement action. So with compliance assistance, that means that we are able to confirm that an actual violation occurred, but due to mitigating factors, we decide to give them the compliance assistance rather than giving a written warning, some resettlement, or sending it up to an attorney for prosecution.

Um, that completes my portion of the slide, so I am ready to take any questions.

Thank you. And Miss Thank you, Miss Smith, for your presentation. I, I should have asked you this on the side, but there's no opportunity to, to fill the— I don't know what the title was— the OLE Observer Program liaison position that they— you used to have to work with plants on the CMCPs. That person was part of the people that got fired from all of that. Is there any plan to fill that person?

It was a great liaison, and I'm trying to work hard to tell people who to work with now on any of those kind of things that are, especially with a new EM program. So I think people have been relying on the region to try to help interpret regs, but if you have any, anything on, you know, how we fill that role, if it's not a person, but that what they did, um, that would be really helpful. Through the chair, thank you for your question, Ms. Kimball. Um, at this time, I don't know what the status is for that position. It's a shame that it was lost because that employee was a former observer and worked closely with the Office of Law Enforcement as a contractor before coming on to us permanently.

So that's a decade of experience lost now. Um, so in the interim, until we can decide what we're going to do with that position, um, I would be the best contact, and then I can work with my counterparts to decide who would be able to answer some of the questions specific to whatever reports it's in.

Okay, the next section is our NIMS recommendations, which are also included in the FMAC report and the AP report, I believe, that will be coming to you. So I'm going to kind of go over these these fairly quick, but please feel free to ask any questions.

So as far as deployment design, we're going to continue the proximity allocation that Jeff had in one of the slides. Nothing has changed. And the one— the final bullet on this slide, though, we will— we are completing a CIE review, Center of Independent efforts review, um, June 16th, 17th, and 18th, um, on the annual deployment plan. So when that report becomes available, if there are any suggestions, we will absolutely incorporate that into next year's ADP.

Um, we're, we're recommending that we maintain our current stratification based on the monitoring that are all listed here. No change from 2025 to '26.

Improve trip closing in ODDS for 2027. This— we had, we had some issues where some trips remained open and it was unclear whether the trips were taken, whether they were not. So We are trying, we're considering figuring out a way, and these were just some ideas. They may not be the best ideas, but we, we haven't settled on anything. We're gonna definitely communicate with industry, make it simple, possibly even a yes or no question when they're finalizing closing their trip.

Was it realized? Yes or no? Did you— something very simple. We will definitely keep it open. We will take suggestions.

Questions, try to do outreach as much as possible if we come up with anything that's going to be complicated.

Um, EM video review, no changes, just continue our collaboration with our, um, PECS states on the video review progress and continue collaboration with them, which the second bullet we've pretty much completed prioritization rules that can be used to allocate review efforts.

It's, as you saw, we did 74% of our full coverage trawl EM. We would like to achieve 100%, but if we can't, we've come up with ways to randomly stratify the sampling across so that it's not everything at the beginning of the year that's sampled, and everything at the end of the year is unsampled because we ran out of time. So we've already developed some ideas that we are going to put in place to make sure that it's fully sampled randomly across the whole year.

And in fixed-year EM, just maintain our current EM selection pool of 181 vessels. We'll continue to prioritize placement with all the criteria we have been using in the past, no changes there, but the last two bullets are a way for us— I don't know if you noticed that in that first slide when I was talking about EM, we had under 181 vessels that are in the pool but only 120, 125 fished. We have a large amount of boats that are not fishing. They're using equipment, they're using space, and we're trying to come up with a way that if they have not fished in the last 3 to 5 years, because they're permanently in our EM pool, we're trying to figure out a way to remove them from that pool so it opens up spots for vessels who are actively fishing.

EM development, we're going to continue to collaborate with industry partners on EM development cost efficiency projects, continue to work with FMAC, PCFMAC, and potential grant proposals from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. And then for budget planning during the development of the ADP, we, we have requested advance notice by the processing accepting trolley and pollock deliveries from catcher vessels, if they could notify of us of their needs for their partial coverage observers in the upcoming year by the November 1st deadline that is in the regulatory language. But that regulatory language is just their intent, their intent to fish, not absolute gonna fish. And when everyone opts in, because if they don't do that November 1st notification, they cannot accept deliveries from trallium vessels. And in the Western Goa, it's very uncertain.

