NPFMC 279 Day 3 - June 6, 2026

Good morning, everyone. So, we'll be beginning our day with public testimony on C1. It looks like we have 2 people signed up to testify, and then we'll move on to— we'll see if the council wishes to take action, and then we'll move on to our C2 agenda item.

So, we'll begin with Chad C. and Jim Armstrong, followed by Patty O'Donnell.

Chair Dovhenryka, members of the Council, my name is Chad See. I have with me Jim Armstrong, our technical advisor for FLC. We wanted to provide a few short comments today on the annual report, and then Jim is going to walk through very briefly a presentation we gave at the FMAC regarding our pilot EM project for our fleet. So again, my name is Chad See. I'm the executive director of the Freezer Online Coalition.

I'm also a member of the FMAC committee. I wanted to just comment briefly on the annual report. We supported the FMAC and the AP's recommendations on that annual report. Within that, we appreciate the update on the report on the cost for the full coverage fleet and its description of those of those costs for full coverage participants. That said, in reviewing the report, the top line decrease that's invoiced, uninvoiced full coverage costs really doesn't tell the story of the costs for full coverage participants.

And that was noted in the report in some ways in that the decrease is reflective of the TRAL-CV EM program implementation that removed a number of the observer deployments in 2025. With that said, for the rest of us, actual costs for that deployment of human observers on vessels continues to rise. We support the FMAC and the AP's recommendation for more clarity on costs for full coverage participants in future annual reports. So, second, we at the FMAC committee, we did present to have the opportunity to present on the Free Zone Alliance Coalition's EM pilot project on developing a, a, a EM project program for our fleet. We appreciate FMAC and the AP's continued interest in this project and for the engagement by the Alaska Region, FMA, and others in our work to get this effort off the ground.

In particular, we're excited to learn about the $150,000 in funding the Alaska Region was able to secure from NEMS headquarters for the installation of EM equipment on our vessels. As we move this forward. We understand the Alaska region's also been cleared to begin soliciting EM providers for this work here shortly. In our presentation, we walk through a draft roadmap for this project, which is something I attached when I signed up for testimony today. It's also available on the FMACS e-agenda, but I'm going to turn it to Jim, and he's going to walk through that briefly, and if there's any questions, we're happy to take those.

Thanks, Chad, and thank you, Madam Chair and members of council. Jim Armstrong, Trees Along Liners. So the document that Chad referred to, we're calling it our roadmap.

The council was made aware of our interest in pursuing EM for our sector at—. In a previous FMAC report. We've been working with the regional office throughout our development of this, and I need to highlight, Mr. Kerwin, our gratitude to your staff for all the support and just the positive—. We've got it, we're at the foot of the mountain now, so this is an ambitious project. We're going to basically explore how far we can get EM going on our vessels and if that creates opportunities for us.

So, so far it's been a lot of, a lot of just discussions, but by having a roadmap, it sort of is— we're trying to add some efficiency to those discussions so that we can point to something If people ask, have you thought of this, that, and whatever, we have and it's in the document. And as we reported to the FMAC, this overall project really consists of a lot of mini projects there. So the roadmap is— it's called a roadmap because we have milestones, about 11 milestones, or depending on how you want to slice and dice the first phase. Is just installation. And so the funds that we— that the regional office was able to get is going to be used for that.

We'll have EM systems installed on about maybe 5 of our vessels, and then we'll start the rest of that phase. It's just getting those things online, testing them, and making sure they're operating, figuring out camera angles. And then once that's all kind of settled down— and that part includes also the, the flow scale, so we'll have— that's just integrating EM with that will be a part of the installation. And then we'll start to see what we can do in terms of data collection. Um, uh, there are— that's really 90% of this is to test the functionality of EM for tallying our target Pacific cod catch.

And then as well as looking at methods, both in video review and on board with crew to try to, you know, set things up so that bycatch species identification can be as accurate as possible.. And then we also how to PSC and effort gear like hook counts and measures of fishing effort. So all of the things that onboard observers do, we're going to see, you know, how much of that can be covered by EM. And then Once we've— and part of it is also daily reporting, so we're going to have methods for that developed. And then once that's been set up, we'll move to an EFP phase.

So it looks like time's up, so I'll stop there and take any questions. Thank you both for your testimony. I'll see if there are any questions.

Seeing none, thank you for your time. Thanks. So Patty O'Donnell is our next and last testifier.

Good morning, uh, Madam Chair, members of the council. I spoke to This during B reports has to do with, uh, improving closing the, uh, odd strips. And, uh, it said consider requiring a landing report ID to be closed. And this is from the AP report. Uh, the problem we have with trying to close strips is there's a delay in getting the the fish ticket ID landing report into the odds system if you're doing it on a computer.

A lot of guys are calling in, having it closed, but my suggestion to make it easy— and I've battled with this for a few years trying to match fish tickets up with the odds trip number, and especially if you get, you know, a delay of 2 or 3 or 4 trips— is one, you need to change the the mechanism within ODS where you can change the date, uh, not, not the log date but the actual landing date, and make that stick. And as I said, the last day that, that doesn't happen. So you can do a couple of things, yeah, a system where we can get a landing ID report as soon as we, uh, swipe the card on a fish ticket before the offload is complete, then we have it. And we can attach it to our landing report, which we do an individual vessel landing report for ourselves so that we have it for the office when, when we're trying to keep up with things. And, and a system where we can attach the odds trip number to the fish ticket would be very beneficial.

That would make it easy for everybody, and then you'd know where you're at as far as which trip, which odds trip goes to which fish ticket. So that's been an issue for years. I mean, it's like doing the jigsaw puzzle at the end of the season trying to match everything up. So, like I say, a report ID upon delivery, odd strip number on the fish ticket, and then a mechanism where you can change in the odd system and put in your actual day of landing and it stays. And that's all I have in that.

Thanks. Thank you very much for your testimony. See if there are any questions.

Seeing none, thank you so much.

Yeah, that concludes our public testimony on C1. Uh, we finished our presentation yesterday, um, as well as received our FMAC report. And I'll see if the council wishes to take action. Yes, Miss Kimball. Thank you, Madam Chair.

I do have a motion.

Okay, we'll just wait a moment. It's okay until that gets onto the screen.

There it is. Uh, the motion reads, the 2025 annual report, given changes to the council's future meeting schedule, the council supports NOAA's proposal to provide relevant data to the council at the May council meeting to support recommendations on the following year's annual deployment plan, with the final annual report released prior to September. Overall, the council recommends an abbreviated annual report with a focus on clear plain language results on the projected and achieved observer or electronic monitoring coverage by sector and whether spatial and temporal distribution were achieved. Statistics on the percentage of actual catch observed by gear type in the Gulf and the BSAI as indicated on page 6 and tables 4-3 and 4-4 of the 2025 annual report. Identification in the executive summary of any notable changes from the previous year's deployment scheme and resulting changes in trends or conclusions as to their effectiveness.

Effectiveness, and an addition to the enforcement section to identify whether the vessel or processor was able to resolve the issue in season. On the 2027 Annual Deployment Plan, or the ADP, the Council supports the following recommendations for the 2027 ADP. For the partial coverage program, use the proximity allocation method except for pelagic trawl EM and the following strata for deployment: observer, EM fixed gear, EM pelagic gear, or pelagic trawl, fishery management plan areas of the BSAI and the Gulf of Alaska, and gear type fixed and trawl. For pelagic trawl EM, maintain 100% EM at-sea monitoring and the 33% sampling rate of EM deliveries by shoreside observers. Maintain the fixed gear EM selection pool of up to 181 vessels.

If needed, prioritize placement in the EM selection pool based on vessel size, fishing effort, minimizing data gaps, and cost efficiency. Present criteria for inclusion in the EM programs for review such that NMFS could remove or deny vessels that have not been actively fishing or have repeated issues causing data loss from the EM pool, provide a process to rem— oh, that's a typo. I have two things in there on the same thing. Continue to improve EM video review times with Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission and use prioritization rules to better allocate review effort to the fisheries, gear types, times, and areas most dependent on EM data for management. Present revisions to the zero selection pool, currently less than 40-foot fixed gear catcher vessels and jig gear, for cost efficiency purposes.

For pelagic trawl EM, ensure logbook explanations are available to EM reviewers to provide additional context for discarded pollock events. Develop a secondary blind review process for pollock discard events that may advance to enforcement actions and support an OLE focus on compliance assistance given early implementation of the program similar to the fixed gear EM approach. The council recommends sending a letter to the Department of Commerce on the planned transition to Login.gov multifactor authentication for all public-facing systems such as ODS beginning as early as mid-2026. The letter should highlight the challenges for Alaska fisheries participants given unreliable internet and cell service in some areas of rural Alaska and request reconsideration or accommodations. And with a second, I'll speak to it.

Thank you for the second, Ms. Vanderhoeven. Ms. Kimmel. Thank you for the second, uh, Ms. Vanderhoeven. I guess the first thing I would note is that under the annual deployment plan, that fourth bullet is repetitive with the fifth bullet, so an amendment would be welcome to remove the fourth bullet. Overall, I think we've received a really comprehensive annual report.

We know we're moving to a different schedule, so that's what I was trying to address in the first section of the motion. Um, we still, I believe, will get relevant data to provide, you know, meaningful input on the ADP, but we do need to adjust a little bit what we're getting because they can't provide a full— agency can't provide a full annual report prior to a May council meeting date. I did still, in that first part of the motion, identify kind of the major things that we want to see in an abbreviated annual report, and I think the council's been supportive in the past of trying to condense that to make it both less work and on more meaningful decision points for the council. In the ADP section, I didn't mention the CIE review. I think that was provided in the, in the annual report and in the presentation.

I'm excited for that CIE review. If people recall, you know, what we're doing here is mainly having full coverage on all Ketchum processors and the Bering Sea vessels on the trawl fleets. With few exceptions, and those exceptions remain in the Gulf of Alaska for partial coverage. But the ADP is really about how do we deploy partial coverage among those vessels that aren't in full coverage. And we've moved to a proximity allocation method, which was— to break it down, just how do we best use a fixed budget and deploy for both EM and observers in the partial coverage program to the best extent we can to get spatial and temporal representativeness.

So that we are sampling well and covering fleets, and that the fleets we do cover are representative of the vessels that are not covered. So that's the basis of what we're doing. I think what we've seen already, and I appreciate the report and the presentation calling it out, that we have moved in a positive direction by changing to that proximity allocation method. And I look forward to the CIE review to see if they have other recommendations or improvements on that statistical design. The other bullets here are really the, you know, NIMS recommendations.