So everyone opts in. We plan budget-wise to put plant observers at all of those plants, which takes away from our sea days. So we're trying to figure out the best way to be as efficient as possible but also be flexible, and it's very hard to have both. So we are just requesting that all these processing plants keep us in their communications as much as possible on their intent to, um, whether they're going to need these observers at those plants or not.

And then this was just, um, a thank you to, um, all the AFSC, Alaska Region, and PECC staff who had worked on this annual deployment report and our annual deployment plan, and then all the observers, observer providers, captains, crew members, EM providers, video reviewers, and agency staff who make the fishery-dependent data collection possible.

Yes, Ms. Kimball.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Back on the slide 45, and it's under fixed gear EM, but, but correct me if I'm wrong, this— you're also looking at this for trawl gear EM. Is the plan to create some criteria around removing vessels from an EM program if they're not— this slide says causing data loss. I guess that could also just mean not actively fishing, which is what you presented. Are we looking at some criteria for both those programs so that we're using the most systems that we can on people that are actively fishing and, and keeping up with their vessel monitoring plans?

Yes, through the Chair, Ms. Kamal. Yes, we actually have two categories. We have a Notice of Improvement pool. Those are the data loss boats. Then we have the boats just that are inactive.

Okay. We are working, um, with General Counsel to be sure we are following it as it was outlined, um, what we are able to do. And yes, then we will begin to act on those. We've been foiled in our plan to move forward with anything in the last 2 years, just at the timing of the shutdown. We, we've lost all progress last year on that Notice of removal pool.

By the time we returned, it was too late. So we still have that. We're going to review it again this year, and we will see who we've got, because there's already a process outlined in our— I think in the annual deployment plan on how we would remove data loss vessels. But the, the ones who are inactive are a whole different process.

Follow-up, Madam Chair. But you expect to give us more to look at under the 2027 ADP on that? Okay, thank you.

Mr. Thumm. Yeah, thank you, Madam Chair. Yeah, Jeffrey, Lisa, the— I think you mentioned earlier in terms of who pays for these programs that the $2 million that was provided for equipment and other things on EM is running out sometime in 2027. Would you care to speak to what happens when that money runs out or what kind of gap it leaves in coverage or equipment?

I think it's a question of Tom, um, through the Chair. I don't know if we know what happens, but I can characterize is this $2 million is spent for EM only, but it was strictly for the systems that were new for new vessels and for the replacements of old systems. And so it is basically an upkeep cost that we haven't really been super able to characterize in previous years. And so it's really kind of new this year that we're kind of able to characterize that. B funds have always, you know, at least in the last few years, have always been used for other maintenance costs.

And so it's just the kind of general upkeep, but not so much for the equipment replacements or for new installations. And so I think that, you know, since 2023, where we've had, you know, this money being spent down was meant to really replace a lot of those aging systems. That's where the bulk of that $2 million has been spent. And so it's something that we need to, you know, we'll have to sit down and kind of talk about, like, what's kind of the status of of the equipment that we currently have on our vessels. I'm hoping that, you know, this is something we have to look at, but I'm hoping that we have with our EM vessels, you know, a fairly new set of equipment that should hopefully last us for a couple years.

But that being said, you know, there's always going to be some vessels that will need to have replacements. And so given that the fee funds were really meant to support all of the monitoring, I don't know if we're going to have to start to expect that the fee funds will additionally have to pay for these costs that have historically in the last few years just not been— the fee funds haven't been used for EM system replacements. And so that's being able to at least see how much has been spent in the last few years and maybe looking at how many vessels get updated. We're going to have to kind of look at that pretty closely because it is going to be— without any external funding, it will be a significant additional burden to our fairly already burdened EM fee revenues.

Thank you for that.

Okay, and then I just had a few other updates that we had provided to the FMAC, um, budget update. Um, not too much changed. We had a financial system established in 2024, still a little bit difficult, but we are definitely figuring things out. And our budget team at the AFSC did some amazing work this last year to help me work with Treasury on all of the partial coverage fees that we collected. And I was able to backfill a table in the report as far as costs for all the sequestration fees that we were missing since this new financial system that we are using went into place.

It was kind of a black hole. We weren't sure what we were getting, but we were able to get all of that clarified. We've got final numbers, and in addition, we were— we— they're there, they're present, and they are on their way to us. So there is no letter requested this year as far as getting our, our money sent to us. So we appreciate the assistance that you guys had provided for the previous years on that.

And this— here's just the numbers. The greens, what's already here. That, that bottom one, deobligation from past contract, was one that was stuck last year, and we've got it all. We already got carryover, and the ones in black are this year's, the '23-'24 fee sequestration fee fees, and then we were able to collect $2.975 million in fees this year. So we are awaiting that chunk in the, um, in the, in the black letter numbers up there.

And once I get that $2.975 million, I will have the 2025 sequestered observer fee amount.

Um, the only thing that, other than the dates that have changed up there, the big one is the projected fee revenue of $3.6 million for next year. That, that is what we are hoping to achieve next year.

These are some projects that we just wanted to make industry and people aware of. There's—. Observers are taking photos. They've added shark, a new shark, unusual shark species to the observer's ID guides. PECA genetic fin clips are already completed this year, and the sunflower sea star now has its actual species code, and observers will request those for ID purposes.

Uh, the NIMS confidentiality, uh, team is still working, and they recently put out a survey, um, and we're waiting for that, uh, survey information to come back to us as far as proposed proposals of different policies that they're going to hold us to. These— I'm not going to— these have already been presented, so I'm not going to run through these at all. The, the questions on the LEED Level 2 and the other ones that had come in public comment did not fit into this category due to the larger regulatory actions that will be taken to alter those, which is why they were not included in the on our list.

Uh, that one's from the region. And then this was something that we just shared, um, with all of industry to get the word out. This is above us. This is nothing we have requested. This is coming from NPS headquarters.

And we realize that this is gonna mean a lot of complication, um, for the industry members working through any public-facing application within NOAA, which is for the Observer Program. It's the ODS program. Program that industry may need a Login.gov account to access those applications. It will also affect many of the public-facing applications at the region as well.

Yes, Ms. Kimball, you see my little hand.

Thank you, Ms. Thompson. I mean, we had the FMAC meeting and they expressed concern. Council will see that in their report, but do you have any other updates? I mean, this really talks about potentially having it deployed in mid-2026, and it is mid-2026. I'm quite concerned about how this might affect the fleet and their ability to log trips at sea or in remote ports.

Anything further on this? Through the chair, Ms. Kimball, I had When we presented to the ADP on Tuesday, a lot of people had questions as well, so I had pinged our IT. There is a lot going on behind the scenes as far as they've asked us— our IT department has asked us to list all of the public-facing applications that may be affected by this. They are doing a huge data collection. They're already hearing, I think, from a lot of concerned constituents on this new requirement.

Government. What that says, we, our office, will get told we will implement it by mid-June, but we have a year to implement. So we are hoping within— if they put the force that down, that we will still have time to push back on that required implementation.

Oh, and then we just have, um, this final— I think this may be the final slide, um, annual reporting for 2027. So with the fewer meetings, um, we were thinking about deploying some form of an online dashboard to get a lot of this data, but when we started to develop that, we realized that it was going to be a large increase in our workload. So we took a step back and we agreed we would not change how we're reporting, but there will be one change, is that, um, when we present to the FMAC before the council meeting, the actual written draft written report will not be available. We will still give a full presentation with all the details, but there will just not be that physical draft to review beforehand. Hand.

Once we report out on that presentation, then the draft will become available, um, after the May council meeting, and a second opportunity to provide input will still be there, um, in the fall during the draft ADP, uh, presentation as well. So we will not lose input.

Thank you, Miss Kimmel. Thank you, and I appreciate the agency thinking about this. Is the intent though, and if we won't have the annual report in hand, we'll have a detailed slide deck that provides that same information. Would— is the intent that that is still able to be provided in advance of the meeting such that people can form public comment? Okay.