They, they cover generally what the AP recommended. I am happy to see that we are looking to provide something in the next ADP on a process to remove or, or deny vessels from entry into the EM programs if they just aren't active. We're, we're kind of wasting resources there, and we've known that, and it's a difficult thing to pull somebody out of that program. But I appreciate the opportunity to look at that potential process in the 2027 ADP in the fall.

I think the last piece of the motion we, we heard about, I've already received several emails about the concern about moving to multifactor authentication for, for ODS. We don't want to provide a situation, I'm sure the agency doesn't, where, where vessels can't get into ODS or or log trips and then are non-compliant with our entire partial coverage system. And so I think just a letter trying to explain the circumstances in Alaska and, and doing that early, given that we potentially have a year for implementation, might be helpful in that regard. I'm sure I've missed something in terms of speaking to the motion, so I'd be glad to take questions.

Thank you for the motion. Are there any questions? Yes, Ms. Baker.

Thank you, Madam Chair, and I'm sorry, Ms. Kimball, you might have spoken to this, but I'm looking at the bullet under the ADP in terms of presenting revisions to the zero selection pool, and I'm just wondering, I feel like we've requested this maybe in previous years. Was there discussion at the FMAC, or is, is there, um, are you thinking that that might actually be possible. Um, and it was just always a capacity issue before, was my recollection, but can you please correct me on that if, if we think there's a good chance that, that a little bit of thinking could actually occur about that for the 2027 ADP? Thank you, Ms. Baker, for the question. And through the Chair, yes, I, I do think we're in a different position this year.

I sometimes add that in just to show that we're still paying attention to that request from both FMAC and the Council for a few years, but I think the Observer Program has provided notice that they will be able to provide something in the ADP, at least some possible changes to that zero selection pool. And I think it's somewhat in line with the things that the Council's mentioned, you know, vessels with very few trips, things like that, small capacity vessels that we could move into zero selection and then use our fixed resources on vessels that are actually doing more fishing. So I think we do— we are at a different place than we have been in the past, but I appreciate the question because I did not speak to that.

Thank you. Any other questions or amendments?

Yep, I think we have an amendment if someone would like to offer one.

Mr. Pamplin. Uh, thanks, Madam Chair. I move that we strike the 4th bullet under the 2027 ADP.

Thank you for the second, Mr. Ciccano.

Would you like to speak to your amendment? Thanks, Madam Chair. It sounds like it was just a typo. Ms. Kimball messed up.

We'll note that one. Doesn't happen often.

Okay, so any objection to that amendment?

Seeing none, that amendment passes without objection.

Any comments on the amended main motion?

Okay, seeing none. Thank you for all of your work on this, Ms. Kimball, and all of your leadership on the FMAC committee.

So, that's any objection. That motion passes without objection. Thank you. Okay, that brings us to our C2 agenda item. So we'll begin our Bering Sea Lucian Island specification presentations.

Good morning. I think the presenters are online, so we can get started. Hi, Madam Chair, members of the council. For the record, this is Anita Kroska, council staff. I'd like to introduce C2BSAI crab harvest specifications that will be presented by crab plan team co-chairs, Katie Paloff from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and Dr. Mike Litzow from NOAA Kodiak office.

They will provide an overview of the final stock assessments and harvest specifications for two stocks. The first being Aleutian Island golden king crab and the other Pribilof Islands golden king crab. They will also review other items found in the crab plan team report. And with that, I'll hand it over to them, and I will stay up here for just a few minutes just in case there are any issues with slide advancement. Go ahead.

Good morning. Can you hear me okay there? Yes, we can. Good morning. Okay, great.

Good morning. As Anita said, Katie Palof, co-chair of the crab plan team. So assuming I can advance our slides here, we'll get going.

This is where my technology—.

Anita, I wonder if I need you to advance them or not. I'm not seeing an advance and my arrows aren't working.

Oh, there you go. All right, the first couple slides that we have for you today are just kind of to provide everyone an overview of our annual crab assessment schedule and then just to remind everyone of our tier system for crab stocks. So for this schedule, as Anita already said, we have two stocks that we'll have a final review for at this meeting. And that is on an annual basis, we do Aleutian Islands golden king crab, and then on a triannual basis, we do Privilof Island golden king crab. And so those are the two stocks that we'll have a final assessment for.

In addition to final assessments at this meeting, we set up our proposed model runs, kind of what we're going to expect to see in the fall for our stocks that we assess then. And so we'll have a few slides on those two also here. Okay, let's see, for crab, we have a 5-tier system that's similar to that for groundfish. Most of our crab stocks lie in tiers 4 and 5, with the top like 3 being in tier 3, that being Tanner crab, snow crab, Bristol Bay red king crab, and Aleutian Islands Correct. The tier system really relies on the amount of information that we have for that stock and the, our ability to assess them with different, you know, modeling options, whereas in a Tier 5 stock, we really do not have much more information than just average catch in most cases.

So that may come up later when we talk about some of our crab stock specifications. This is kind of an overview of our May agenda. Those items that are in black font are those that we have slides on here in our report to you. The other items are things that we took up at our meeting, but that we do not have in our oral presentation, but they are in our minutes. And of course, as always, we can field any questions on anything else that the council may have that isn't in our presentation today, but is in our report.

So, as Anita said, we'll go through the final specs for those 2 stocks. We'll have a brief slide on We had quite a, a large discussion at our meeting on, um, kinasedis, or snow and Tanner crab hybrids, um, due to the large amount of those seen in the survey last summer. And then we'll do proposed model runs for the stocks that we'll see in September, and then one, uh, final slide just on our risk table progress.

So jumping right into Aleutian Island golden king crab, uh, this is a stock that we assess on an annual basis., and it is our— the only stock that we have that we do not have survey information, but we still do a Tier 3 assessment. It's based on fishery-only CPE and fishery and other fishery data. We had updates for, for the typical data streams for this stock going into this assessment. The fisheries were completed, which is, is great. Some years the fishery can still be ongoing when the assessment is done in you know, late April, early May for this meeting.

Their stock is assessed in two subareas with two separate models, but we set specifications for the stock as a whole. So these figures that you'll see here just show the CPE trends for the eastern Aleutian Island and western, and that's the EAG and WAG. And then to the right is the output from the model, which is the resulting biomass trends for both of those. Subareas. Also, just in general, as far as the status for these, in the EAG, the CPE went, went down some this year, but the overall biomass trend is fairly stable from last year.

In the WAG, the CPE trend did go up quite a bit, and there was some talk at the plan team as to if this was truly an increase in the stock or more of an increase in potential hyperstability, where folks are just fishing in the area where they know more crab are. So there was, there's some conversation there, no conclusions made, just some conversation about that large spike in CPE. And then the resulting biomass in the WAG did trend upward from resulting from that. So the author brought forward a couple different model options looking at different model improvements that we have asked for and the SSC have asked for. The CPT and SSC landed on model 26.0A, and this utilizes kind of a new approach to— not new, but an updated approach to standardizing CPUE that goes into the assessment model in addition to an update to the initial conditions of this model that more closely match when data became available than the previous one.

The SSC— the CPT and SSC both endorse— I guess you heard the report for the SSC. I'm used to giving them to the AP where they don't.

Heard, uh, endorsed our 25% ABC buffer, and this is consistent with previous assessments, um, and is due to the level of the different uncertainties that are present in this assessment, the biggest one of which is that there is no fishery independent data, there's no survey. That results in an OFL and ABC that you see listed there, um, and just wanted to mention that one of the The things that the, this assessment author, NADFNG, is working on in the future is working with the fleet to potentially redesign the cooperative survey efforts to go in a slightly different direction than what has been done in the past due to kind of the, the participation, but also due to the what we've now kind of deemed as maybe a higher need for this stock, which is trying to understand what's up and coming in the, in, in the population that we fish. So trying to get an idea of what's coming up in a recruitment index. So we might— you may see more about that in the future as that kind of works through ADFNG's kind of methodologies and figuring out what, what best we should bring forward. And I think with that, that's my final slide for Aleutian Island Golden, so I can pause to see if there's any questions.

I'm not seeing any questions. Thank you.

All right. Thank you. So the next talk is Pribilof Island. Golden King Crab, and this is a final safe. This is a stock that we assess on a triannual basis.

The last assessment was in 2023. It, there's no new model developments or data for this stock. It has been open annually by commissioner's permit at ADFNG with a GHL of 59 tons, which is below the ABC. There's pretty low participation, and therefore the catch data for this fishery is confidential, but does not reach the GHL. In 2023, the author did bring forward a couple different Tier 5 ways, either using catch data or using some years of the Eastern Bering Sea Slope Survey data to kind of assess, to calculate an OFL.

And the recommendation coming out of the last assessment was to use what we've termed as a groundfish Tier 5, just, and that's just how the OFL's being calculated. Where the OFL is being calculated by the average mature male biomass for these 6 years of survey that we do have survey data from the slope survey, and then utilizes natural mortality, which is borrowed from Aleutian Island golden king crab. So that results in this slide, this table here has more years than our typical specifications table, but that's just due to the fact that we're setting a 3-year specification. So you can see the specifications that were set back in 2023, um, and the specifications that are— we're recommending for the next 3 cycles are, are very, very similar. They're using the same methodology.

There's a slight difference. So, um, the OFL recommended went from 113.7 to 112.6, um, and that was just due to a small, um, error that was found in, in how the survey data was being overlaid in a geographic, you know, mapping system to the Prevost Island Management Area, and that was corrected. So that's why that OFL is slightly updated. The CPT, the author recommended a 25% buffer for the stock, and the CPT recommended a 30% buffer, which is a slight increase from the previous buffer for the ABC. And that's really due to the utilizing, you know, utilizing the survey data instead of historic catch data, and the fact that the survey data has some assumptions that were being— that are being made in the early part of the survey data.

And also, it's been 10 years since we have any survey data for this from the slope survey, and just uncertainty as to if there's going to be data collected in the future for that survey. So, and also just, uh, we also had some discussion about consistency, especially among our other golden king crab stocks such as the last one, Aleutian Islands, and potentially the uncertainty with the stock being higher just due to the data streams and how we're making our OFL determinations. So I think with that, I can pause and see if there's any questions.

I'm not seeing any questions. Thank you. All right. I'm going to hand it off to Mike.

Good morning to the Chair, members of the Council. Mike Litzow, the co-chair of the crab plan team. To refresh your memory, as Katie mentioned, we saw an unprecedented spike in abundance of hybrid Chionosceles crab on the survey in 2025. We saw numbers about 13 times higher than the time series average. Because of the very short time span between the end of the survey and the September crab plan team meeting, there's very limited capacity for, for staff to consider responses to this event.

So the SSC made a number of recommendations for the for the CPT to consider. We got to those at our next meeting, which was the May 2026 meeting. So I've got a single slide to, to summarize our recommendations for dealing with continued very high levels of hybrid abundance in the system. First of all, at the request of the SSC, both the snow crab assessment author and the tanner crab assessment author ran sensitivity analyses to consider the effects of including hybrid crab in different parts of the data stream into their assessments. What we saw there is that there is very little effect on the reference points or the estimated quantities that came out of those models, depending on whether hybrids were or were not included.

So, didn't make a big difference in terms of stock assessment for the parent stocks, and then that next bullet point was an important consideration that we identified, and that's that we really don't have the basic biology information for hybrids to support their inclusion in a Tier 3 stock assessment model. We don't have data on their growth, we don't have data on their maturity dynamics, we don't have data on their fecundity. And so just considering them as identical to either snow crab, either snow or Tanner crab in an assessment model is potentially problematic. And then finally, the CPT recommended that there are other priorities that, that are higher priority for these stock assessments, particularly for the snow crab assessment, which continues to suffer from convergence issues. So for all those reasons, the CPT recommended not including hybrids in the assessment models going forward.

The SSC requested input from the CPT about the best way to convey information about hybrid components and hybrid distribution and hybrid size compositions to the management process into this body. Our recommendations— our recommendation was that information should continue to be presented in the annual survey results tech memo that the NOAA Kodiak Lab puts out every September. That report, that document already tracks all of the basic survey information about hybrids, and that information is presented to the CPT, presented to the SSC, and then presented to this body. So there's, there's a good standing framework for presenting information on hybrids going forward to the management process. And then finally, we discussed the, the approach that the management body might take for dealing with high or elevated levels of hybrid abundance if that can— if those continue.

And our recommendations was that hybrid abundance should be addressed with the sources of flexibility that are currently available in the FMP. We noted that there's flexibility in the ABC buffer setting process that allows the council to take the abundance of hybrids into account when setting ABC for Tanner and snow crab stocks. And then we also noted that the state of Alaska retains tax-setting flexibility, and the state has quite a bit of flexibility in the co-management system in, in terms of responding to unexpected events like this spike in hybrid abundance. And we saw the state use some of that flexibility for the previous, for the last crab year. And then finally, the crab plan team noted that if this very elevated level of hybrid abundance continues, there's always the potential going forward for recommendations to amendments to the FMP, you know, if we find that existing flexibility is not adequate in the future.

Ms. Kimball. Thank you, Dr. Litzkopf, for that. I'm still trying to understand how we treat hybrids. Currently and whether this is a significant change. I, I, my understanding is only when a hybrid crab is caught in the fishery, it is, it counts against the snow crab TAC.

And so is this move significant in that we wouldn't include any of those crabs in either the assessment for Tanner crab or for snow crab, so we're looking at more conservative OFLs, ABCs as a result? I'm trying to I'm trying to understand what the results of this might be. Yes, through the Chair, thanks for that clarifying question. And I should stress that this is a single slide that's summarizing an entire afternoon of conversation at the CPT. So there's a lot of, a lot of background information there that's not covered.

We are not proposing any change in assessment for hybrid crab. They're currently not included in either the snow crab or the Tanner crab assessment. And you're correct that under State of Alaska regulations, about 98% of hybrid crab that are landed in the directed fishery are landed as snow crab. And that's because the State of Alaska regulation stipulates that any kinocidius crab with an M-shaped mouth and red eyes is a Tanner crab, and anything without those characteristics is a snow crab. And so that distinction in State of Alaska regulations means that the vast majority of hybrids that are landed are landed as snow crab.

We did receive a presentation from State of Alaska management biologists at our meeting where they shared information about the incidence of hybrids in the snow crab fishery in this most recent crab year, and it was only about 3.2% of snow crab landings that were identified hybrids. So that's much less than you might expect given the very high abundance that we saw in the survey. So I think to summarize my response to your question, we're really, the crab plan team is really recommending that the current approach is adequate where we are not explicitly assessing the abundance of hybrid crab with a stock assessment, but that we do have this, the information from the survey that allows us to track that abundance over time. And then there's flexibility both in the ABC and the TAC to adjust reference points to adjust quotas to, to respond to changes in hybrid availability over time. I hope that answered the question.

It does. Thank you.

Yes, and Ms. Gowan. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you, Dr. Litzau. I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit more to the bullet on adjusting the ABC buffer to account for changing hybrid abundance. And what the discussion there was among the CPT. Sure, through the Chair.

So as, as council members will know, the ABC for crab stocks is set every year based on expert opinion concerning the uncertainty around the, the true OFL, if you will. There's typically more uncertainty in our crab assessments than there are in, than there is in groundfish assessments. And so we, we, that uncertainty is handled by the management system through setting ABC buffer. So just to think of a hypothetical, in a future year with very elevated hybrid abundance, the, the CPT, the SSC, the council might come to the decision that the chance of exceeding the true FL the true OFL is reduced because of that very high hybrid abundance in the water. And so that might be a situation that motivates a reduced buffer and a higher ABC.

So there's a tremendous amount of flexibility with that ABC buffer, and we recommended that that flexibility be used to address these anomalous hybrid conditions. At this time.

Great. Thank you, Dr. Litow. I'm not seeing any of the questions at this point. Okay, thank you. I think I might need assistance advancing the slide if Anita is still available to do that.

And one more, please. I think Katie may be. In charge. Okay, thanks, Katie.

So I've only got this one slide combining proposed model run discussions for the snow and Tanner crab assessment for our setting specs in October. The Tanner crab author brought forward two models, both his custom or bespoke model and the GMAX version of this model. Tanner crab is the last of our models that are— sorry, the last of our stocks that is assessed with the population dynamics model that hasn't been moved into GMAX yet. The CPT recommended that GMAX would be ready for setting specs in October. As you heard yesterday, the SSC differed and recommended that an additional bridging analysis would be required focused on differences in the OFL between the two model parameterizations before GMAX would be ready for sayinspects.

And I will say that offline, the assessment author investigated the, the causes of that difference in the OFL, and he believes that he's already identified the difference. So we are expecting that CPT and SSC will have an updated fix for that issue to consider in September and October. For snow crab, there's a new assessment author beginning this cycle, Grant Adams from AFSC in Seattle. He parameterized 14 different Tier 3 models to bring forward to CPT at our May meeting. Unfortunately, those models are almost universally suffering from the convergence issues that we've seen with the snow crab model in previous cycles.

The one fix that he was able to institute that showed the most promise was deemed by CPT not to be worth pursuing for a number of technical reasons. So at this point, we, in the management system, we don't have a Tier 3 model that is converging that we expect will be useful for setting specs in October. So we expect that this stock will again be assessed with a Tier assessment in 2026. Next slide, please.

This is just an informational item that we, um, brought to the SSC and we wanted to bring before the council. Emily Reisner at the AFSC lab in Kodiak has been, uh, conducting research using the survey data on maturity dynamics in snow crab, which has been a really high-level issue for this stock over a number of previous cycles.

The sort of first take-home result from her research is in the two panels on the right, where she's showing that there is a persistent linear decline in the size at 50% maturity for male snow crab. That's the top right panel. You'll remember, of course, that the current industry preferred, industry targeted size is 101 1 millimeter carapace width. So you can see that decline relative to the 101 level on that top panel. And then the bottom panel, she considered the proportion of male snow crab that molt to maturity at that industry preferred size.

And again, there's a significant linear decline over time. And just as a reminder to members of the council, both snow and Tanner crab undergo undergo a final molt to maturity and then they never grow again. So if male snow crab are not molting at the industry preferred size, they'll be protected from interaction from the fishery for the rest of their lives. She also considered or evaluated different hypothesized causes of these declines in size and maturity for snow crab. Here she leaned quite a bit on on research results from the Canadian population, where this has been a topic of interest for a number of years.

And she found results very similar to what the Canadian researchers have found, which is that it's really a mate competition dynamic that drives the size of mature snow crab. When there are a lot of large male snow crab in the water, competition for mates requires that incoming mature animals delay maturity until they're at a large body size, till they're large enough to compete for a mate. And so that suggests a feedback loop where if you get into a situation where you have very few large males, the population will tend to produce few large males in response. She also examined exploitation rate in our system across the, the time series going back to the late 1980s, and she found that high exploitation rates on large males are also an identified cause of that decline in the proportion of industry-preferred meals over time. Um, this is research that's still in progress.

Um, she's got a second draft of the paper that's close to going into internal review. Um, we'll present the information in more detail when that— those results are finalized, but just wanted to make you aware of this research going on. And next slide, please.

Alright, I'll take over from Mike on the next few proposed model slides. The first one we have is Bristol Bay red king crab. This stock has been in a pretty stable model in our GMAX framework for since 2018 and, and has been open the last 3 seasons after a 2-season closure that occurred in '21 and '22. 2022. Uh, just to provide the, the council with a high-level summary here, the model explorations mostly looked at, um, just updating this model to new GMAX versions with new developments that are happening within that platform, and then also increasing the number of size bins for males and females going into the model.

Um, and that's just you, uh, in the— on the right-hand side, you can see some different histograms. On the bottom, you can see that there's been some buildup in the plus group that at some point in time you say there's not enough individuals to have a size bin for every size, so we're just going to say these individuals after the size all behave similarly. There's been some buildup of that, kind of just more crab in higher bins, um, that's been happening over time, and so we've now just added size bins to expand that to better fit, um, the size composition data that goes into the model. The resulting Output is, is pretty similar. And so the CPT did recommend bringing that model forward, seeing it as an improvement.

And then we did address a number of other CPT and SSE comments for this stock. Our next stock is Norton Sound Red King Crab. This stock is also— oh, sorry, I'll pause. Excuse me, sorry, I missed a question on the, I think slide 13 actually, so. Okay, we'll go back.

Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you, Dr. Litzau, for presenting Emily Risner's work here. I'm curious if there was discussion on the CPT or in, in Emily's work on this concept. So the abundance of large males drives size at maturity, and we know that the snow crab are interbreeding with Bairdi, which tend to have larger males, and also hybrid crab, which can then breed again. So I'm curious if this looks at this declining size at maturity for snow crab, and then also the abundance of males between the hybrid population and the Bairdi population and that interaction as well. Yeah, thanks to the chair.