Yes, through the council, Ms. Kimball. Yes. And my second question, Madam Chair, was, you know, the council's, I think, multiple times now supported the idea of doing an abbreviated annual annual report. I realize the dashboard looked like more work, not less, so that's kind of being scrapped. But, but is there still any thought to creating a more condensed or abbreviated annual report that would save some time on your end?

Or are we just going to stick with the same workflow?

Through the chair, Ms. Kimball, we would— we absolutely would welcome any kind of abbreviated reporting that we could do. Um, we're gonna wait to see the feedback that we get from the CIA review. And if they say you are doing what you should, go forth. Um, we will then start to think about a condensed version.

Thank you. And one last question then, is the CIA review primarily or only on, uh, the deployment on the settlement plan, like the scheme, the proximity allocation scheme that we have in place over the past couple years, or is it on other aspects as well?

Thank you for the question, through the Chair. Yes, it will be primarily focused on the allocation methods because it is a new methodology. We do want to get kind of the sign-off from the CIE on that. It's, you know, valid way to, you know, deploy our monitoring resources. Another component of it will be on some aspects of the evaluations that we did present here and to the council.

So those are going to be kind of the two— it's really, we want to think about it, some key components of the ADP and annual report. That's excellent. Thanks.

Thank you very much for the presentation. Are there any other questions, Council members?

Seeing none, thank you for all of your work.

And I think we'll, we'll try to get through the FMAC report and the AP report, and then we will break for the day to take our executive session, and we will start tomorrow morning with with public testimony on C1.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Um, I will go ahead and, and start while the PowerPoint gets pulled up. Um, so everything I'm going to speak to is included on your e-agenda in the FMAC report. Um, the purpose of this meeting was to receive the same presentation that, that you all received, but, uh, in some, some, uh, some more depth and to receive additional monitoring-related updates, uh, as you all received, and then provide recommendations to, uh, to NIMPS and then have some of the committee members provide any of their updates, uh, related to monitoring to the committee as well. Um, on the, on the slides, you'll just see the list of committee members that we have now, both on the FMAC and the PCFMAC.

Um, let me— yes, I have slide control now, I think. Yeah, um, those are our committee members. And as far as the committee's annual report recommendations, um, they— the committee supported continuing the proximity allocation method and the strata that that's been used for the past few years and continuing that for the 2027 ADP, and all of those recommendations are shown in the annual report. The committee also continued to support the zero select— the modifications to the zero selection pool that Ms. Thompson mentioned, and the FMAC had a recommendation for the enforcement section of the annual report to include whether or not the vessel or processor was able to resolve the issue described in those statements during the season, rather than kind of not knowing whether or not they were able to be dealt with right away. The committee also discussed how the, the cost of the full coverage portion of the program while those are decreasing, the committee noted that it was difficult to discern the impact of the movement of trawl CVs into the trawl EM program.

And so the committee was hoping that the report in future years could provide additional clarity on the costs overall, noting that there are some confidentiality restrictions there, but wanted to explore if there was a way to separate out those costs a little bit better.

At the meeting, we had, um, some public comment that brought attention to a discrepancy between the discard estimates of pollock in the AFA fleet, um, those reported by vessel operators and then those reported by the EM video reviewers. And the committee discussed this information, um,, and noted that during the trawl EM EFP, the vessel operators were generally overestimating their discards compared to the estimates that were received in the EM video review. So the discrepancy, um, hearing about this was, was surprising to the committee members, and they had 3 recommendations on this issue. The first was to improve communication pathways amongst the various bodies that were invol— involved in this to make sure that the vessel operators are aware of what they are supposed to be reporting. The second was to ensure that the Bessel logbook explanations were available to the EM reviewers so that they could have additional context for any of the discard events that they were seeing on the video.

And the third recommendation was to develop a formalized secondary blind review process for these, uh, for the EM video review discard estimates that may advance toward any enforcement actions. And with regard to that last bullet, agency staff did state that the, the EM video review methods that were being used to estimate discards, those methods have not changed since the EFP, and that some of the discrepancies that we were seeing may result from the vessel operators being able able to actually observe all of their discards, and the agency explained that the EM reviewers do already consider logbook information during their review, and they do have multiple reviewers involved in evaluating those discard estimates as part of their quality control procedures.