Um, that's a great question, and it gets at the point that there's a lot of complexity going on with kinocetes mating right now. Um, in her research on males, she was looking only at pure crab that are identified as pure opilio. So she's not explicitly considering the role that hybridization might play in, in the size of snow crab as you, as you get backcrosses in future generations from hybrids back into snow crab. I'll just note super briefly that issue of, that's called introgression, where you get hybridization and then you get backcrossing that allows genes to spread between both species. That's potentially a very important ecological outcome of this spike in hybridization that we're seeing and something we want to track going forward.

But in specifically here, she only, she only looked at pure snow crab for the male dynamics. You might remember though that we've seen really unusual maturity patterns for female snow crab as well in the 2024 and 2025 survey after the collapse, as the population has been coming back from the collapse, we're seeing very large numbers of female snow crab delaying the molt to maturity at very large body sizes, you know, sizes at which typically we see 95% or more female snow crab being mature previously. In the last couple years, we've seen something like 60% of those crab remain immature. And so we have wondered if mate limitation in terms of, again, that small number of large snow crab on the grounds, if that's driving the life history decision for females to put off maturing as they continue to grow. And she looked at that in this same research, and she did identify that limitation of mates as, as a factor that appears to be driving delayed maturity by female snow crab.

So I would say this is a first look at some of those dynamics. They're complex and they're ongoing, but I think she's, she's definitely finding some, some concrete answers in this first step.

That's really helpful. Thank you. And just as a follow-up, is there additional research planned then to better understand this decreasing size at maturity and all these interactions with the hybrids and Bairdi.

Thank you. Through the chair, so at this point we're really focused on finishing up this first study that Emily is leading. And, and, you know, as I just said, I think it's really providing us with some good, what appear to be robust initial answers to these questions. So we're really focused on getting that through the peer review process and getting it published. In her explorations, she has looked at similar dynamics for tanner crab.

The declines in size and maturity for male tanner crab are not as severe as they are for snow crab, but there are some indications of declining size maturity there.

We, in terms of hybridization, in the Kodiak lab, we have a pilot study planned for this year's survey, where we're going to bring back identified hybrids for 2 reasons. First, to work on our identification, how to put it, like to uniform our identification among the different biologists that are working on the survey. That identification is based on a study that related genetic information to morphometrics, but on the survey vessels, we just use an evaluation, a qualitative evaluation of those morphometric characteristics to make the identification of a hybrid. We've worked over the years to make that identification process as robust as we can. We're bringing crab back to the lab this year with the goal of improving it even more if we can.

And then the second part of that pilot study is that we're planning genetic identification. Identification of those hybrids to, to relate our IDs to the parentage of individual crab. So those are sort of the two research efforts that we have planned at this time.

Okay, thank you, Dr. Litza. I think we're ready to move to the next slides and back to Katie. All right, great. Thank you. So the next slide would be Norton Sound red king crab proposed models.

This is an annual assessment that we do a little bit off-cycle from our other stocks just due to the fact of the fishery opening in early February. So we'll do proposed models now and they do final specifications in November just due to the later data availability. This model also did some just housekeeping updates with, with GMAX and updates to that platform.. But then also looked at a number of different models where we bring in what's called model-based indices instead of design-based from the survey data. And that was mainly to try to get a better overall index of red king crab in Norton Sound utilizing both an ADFND trawl survey time series and then the Northern Bering Sea trawl survey time series, which both have some gaps in years due to them not being necessarily forming every year.

So the authors spent some time on that, and the CPT sees that as an improvement, and having a good index that kind of covers the area where the, the Norton king crab stock exists, and not just the high abundance area where the fishery occurs. So we recommended bringing— the author bring forward those in the fall, and recommended a couple different variants of those based on some additional diagnostics that we asked bring forward also, and hopefully we'll be able to adopt that as a model improvement in September. There's a couple of, a number of other things the author is going to be working on for this stock, but overall we're seeing good study model improvement for this stock and a better understanding of what's going on. And finally, our last stock that we'll assess in the fall is St. Matthew Island blue king crab. This is a biannually assessed stock.

The last assessment was in 2024, and as, as you know, it is under a rebuilding plan and has been since 2020. We've kept this stock on a biannual assessment even though there is no open fishery, just because of that rebuilding plan and trying to, you know, determine adequate rebuilding progress. We want to provide all that information, as much information as possible, to NOAA for that. So this also, the improvements that we saw with this model development were pretty straightforward, in terms of upgrading to new versions for GMAX. And then also similarly, the author is working on an additional model-based index here instead of design-based from the survey data, and that's due to the loss of the corner stations around St. Matthew Island that has— have not been sampled since 2023.

So this now allows the author to have a consistent time series that goes into the model using the model-based indices that can account for the loss of those quarter stations instead of assuming that the design-based estimate you're getting is similar even though you know that there's no quarter stations there. So this is seen as an improvement, and we encourage the author to bring forward that model in the fall for setting specifications. And then included some other work that I'm sure you heard a summary for the SSC, both Both this and for Norton Sound, one of the things that we've asked the author to work on in the future is to then apply the same model-based index methodologies to the size composition data that's coming out of the survey. And so that's something that we'll probably expect to see in the next year or two as we move forward with the stock. And I think that's all I— all we have for proposed stocks.

We have one more slide here to share with you, but I'll pause real quick in case there's questions. Okay, I'm not seeing any questions at this point. I'll hand it back to Mike then. Thanks. Um, so as Katie said, a final slide.

Uh, this one's summarizing another long conversation that we've had at our meeting, um, about how we might, uh, uh, follow up on the SSC request to institute risk tables, um, for crab stocks and specifically institute risk tables to organize the information that we use to make the ABC buffer recommendation in each year. So we had quite a long interaction with groundfish biologists who are familiar with the risk table format on the groundfish side and had a discussion with them about how we might port that over to meet the specific needs of crab stock assessments. One of the differences that we landed on as being really important between crab stocks and groundfish stocks is that crab, as I mentioned earlier, tend to have sort of structural sources of uncertainty that are persistent year to year, assessment after assessment. And that's why we have this system where the ABC is reduced below the OFL or below the max ABC, um, every year for crab stocks with an ABC buffer. So the format that we proposed to the SSC, um, is this two-tier format that you see laid out here in this template.

So in the top row, we would highlight, um, long-term persistent sources of uncertainty for a particular stock that have motivated a historical buffer. That's been persistent for a number of previous assessment cycles. These are things like the absence of a spawner-recruit relationship, which is, that's the case for every crab stock that we assess. Things like borrowing life history information from other populations, that's also very common across different crab stocks. So those considerations and those sources of uncertainty that are persistent year to year,, and that have motivated that, that persistent buffer would be highlighted in the top row.

And then the bottom row would be something more akin to the, the current version of the Groundfish risk table where we'd have, um, those 4, uh, um, categories in the 4 columns, and then we'd score each one of those as level 1, 2, or 3 for the risk. And that would be, um, those would be considerations that were specific to the assessment year in question. One of our big motivations for proposing this format is we wanted to make the information easier for stakeholders and other interested parties to, to digest rather than having to, to go through a long laundry list of uncertainty sources. We felt that this format would allow people to quickly distinguish things that, you know, we don't expect to change year to year at the top from considerations that we do expect to change year to year at the bottom. As you heard, the SSC supported this recommendation, and they're requesting us to bring risk tables forward for every crab stock from this point forward.

And Katie, I'll hand it back to you.

Thanks. So I just wanted to make one final slide, just kind of wrap up for you all. We just wanted to, of course, thank all our CPT members and crab assessment authors for all their hard work. I just wanted to congratulate Mike. Mike is retiring and so moving on from his role as co-chair of the crab plan team.

And so just wanted to kind of let the council know as far as that, we do not have a— typically the co-chair of the plan team has been co-chaired by a state representative and federal representative in the last number of years, and we do not have a co-chair lined up yet for the fall. So you'll see a lot of me, but we're working on that. But right now there isn't anyone kind of slated for that. So we just want to let the council know that we're— we made some calls at our meeting to try to get potentially establish a vice chair position to get some folks onboarded to help with maybe some administrative behind-the-scenes things, and we're working on that, but we don't yet have a co-chair and probably aren't expected to have one for this fall cycle just due to the timing. And I think that's all we had, and we can field any questions you might have.

Thank you both for the presentation, and congratulations on your retirement, Dr. LeTsau. And we just immensely appreciate your contributions to this process over the years. We do have probably a handful of questions for both of you before we let you off the hook here. So we'll go to Ms. Kimball first, and then Ms. Go, and then Ms. Baker. Thank you.

Um, Dr. Litsao, I just had a question on the risk tables, and I wasn't able to listen to the crab plan team discussion on this.. And so I'm, I'm curious how, how we think this is going to work, if it's going to look like a real departure from what we currently do or what the crab plan team and the SSC do in terms of assessments of buffers from MaxABC, or if it's really just a categorization exercise. It's such a different scenario for groundfish where we use the risk tables because there is actually a big difference between OFL and MaxABC, and so the risk tables are supposed to provide this opportunity for further reduction of Max ABC to ABC, but in rare circumstances, because we're actually accounting for a lot of the uncertainty through the model or the tier system or the harvest control rule. And so I'm just trying to see, understand if the crab plan team thinks this is a real— this will be a real difference, or this is just a better way to categorize the, the buffers that they're already doing in a significant way, because for all intents and processes in crab, OFL is, is basically max ABC.

Yeah, thanks to the question and to the chair. Um, this does not represent any change in process in the way that ABC buffer will be recommended. Um, we're going to follow the same expert opinion consideration of the same sources of uncertainty, and that was the SSC request to us that we not change the process but their request was that we summarize the information we're using for that recommendation in this format to make it more consistent with the groundfish format. And then those differences that you point to in between the nature of OFL and ABC for groundfish and crab, I think that's why it took us so long to figure out how to institute something that was similar to groundfish but would work for crab. But I guess the short answer is there's no change in process that's, that's on the table here.

It's just a way to convey the information more consistently and hopefully in a more clear manner.

Thank you for that response, and I think that's my last question. So I just want to thank you again for your work, and we're going to miss you so much in all your roles at the Council. Thank you.

Thank you, Miss Gohan.

Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you, Dr. Litz. I'll also want to congratulate you on moving on and good luck in your next endeavors. We've really appreciated your contributions to this process. Um, Miss Kimball covered most of my question, I guess. I would just like to clarify because I can hear my inner Greta here when I see 2 rows of buffers.

And concern from the industry over whether that's like adding additional buffers because CRAB is already heavily buffered between OFL and ABC and TAC. So just could you speak a little more to— I think I heard you say that the long-term persistent and then this current row, the idea is to capture what the CPT is already doing, not necessarily be adding additional buffers. Is that correct? Yes, through the chair, that is correct. And let me just say that I personally miss Grégoire's input in this, this review process.

He was, he was, I think, very effective in voicing industry concern over the buffering process. And that's the point that Grégoire made over many cycles, is that we had to guard against a situation where buffers only moved in one way, only got larger. ABC only went down. Um, and I think his perspective and that perspective from others has been really effective, um, and has certainly been taken up by the CPT, where we're very explicit that we don't expect buffers to only change in one direction, that they should be equally likely to go up or to go down. Um, so that said, there is that persistence in some of those sources of uncertainty Certainly, in the most extreme case, the absence of a spawn-recruit relationship is unlikely to change for any of our stocks in any appreciably short timescale.

But there have been other persistent sources of uncertainty. An example is retrospective patterns that have dogged some assessment models for years and were very difficult to remove and created uncertainty in trying to estimate OFL. There have been cases where those have been successfully addressed and have been taken out of consideration by the plan team and have resulted in a reduction in buffer. And so looping back to the previous question, we expected that same process will be carried out just through the, the risk table format, and we do foresee situations coming along where those long-term sources of uncertainty are removed and we do see reduction in buffer.

Thank you. And Ms. Baker.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you for the presentation, and I'm not sure which co-chair this is best addressed to, but I wanted to go to the CPT report itself and ask about the CPT's discussion about about the possibility of integrating SCALOP topics into the crowd plan team review process. I realize this is a bit awkward since we haven't had the SCALOP plan team report yet, but I just wanted to ask about that discussion, especially given, you know, Ms. Palof's reminder that fortunately for Dr. Littsow, but unfortunately for us, Um, he's going to be retiring and that'll be a big loss for us. So can you just give me a sense of the discussion there? It seems like, um, since we have the benefit of the scallop plan team chair also being on the crab plan team, that you were able to talk through some of those capacity issues on the crab plan team.

And my question for you is, is integrate— is the possibility of integrating scallop topics into the crab plan team Could that functionally be a merger of those two plan teams perhaps if we work through the logistics?

Maybe I'll defer to Katie on that one since she is the co-chair who will be going forward.

Yes, through the chair of the state. Yes, that's the— I think that is the plan. I think the conversations that we've had is, is CALHPS is somewhat, at least the way it is assessed right now, similar to our Tier 4. 5 Stocks that we spend some time on every few years, and I think that one of the things that crab planting has been tasked with is kind of reviewing our crab stock prioritization as to when we see, how often we see some of our stocks that we don't have, you know, complex or any assessment models for. And so I think something that we can do in the next few years, off years for scallop since it's up every 3 years, is look at our schedule when we do our Tier 5 or or less frequent stocks or Tier 4 stocks and kind of develop a schedule that kind of makes it so that in every year we're seeing a few of those and we're not overwhelming the plan team by having a bunch come up in the same year.

So that might just be a stock prioritization conversation that is involved in the merging of these two teams to make it kind of equally— equal amount of work on an annual basis instead of a lot in one or two years. But I do think that it is something that we can do, and I think it also does provide a much better level— kind of taking my co-chair plan team hat off and my ADF&G hat on— it provides us a much better level of review for the SCALP plan team than the current plan team that just doesn't have many members or much contribution towards improvement and development because of that.

Ms. Baker. Thank you for that, um, Ms. Palof, and I do have another question, but I think it's for Ms. Kroska. And before, as she's coming up to the table, I just wanted to add my appreciation to Dr. Littell for your contributions to this process, and all the best to you. Thank you.

So, Ms. Kroska, given the exchange we just had with Ms. Palof, I just wanted to ask ask. I'm sure—. I personally don't recall any sort of combination of plan teams or anything like that in, in my time here. If, if the council was interested in, in sort of supporting the recommendation that we just talked about to, to merge the scallop and crab plan teams, is that— it sounds like there have been discussions occurring and presumably perhaps you and, and Ms. Palof and, and other key members of the, of the respective plan teams would sort of walk through that and the logistics and what that might look like. Um, and could you sort of do that and, and just, um, maybe proceed with that, uh, and, you know, and come back to the council if there were specific questions or guidance that you needed?

But can you just give me a sense of how you might proceed the council supported that recommendation.

Sure, um, thank you through the chair. Thank you for your question. Um, we've put a little bit of thought into how this could look moving forward. It seems to make sense at this juncture due to the scallop plan team attrition and membership and also lack of quantitative expertise for review at this time. I think that I, you know, I spoke to low membership, but it includes 4 of us.

There is Tyler, a chair, and myself, and we are also both on the crab plan team. So that kind of transition would probably create some administrative efficiencies for us in some senses. And then the other 2 members are on scallop plan team and do not cross over with crab plan team. That is something that we would work directly with agency partners and the chairs, of course, to figure out their workload and tasking and also their bandwidth. I don't think that a merger would necessarily have to mean that those current SCALOP plan team members also take a shoulder, uh, CRAB plan team level of review process, so we could explore options somewhere in the middle.

Um, the SSC did request that we try to retain some scallop expertise, either quantitative or biological expertise at minimum, and I think that there is definitely a good way forward to do that, inviting them at least to be a part of the review process. Again, this all depends on, um, how we work through this, but I think it's a very feasible process that we could handle behind the scenes and bring back to the council if, as you said, any questions came up. I think that this could happen pretty quickly too.

Thank you. Any further questions?

Thank you, Ms. Krasca. And thank you both again for the presentation, and again, congratulations, Dr. Litsao. So that brings us to our AP report, and a reminder to the public, if you'd like to testify on C2, please sign up before the end of the AP report. Thank you.

Good morning, Madam Chair, council members. My name's Heather Mann. I am one of the vice chairs on the advisory panel, and I will provide our motion on C2. Excuse me.

The advisory panel reviewed the CPT report and recommends that the council adopt the 2026 Aleutian Islands Golden King Crab Safe Report chapter, as well as approve the 26-27 Aleutian Islands Golden King Crab OFL of 3 1,493 kilotons and an ABC of 2,620 kilotons as recommended by the SSC. That motion passed 16 to 0, and you can see our rationale below, and I'm happy to answer any questions even though there's a frog in my throat.

Thank you very much for the AP report. Are there any questions?

Seeing none, thank you. Thank you. Okay. Oh, no problem.

So I'm not seeing anyone signed up to testify on my end. Okay, so let's take a 10-minute break here and we'll come back at 9:30 and see if the council would like to take action on See you too. Thank you.

Council members, please come back to order.

We finished our staff presentation and AP report on our C2 Bering Sea Aleutian Island crab specification agenda item. I'll ask if the council would like to take action. Ms. Baker. Thank you, Madam Chair. I have a motion that, uh, has been sent to staff.

If you could post it, please, and I will wait because it has numbers and it's specs.

Thank you. The motion reads that the council accepts the Aleutian Islands golden king crab and Pribilof Islands golden king crab SAFE reports and adopts the 2026-27 AI Aleutian Islands golden king crab OFL of 3,493 metric tons and ABC of 2,620 metric tons and adopts the 2007 through 2029 Pribilof Island golden king crab OFL of 112,000 metric tons of 112.6 metric tons and an ABC of 78.8 metric tons as recommended by the SSC. Those numbers are reflected in the table below, and the council approves the recommendation to merge the scallop and crab plan teams. And with a second, I'll speak to the motion. Second.

Thank you, uh, Mr. Pamplin, for the second. Thank you, Madam Chair. Uh, I just, uh, want to walk through the key information for the specifications process. Um, as always, the harvest specifications I'm recommending here are based on the best available scientific information available. The estimated stock biomass for Aleutian Islands golden king crab is above the minimum size stock threshold, and therefore the stock is not overfished.

Fished. Overfishing status for Aleutian Islands golden king crab will be updated in September of this year when final groundfish fishery data is available. And for Pribilof Island golden king crab, total catches, uh, from 2023 to 2026 were below the OFL, and thus overfishing did not occur. And as we have in the past, the council, uh, is supportive of efforts to collect data for the Aleutian Islands Golden King crab fishery through an annual collaborative survey with crab vessels and ADF&G, and this is consistent with the SSC reference to that as well. Finally, for the specifications, I'd like to thank the assessment authors, the crab plan team, and the SSC for their work and consideration of all the information.

To get to this point. Speaking to the last part of the motion in terms of approving the recommendation to merge the scallop and crab plan teams, I just— we would refer the council back to the exchange we had with Ms. Palof and Ms. Kroska. I acknowledge it's a little bit awkward because we haven't had the scallop plan team report, but I thought this was is probably the best place to address the fact that the scallop plan team membership has, has been unfortunately losing members and currently lacks quantitative review capacity. And so obviously conversations have been taking place in terms of how to integrate scallop items into the crab plan team process. And as Ms. Kroska said, merging those these teams could potentially reduce some administrative burden and provide that quantitative review capacity for future efforts with respect to scallops.

I do, however, want to acknowledge clearly that I understand also the capacity constraints on the crab plan team given our change in co-chair representation, and I just really Um, hope that, uh, council staff can work with the, the plan team chair. Hopefully we'll get a vice chair or two and some agency partners to plan the logistics of that proposed merger and, and, and proceed with that. Um, and just come back to the council should you need any guidance or, um, come across any problems. And I'll stop there, Madam Chair, for any questions. Thank you for the motion, Ms. Baker.

Are there any questions?

No. Any comments? Yes, Ms. Cohen. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you, Ms. Baker, for the motion. I'll be supporting the motion, and I'll keep my comments brief.

Um, just really want to thank the crab plan team and the stock assessment authors, particularly for your work on looking into the hybrid issue. Issue. It's of keen interest to the industry and really appreciate your work there. So thank you.

Thank you. Any other comments?

Thank you for your work on the motion, Ms. Baker. Um, we will need a roll call since this is specification, so I'll hand it over to Ms. Evans.

Members of the council, calling the roll on Motion for agenda item C2 to set specifications for Aleutian Island golden king crab and Pribilof Island golden king crab. Miss Baker? Yes. Miss Gowan? Yes.