The committee— as Ms. Thompson noted, the committee was pleased to hear that they do not need to ask the council to send a letter regarding the sequestered funds. So that's a, that's a win for us this year. Um, and the committee wanted to ensure regarding the potential changes in annual reporting structure that there would still be time for discussion of the previous year's performance and the types of information that are included in the annual report, um, to provide recommendations on potential improvements documents and have that, that time for additional recommendations in October before any final ADP decisions are made, and to be able to react to the ADP recommendations in October if there were any issues that arose before the final version of the report.

The committee discussed with glimpse how this exactly would work, but the committee didn't necessarily indicate support either way on that, so they just received the information.

As Ms. Thompson noted, the committee, uh, expressed significant concern about the multi-factor authentication and recommended that the council send a letter to DOC highlighting the challenges and requesting reconsideration for Alaska fishery participants. So that was something that I believe was also noted in the AP report, just this extensive concern.

The last topic of discussion at the FMAC were just some updates from committee members related to monitoring. We had 3 different groups of people, or people provide information on monitoring projects or issues that had come up, and these are described further in the report, but we had a presentation on development of an EM project for the freezer longline fleet, a description of some of the preliminary findings of the Potcod catch handling project,, and then an update from our observer representative on the new shoreside plant sampling design. And he said he would provide, uh, further updates on that after the bee season to the committee. And the last slide I have is just regarding our scheduling for future meetings. We always have our PCF MAC meeting in September to review the draft ADP, and then, uh, Staff will be working with NIMPS and our committee chair to determine what we need as far as FMAC scheduling and prioritization of NFWIP proposals for EM projects.

So I'm happy to take any questions on the report. Thank you very much for the report, Ms. Cleaver. Are there any questions?

Yes, Ms. Kimball. Thank you. I don't have a question, Madam Chair. I just wanted to say thanks to Ms. Cleaver. She does a great job summarizing some really intense and detailed committee discussions.

And also just to note the updates from committee members on the work that they're doing on the side and with their own vessels and their own volition, including the agency partnering with them on doing it properly. But the pot cod catch handling project, the Freezer Longline project, looking at EM there, plant sampling designs. Like, the feedback that we get on those projects and the, the just industry work toward those things are really, really great to see. I also wanted to know, we're getting great feedback and input from our new observer representative that we were missing for a while on the committee. So I just wanted the council to know that we're grateful to that inclusion on the committee.

Really well engaged and really providing some great input on some hard issues. So just a comment and thanks to Sarah. Thank you, Ms. Kimball, and for your leadership and chairmanship on the committee.

So not seeing any other questions. Thank you so much, Ms. Cleaver. And that'll bring us to our AP report. And following the AP report, we will break for the day and go into executive session. So any members members of the public wishing to testify on C-1, please do sign up, um, before 8:00 AM tomorrow morning.

Thank you.

Good afternoon, Madam Chair, members of the council. For the record, my name is Chelsea Riddell, I'm the technical vice chair of the advisory panel, and I'm here to give the advisory panel report on C1, the Observer Program Annual Report. And since you're all on a short timeline, the majority of the AP motion is the— is identical to the FMAC report and the NIMS recommendations. So we will— I'll just read the additional bullet that the AP provided.

So the AP did acknowledge the receipt of the 2025 Observer Program Annual Report and appreciates the work that went into it. The AP supports the following recommendations from NIMS and/or the FMAC.

Um, under 5, the EM development, the AP did specifically support continued development of the Fraser Long Lines pilot EM project and continued support for the recent progress made on the Potcod catch handling EM project, which just differs from the FMAC in that they didn't signal specific support in a recommendation.

But that motion did pass 16 to 0, and with that, I will be happy to take any questions. Thank you very much for those. AP report. Are there any questions?

Seeing none, thank you.

Okay, so we will break for the day. Council members, please come back at 3:15, and I'll ask members of the public to clear the room, please, so we can— 4:15. I, I need to, I need to change my clock here. You guys know what I mean by now. So deal with it.

All right, we'll see you tomorrow morning at 8 AM. Okay, bye.