Miss Kimball? Yes. Mr. Kurland? Yes. Mr. Muller?

Yes. Mr. Pamplin? Yes. Mr. Ritchie? Yes.

Mr. Seaborne? Yes. Mr. Tsukada? Yes. Miss Vanderhoeven?

Yes. Miss Drapnicka? Yes. That motion passes 11-0. Okay, thank you.

Anything further on C2? Yes, Miss Baker. Thank you, Madam Chair. Uh, no motion, just very briefly, I wanted to take us back to the B reports yesterday, and we heard about a request from ADF&GE for the crab plan team to review, uh, King crab hatchery permit, if time allows. And I just wanted to suggest to the council that I hope that we can be supportive of that.

It is, just as a reminder, if you didn't get a chance to look at the letter, state regula— so going back to it, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game is in the initial stages of a review process for a red king crab hatchery application, and this is a new process. So part of our state regulations require consultation with federal and state agencies and technical experts to seek comments on the permit application. Clearly, the crab plan team is, is an excellent group to do that, and we do not anticipate this being a significant item for the crab plan team, and we have coordinated with, with council staff in the, and the, uh, crab plan team chair, and if possible, understanding capacity constraints at the crab plan team, um, we would appreciate, uh, the council and, and council support of putting this on the crab plan team agenda. Thank you. And Ms. Gone, thank you.

And I just wanted to add, I as one council member would support that. And looking at the, um, plan teams handbook, that's consistent with our scope of duties, and I would support that.

Thank you. Anyone else?

Thank you, Miss Baker.

I'm seeing some head nods, so I think there's general agreement in that.

So that brings us to our, uh, C3 agenda item, and Ms. Kroska. Good morning again. For the record, this is Anita Kroska, Council staff. I'd like to introduce C-3 Scallop Harvest Specification.

That will be presented by the Scallop Plan Team Chair Tyler Jackson at the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. He will provide an overview of the final harvest specifications for scallops, and he will also review other items found in the Scallop Plan Team report. Again, as with our last presenter, he will be virtual, so I will stay up here for a moment to make sure that he doesn't have any issues with slide advancement. And with that, I'll hand it over to Tyler. Thank you.

Thank you, Anita. Good morning, council. I think Anita covered the introduction well. I'm going to talk about the scallop plan team meeting that we held back in April. As it's been talked about a bit this morning, we're a pretty small group right now.

There's the names on the slide, and then Ryan Burt from Alaska Department of Fish and Game from the Shellfish Observer Program is also involved.

I don't know if I did that or you did that, if it's going to work. It looks like it is going to work for me this morning. So everything on this slide is prescribed in the scallop FMP. There's no stock-wide biomass estimate, so stock status is unknown relative to overfished status. The OFL is based on average total catch from period of 1990 to 1997 excluding 1995, which was kind of an odd year because there was enforcement action on one vessel that resulted in just a catch that's not representative of the rest of that time period.

So the scallop OFL and ABC are managed in terms of shucked meats, the abductor muscle from the scallop, and for the OFL that's 1.284 million pounds. ABC is max ABC control rule, which is 90% of the OFL, and is 1.156 million pounds. I was brought to the SCALP planning team that we could take full advantage of the flexibility that Amendment 18 allows and extend our harvest specifications for one more year than we did in 2024, which would be 3 years. So we're recommending that these specifications go to '28-'29.

There's model development ongoing, but there's no express urgency to implement it before that year, and it'd probably be best to allow for more flexibility in evaluating usefulness of the model-based assessment, given that extra time.

There was a dredge survey that happens annually for scallops. It alternates between the Eastern Gulf, which is the Yakutat registration area, and the Western Gulf, which is the Kodiak and Cook Inlet registration areas. There was no 2024 survey. There was some mechanical issues, and then the 2025 survey ended up covering what the 2024 survey would have sampled, which was the, the west the Western Gulf, sorry, that's a typo on the slide I'm now just catching. So Kodiak, Shalikof, and Northeast areas and Area H, there's Kodiak, Shalikof, and Northeast make up a large portion of the statewide GHL and they're heavily fished.

Area H has not been fished in many years now, but it's a long time series for that area. So we continue to survey when it's possible. It only takes like half a day to do. I'll just clarify that the survey is used in state GHL setting and in model development. Model that's being developed does use the survey index size composition data and other various biological data that come out of it, but this isn't informing the OFL ABC at this time.

The fishery you'll see here, so I think the black horizontal line on that graph is the OFL and the gray one is the ABC, and you'll see that the total mortality that occurs during the fishery does not come close to the ABC. Basically, state management is much more conservative than the federal harvest specifications allow, and being that we're likely in a different stanza of stock productivity than when those specifications were originally set. State GHLs haven't changed in the past few seasons, but what has changed is where the fleet decides to fish. There is a large portion of the stock in terms of area is out west in the Aleutian— along the Alaska Peninsula, the Aleutian Islands around Dutch Harbor, and then Bering Sea. And that portion of the stock does not get fished annually..

And so some minor changes from year to year have a lot to do with if the fleet goes out there. So in 2024, they did not. In 2025, they did. Noting that Bering Sea used to contribute a large portion of the statewide GHL and retained catch, that underwent stock collapse in the mid-20-teens because of disease. Anecdotally, we're starting to see some evidence that it's starting to rebound, and so there's some hope for the future, I guess, there.

The fleet is 100% made up of members of the Alaska Scallop Association. This fishery is, has a limited entry program, and 8 of the 9 LLPs are owned by the Alaska Weather Bay Scallop Association. There is a single LLP that's owned by an East Coast firm and there's no vessel associated with it.

Value of this fishery fluctuates a little bit obviously with the catch, but the prices are primarily driven by the much larger East Coast fishery.

And we don't foresee many changes happening here. Fleet dynamics have been pretty stable in recent in history.

There has been some talk this morning at the end of the crab plan team meeting that there is a population dynamics model under development. It's in GMAX, the same software framework used for the crab stock assessment models, size-structured model. It wasn't reviewed by the SSC, and I'm not going to get into any specifics.

It was reviewed by the CPT, back in January at the modeling workshop. There was no document at that time, though. And then the SPT, to the extent that it could be given our limited membership and capacity, we really haven't had much quantitative expertise on the scallop plan team since Ji Zhang retired in 2020. But there is a document associated with it that's floating around out there. And so the feedback that I solicited from the SSC was that the the scallop plan team lacks capacity to really advance this at this point.

It sounds like this is— was a key point of attention at this meeting, which is great. And then second, the kind of the biggest struggle I think with using a model-based assessment for scallops isn't necessarily development of the population dynamics model, it's how to use it within the management framework. So currently under the FMP, scallops are considered a single stock and state manages them.

A number of smaller registration areas and districts that undergo different population dynamics, it appears. And so we only have surveys in these, in some core areas that fishing happens on a regular basis, and that's where model development is focused on. And so being able to use that information and apply it to the broader stock Uh, there's several routes you could take. Um, I, I think the one that has been discussed, uh, more in depth is coming up with some kind of split tier designation where there's a core area and a non-core area, and those are treated differently. But, um, what information is needed to, um, feel comfortable with going that route or better informing it is asking for guidance from the SSC and then deciding whether or not we have capacity to be able to develop those.

And so that's all of my slides.

Are there any questions on the report? Okay, thank you very much for your presentation, Dr. Jackson. I'm not seeing any questions.

Thank you. So that brings us to our AP report.

If there are any members of the public wishing to testify on, uh, scalp specifications, please sign up before the end of the AP report.

Let's try this again, although I heard Bob Alverson was much worse than I was coughing and choking. So, um, good morning again. I'm Heather Mann, uh, co-vice chair of the advisory panel, and I'll be delivering our Motion on scallops.

The AP reviewed the scallop planting report and recommends the council approve the final 2026-27, 2027-8, and 2028-29 scallop overfishing level and acceptable biological catch as recommended by the SSC. The, the AP recommends the council approve the scallop APSAFE report, and that motion passed 16 to 0, and I'm happy to answer any questions. Thank you very much. Are there any questions on the AP report?

Seeing none, thank you for your work.

Okay, I am not seeing anyone signed up for public testimony.

Okay, see if action is ready. Yep, Ms. Baker. Thank you, Madam Chair. I have sent a motion for C3. I'll wait for that.

To be posted.

Thank you. The motion reads that the council approves the Scallop Safe Report and adopts an OFL of $1.284 million. Pounds, or 582 tons, of shucked meats, and an ABC of 1.156 million pounds, or 524 tons, of shucked meats, as recommended by the SSC for the 2026-27, 2027-28, and 2028-29 seasons. With a second, I'll speak to the motion. Thank you for the second, Ms. Vanderhoeven.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Ms. Vanderhoeven. Scallop removals for the 2024-25 and 2025-26 seasons were less than 30% of the ABC, and overfishing did not occur. In the absence of stock size assessments, the stat— excuse me, the status of the scallop stock relative to overfishing is unknown. I will note that the Council will be setting harvest specifications for 3 seasons as recommended by the scallop plan team and the SSC, and as Mr. Jackson noted in the presentation, state management of the scallop resource using area-specific GHLs, guideline harvest levels, continues to be conservative in terms of our management structure.

Um, many thanks to the SCALOP plan team and the SSC for considering available information, and I'd be happy to answer any questions, Madam Chair. Thank you, Ms. Baker. Are there any questions for Ms. Baker?

Any comments on the motion?

Seeing none, thank you again for all of your work on this, Ms. Baker. We'll need a roll call vote since we're at harvest specifications. Ms. Evans.

Members of the Council, this is a roll call vote for a motion under Agenda Item C3 to set harvest specifications for scallop for the next 3 years. Ms. Cohen. Yes. Ms. Kimball. Yes.

Mr. Kurland. Yes. Mr. Mohler. Yes. Mr. Pamplin.

Yes. Mr. Ritchie. Yes. Mr. Seaborn? Yes.

Mr. Tsukata? Yes. Ms. Vanderhoeven? Yes. Ms. Baker?

Yes. Ms. Trapnica? Yes. Yes. Passes 11-0.

Thank you, everyone. Um, so that'll bring us to our C4 agenda item. This, uh, I know we just took a little bit of a break, but, um, to prepare for a motion, I'm not sure if everyone, uh, was able to take that break. So let's just do an abbreviated one. We're at a good time for our mid-morning break.

We'll come back, please promptly, in 10 minutes. So come back at— oh, actually, we need a little longer than that. So we'll come back at 10:20. We have to take a picture. So sorry I didn't remind everyone.

Disappointed because last year's picture was really good. And so I'm— yeah, I don't think we're going to be able to replicate that, but we'll try. Can you? I can. Yeah, yeah, we'll see how it turns out.

So, um, please, uh, Councilmembers, uh, convene in the hall. We'll take a photo and then come back here at, uh, 10:20, and we'll begin our presentation on C-4. Thanks.

Council members, please come back to order.

So we're re— ready to begin our, uh, C4 agenda item. I think we have Ms. Holman here to introduce.

Good morning, Madam Chair, members of the council. For the record, Taylor Holman, council staff, and before you this morning is agenda item C4. This includes both the cost recovery report, which will be presented by by Josh Keeton, Ben Cheeseman, and Alex Perry, followed by the Cost Recovery Program Improvements RIR, which will be presented by Alicia Miller and myself. And with that, I will pass it off to Josh, Alex, and Ben. Good morning, Madam Chair, members of the council.

Name is Josh Keeton. I work for the Alaska Regional Office. I'm here to present on the 2025 Cost Recovery Report for Alaska. Before I get started, I just want to note the author of this report was one of my staff members, Amy Hadfield. She does most of the cost recovery processes for all 8 cost recovery programs.

She is also the primary author on drafting this, but these— this type of report could not be possible without the partnership that we have with our agency partners and providing the information that they do. On the cost recovery when we collect, and also many people in the review. And, you know, thanks to the Council for asking for more clarity.

All right, so just a brief introduction on the background of cost recovery. Cost recovery is an essential program, or an essential component of fishery management for LAPS under MSA. Section 304 of MSA requires the collection of cost recovery fees, enables NMFS to to recover costs directly related to management, data collection, and enforcement of a LAP. And the limits on cost recovery fees are to 3% of the annual ex-vessel value. Each year, NIMS determines the annual fee percentage for each program, ensuring the fee collection aligns with the actual program.

I want to take a step just to talk about the history of this report. Prior to 2020, or prior to last year's report, We used to publish 8 separate reports, each for individual program. We received a letter, or the Council received a letter in 2024 indicating the need for increased transparency. We responded to that by having multiple industry meetings, and one of the things that was mentioned by the industry was the need to maybe consolidate all the cost recovery reports into one single report. So last Last year was the first version of that report, and so this is your second iteration with the comments that you provided last year being addressed.

Sorry, a little delay.

Okay, so just an introduction, further introduction on the background of cost recovery. As I mentioned, we have 8 cost recovery programs. They're all listed listed here on the screen, and MSA ensures that the industry participants contribute to the expenses incurred by regulatory agencies to administer this program.

Yep. So in Chapter 1, on pages 4 and 5, you'll find a list of the items that came from the Council motion last year. Related to cost recovery. We tried to address in that section in Chapter 1 each, um, how we responded to those comments, uh, our requests in the paper. So I didn't go through every single one on the slide here, but you can read them on pages 4 and 5.

Um, you asked to provide additional guidance on the incremental cost tracking for policies and minimizing costs for the regulated program, uh, public. Um, we attached multiple appendices to the document. Appendix A is the NIMS internal guidance that is provided to all agency personnel for when they try to— when they use to follow the cost recovery guidance in the Alaska Region. Appendix B is the letter that the regional administrator, John Kerlin, had sent out in response to the council action last year. You asked to provide greater clarity on how cost recovery programs outside of Alaska incur lower overall costs, and NIMH OEMS is currently engaged in a nationwide conversation about cost recovery programs and will provide more information as it becomes available.

We will just note in some of those conversations to date, it becomes readily apparent that Alaska is a very broad geographical region with much greater cost than other councils may have to deal with, with their LAP programs. You also asked us to describe personnel costs more specifically and list regulatory projects. This information is provided. Throughout the document, to the extent practicable, it's mostly embedded within each individual program as that's specific to the, the programs. So for example, if we're talking about a cost related to, uh, crab cost recovery, you'd find the regulatory projects or, um, personnel costs listed in each one of those projects.

Um, you also asked for NIMS/OLE to provide additional information on the types of violations. They provided a lot of information under Appendices D through F, um, for, for your— for the record.

Mr. Keeton, we have a couple questions. Sure. Yeah, we'll go to Ms. Gohan and then Ms. Vanderhoeven.

Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you, Mr. Keeton, for the questions. Um, under number 2 there with your bullet on this nationwide conversation, can you explain a little bit more about how you say that this this might— more information would become available, is the intent to bring that to the council and share that information? Yeah, through the chair, Ms. Gohen, um, these conversations, um, so we have the catch shares working group which talks about various items we might— are involved around catch shares. Um, as those conversations include, we would add, um, any relevant updates to this version of the report in future years. Or provide updates as you request.

Thank you. And Ms. Vanderhoeven. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Mr. Keeton. Um, I think I'm looking for a little more on your response to Ms. Gowan.

Um, I, I guess when I read this in the report, it seemed to me that maybe there was going to be like a report that was going to come out of it. But from your response, it sounds like no, it's just kind of an ongoing series of conversations. So there's not any particular timeline and there's not any particular work product coming out of that that we should expect to see here. It'd just be like verbal feedback over years, it sounded like in your response to Ms. Gowan. Is, is that correct?

I think the, um, through the chair, Ms. Vanderhoof, uh, we We're currently engaged in internal conversations, and right now we're in the data collection phase. One thing that's been asked is for all regions to provide these cost categories that they charge to Cost Recovery, and we're trying to get an understanding of how each region does that so we can answer this cost directly. As we get that information, it would be my goal to put that in this report in writing. It wouldn't just be a conversation, but we have to wait for that process to go through before I have concrete examples of any policy or guidance that is provided from NIMS overall on that.

And Mr. Keeton, can you expand a little bit on the, the, the goal of the nationwide, um, effort? Is it, is it ultimately to achieve consistency across regions, or is there some other goal? Yeah, Madam Chair, the current conversation is really about consistency and understanding on the various cost categories in the unique environments that each region works through that would help us answer that specific question on why costs in Alaska may be greater than a cost in another region, specific to their LAP program. Like I said, one of those issues is the large geographic area and travel and expenses there. So a lot of other regions might not charge to travel, but in Alaska, with us having to travel to, like, Dutch Harbor to do scale inspections and stuff, that is maybe a cost that we charge up here that maybe other regions don't.

So we're currently engaged in those conversations.

Okay, thank you.

Chapter 2 of the report on pages 7 to 20 identifies the various incremental cost categories that we collect at the agency level. So when we provide— when we ask our agency partners to provide costs, we ask them to provide them in these various categories and provide explanations for each one of those categories. Cost categories. That's important as you go through in the tables that are presented in Chapter 4. You'll see these cost categories there, and in Chapter 2, we define each one of those.

We also, you know, further dive into the details on the type of tasks associated with cost recovery and an explanation on why these tasks meet NOAA's cost recovery policies. Also known as that but-for analysis. We do provide this detailed explanation of associated activities so the Council can provide feedback and recommendations for the next year, and the types of tasks include the ones listed on the screen, but the ones I'm most familiar with are like in-season quota management, quota share administration, and catch monitoring.

Table 2-1 on pages 18 to 20 is a great resource to look at It's kind of a crosswalk between those different relevant cost categories and the various different activity types and examples of specific tasks that are appropriate for cost recovery. We also include in that table the billing entities that could have cost recoverable costs. That column is currently in development, and I'll just note that, for example, in the regulation writing section of that table, it only lists AKR, but other partners may have costs associated. For example, if we're reviewing regulation rewrite for one of our LAP programs, we would include our OLE partners, potentially this, you know, State of Alaska or other to review those regulations as we're trying to implement that, or the analysis there that are derived from that, and those may be recoverable costs.

Chapter 3 goes in depth into the cost recovery process, followed by NIMS. We start by calculating the standard price for the fishery that is allocated, or the fishery species that are allocated for that program. We then use that to derive the ex-vessel value for each of the allocated species by multiplying that standard price by the total amount of landings in the LAP program, and that sum becomes the overall fishery value. That value is important so that we can, you know, create that ratio to understand if we're greater than or less than 3%. We compile the total program costs attributed to each fishery program.

Underneath that process, that includes communication with our agency partners and internal meetings to review the total program costs that were submitted by the agency and agency partners. Once we have the total cost, we can divide those total costs by the ex vessel value for the fishery to calculate the fee percentage, and we publish that fee percentage in the Federal Register along with the standard prices depending on the action. And finally, we generate fee invoices for each permit holder by multiplying that fee percentage by the total ex-vessel value of that permit holder's fishery landings, and we send invoices to those fishermen and process and allow them to pay those payments through the eFish system.

So we have a question. Ms. Vanderhoeven. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Mr. Keeton. Um, I don't receive the invoices for the cost recovery program that we participate in.

Is there any backup that comes along with that, or is just a, here's the amount that you owe? Um, currently at this, or, you know, up to this date, right, we've been providing just, this is your fee percentage, this is your landings, This is, you know, what your bill is, so to say, as an invoice. We don't provide much detail in that invoice, though we've heard from the industry through multiple things about the need for that. So some of the table summary tables that are provided in Chapter 4 are readily available at that time, and we may look to include those in those invoices in the future. So you at least know how much was billed to personnel, how much was billed to contracts and stuff.

Going into further detail because of the extremely, you know, time crunch that we're under doing cost recovery, which will be covered in when Alicia comes up to give about cost recovery improvement processes. There is not a lot of time to do a lot of detail and to meet those regulatory deadlines to get those invoices out. But we could, because we've compiled those total program costs based on those cost categories, we could provide those in that invoice. Thank you. I've heard the same concerns, and I think that would be helpful.

So thanks.

Moving on. Sorry, I heard a psst.

Ms.—. I've heard it a number of times, so I don't know where it's coming from. Maybe it's your hand doing it, Ms. Kimball. Thank you. I'm not making that Noise.

Um, my question is about, uh, Mr. Keeton, if you're going to get into any more detail on how you compile total program costs, or if this is the extent of it and the right time to ask the question. And it's just the main question about, under the law, we're only supposed to be compiling or attributing to cost recovery the incremental costs. And I know you're well aware of that and have heard that. So in my mind, just very simply, that's not because there's a halibut vessel in an IFQ program. It's the incremental cost of that program.

And I'm worried, especially in the halibut sablefish program is like my best example right now, that anything that has to do with anything touching that program is then cost recoverable under the agency and OLE, just because they're in a program, not because it was additional cost as a result of the program itself. So is there more details on, on how maybe the region and OLE are compiling total program costs and what's attributable there? Or is this the extent of it in the presentation? Yeah, through the chair, Ms. Kimball, um, there's multiple sources that I would point you to in the report. Appendix A is the internal agency documentation, our guidance on how to collect cost recovery costs, and with some of those questions that you just asked being answered there.

Additionally, um, all our agency partners were very responsive in request from the letter that John or the regional administrator had sent to the agency partners to provide. And as a result of that, we got Appendices D through F that answers the question on how OLE had indicated to the agency in the collection of those costs. I can go into a little bit more detail on the individual process on how we do that. It starts with us compiling our costs in those cost categories, but we send that document that is attached at the end of Appendix A. It's like a form to each one of our agency partners through an email.

They fill out that form and provide usually, you know, attached documentation to justify per the, you know, our guidance on how to, how they came up with the conclusions that those costs were cost recoverable. That then gets received by our cost recovery coordinator. Currently it's Amy Hadfield and Tristan Endeville that work on that together. If there's questions on that, then those costs, those questions would go back and forth between the agency partner to gain more understanding and justification. And finally, we have the cost for each one of these cost recovery programs.

We have an internal review meeting that includes most of the managers, that we go through those costs for like that high-level overview. Questions are asked, and then those staff go back and respond to the agency partners to get more information. A lot of that was provided upfront this past year, where in the past we had a much more back and forth because of that letter that Mr. Kerlin had sent indicating the need for that. And throughout the report, you'll see that we basically quoted directly from their justifications for each one of the agency partners on how they justified those costs. So if you go to like the CRAB section, you'll see the state-specific responses on how they, they justified their cost recovery under our costs under cost recovery policies.

Thank you, and I appreciate that on Appendix A. I did look at that, and, and so my understanding is that is That is not in regulation, that's a regional policy on how to collect that. And so is our regional policy consistent with other regions?

Through the chair, Ms. Kimball, um, I do not know the answer to that question at this point in time. I know how we do our costs and that we provide that in transparent detail. This is exactly the document that I would use as a supervisor when managing my own staff's costs to understand if they're following the policy and ask questions accordingly. If there are costs being attributed to, you know, their work that may be questionable, and we'd provide that justification. How other agents or how other regions do that, I am unsure, but that may be something I could look into for a future version of this report.

Thank you.

Thank you. Mr. Kerlin. Thanks, Madam Chair. On Ms. Kimball's question there, that's one of the main points of the review the agency is undertaking is to take a look at the extent to which we're consistent, and if there are differences across region, make sure there are good reasons for those differences.

Yes, Ms. Kimball. I appreciate that, Mr. Curlin. I guess to get to part of the point, it doesn't seem like— are all the offices required to, since it's not regulation, abide by this policy? Because it does seem like OLE does it very differently than the region, and so I just don't know to what extent the policy extends to agencies beyond NIMS Alaska Region. Is that maybe a question for Mr. Cheeseman, or, or if it's coming up in the presentation, I can definitely wait.

Thank you through the chair, Ms. Kimball, for the question. So, um, in the regional guidance document, uh, there is a description of, you know, allowing for using an apportionment calculation or formula. Uh, over the, the years since we've been doing this program, uh, that is the, the formula that OLE has been using, and that's described very detailed in Appendices E and F. So, um, also, you know, I might take advantage to note that since this process of, of, you know, reviewing our processes have begun in the 2024 version of this report. We have taken a lot of proactive steps to improve our methods. Uh, you know, we, we do our reviews of the casework caseload, uh, the patrols and the boardings, uh, at least annually and oftentimes more than annually to update our formula and So I would—.

We are—. We did a revamping to some extent of our electronic case management system to enable more accurate tracking of time from each individual cost recovery program. That contract is set to expire, I believe, in July, and then We're not certain yet who's going to get that contract, if it will fall to the same person or same company. But, you know, we've been working proactively to improve the transparency of our process through this cost recovery annual process. And, you know, we're looking forward to continuing to work with partners and council to meet what's there.

But to date, we've used that formula that is described in the regional document as being an approved method.

Yes, Ms. Vanderhoeven.

Um, thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Mr. Perry. I guess maybe this is the right place to ask my question. As I was going through the report, um, recognizing ongoing public concerns about OLE costs in particular. And digging a little deeper, I stumbled upon in the, the tech memo, the 2007 tech memo, where it's, it said the Alaska Region is set up to capture time allocation formulas for all personnel who work on management or enforcement of an IFQ program., at the 15-minute increment level.

And I'm not sure, because we— I, I guess just weren't paying attention. I don't know when that changed, so I'm, I'm not sure why we can't go back to that and why we need to have this— what is not publicly transparent, um, approach to how that billing is being done. Using. I totally get it for the IFQ— or not IFQ, the IT example. That makes complete sense to me, but I've— I'm not getting there on OLE time.

And so maybe if you can help me out a little bit there.

Through the Chair, thank you, Ms. Vanderhoeven, for the question.

I don't know whether or not that statement in the 2007 technical memorandum is an accurate statement. I do know that when this process was undergoing review for the, uh, I believe it was AFA and CDQ, uh, in 2015, there was specific mention that there was no way based on OLE's current methods of tracking time to do the, um, the calculation for how much the cost had been for that particular fishery, those particular fisheries, prior to the advent of the program. And so there is specific language, uh, I don't have it in front of me, uh, that says that, you know, at that time that was not a feasible operation for OLE to As I said, we, you know, we are working to improve our tracking processes in response to all of this. And I might add that when we review cost recovery costs, particularly under the personnel cost category, which is where I think a lot of the focus is on 15-minute increments, you know, there's two categories that I view that people can report. There's those that are working on a discrete project, say there's a regulation that is being drafted or analyzed specific to a LAP program like revitalizing IFQ, for example.

Right. The staff person working on that can build directly like I was working on this in 15-minute increments. And then there's staff members. They exist in my branch that work with all cost recovery programs all day long, you know, dealing with maybe 3 different cost recovery or 4 different cost cost recovery programs within a 30-minute span. So we use that allocation similar to what you mentioned in the IT world because it's hard to tease out the specific understanding.

So, like, for eLandings administration, right, our eLandings support people, you know, they bill their time based on a proportion similar to the process that is explained in the document, and I think that's in Appendix A on on how those two different ways in which staff record their time.

Yes, Lieutenant Commander Reski. Thank you. Through the chair, um, could either of the OLE officers speak about the administrative burden of the 15-minute tracking interval with reduced personnel? I know about 20 to 25% of the officers and agents have left the agency based on the numbers that you guys provided. So that's the first part of my question is just about the administrative burden.

And then whether the second part is whether or not you've ground truth the data, basically did a test of tracking at 15 minutes and then compared it to your current method and seeing is there a disparity between the two.

Through the chair, thanks for the question, Lieutenant Commander. With our reduction in personnel, we've had to utilize a lot of personnel that would not regularly be working on certain types of cases to then go to different areas and work on cases in other LAPD programs. So to answer your question, yes, we're having everyone jump all over the place trying to, trying to get the mission done. You know, we've had in a couple instances, I think everyone, every enforcement person in one location just because we didn't have enough people to do what we needed to do. And then for your second question, trying to break it down to a 15-minute interval for what they're doing cost recovery related, it's just not feasible.

We've asked to see if we can do that, say when they go out to Dutch Harbor and they jump on an Amendment 80 or an AFA vessel and then they they're looking at catch records and trying to figure out what LAP program, if any of them, they are under, and then taking that information back from the boarding and starting the case and how the case evolves and which program it would fall into. I can't speak to how your boarding officers do it, but it would be very difficult and potentially inaccurate to be able to get to that granularity. And then to speak to our, our case management program, you know, what, what Alex alluded to there with our, our ability to document this, you know, we are able to document now specifically to our LAP programs the cases, but those don't add the time that are utilized on those cases. So for example, you saw in one of our, one of our appendix there that we had 888 88 cases for, for LAP programs. It doesn't say how long or how much time each one of those investigations took, and it also doesn't account for anything in '23 and '24 that was open that is still ongoing that they would still be utilizing their time to, uh, to complete those cases.

So hopefully that answers some of your questions.

Continuing on with the report, I've alluded to, or I've mentioned, Chapter 4. This was one of the specific asks by the industry when we were meeting with them to increase the transparency in this report. We provided summary tables which group all the various programs together, the direct program costs, the fishery value, and the fee percentage. I'll note that you'll you'll see some fee percentages are greater than 3% here, but in those instances the fee is capped at 3%, but we collect costs and we can calculate what the actual costs are relative to the fishery value, and that is generally published in the Federal Register where we say the actual costs were 3.56%, and however the cap is 3%, and therefore the fee is 3%.

Other summary tables include a crosswalk of the various cost categories that I mentioned that identified under Chapter 2, such as personnel, benefits, transportation, printing, as it was applied on 2020 over the, uh, 2025, um, year, um, by program. And at the bottom right there, you can see the total cost recovery amount collected for all programs. That was a specific ask, uh, from our meetings with the industry so that they got an understanding of all cost recoveries together. Or else they would have had to take 8 different reports and do the math.

We also provide the total cost for each billing entity over the past, you know, 5 years. We'll continue that report that gives the council and the public, you know, transparent understanding of, you know, costs and how they change from year to year. You'll see that in 2025, costs were reduced per, you know, increased guidance and increased communication. And, you know, the request from the council last year.

We also provided an understanding of the number of invoices that we generate. You know, IFQ is a very time crunch, and because we're generating 1,500 invoices and we're doing it in a span of of 2 weeks with all the collection of all the costs and everything associated with that. While there may be only 703 vessels, I think many are aware that the permits are held by an individual, not necessarily by a vessel, where when you get to a program like Amendment 80, you see there's one invoice that goes to the cooperative, though that represents 16 vessels.

Chapter 5 goes into great detail under each one of the cost recovery programs. I'm not going to go through each one of those in this presentation, but they're there for reference, and I'm available for questions if you have any. It provides a brief description of the cost recovery program, the links to the fee notices, a 5-year review of the direct program costs by the cost categories, and then a discussion of the program-specific costs by the agency. This gets you a little bit more detail on a program cost that might be specific to, to use an example, like the crab fishery, right, where we deploy— the State of Alaska deploys observers. That wouldn't exist in other cost recovery programs, but it exists in that description.

We also discuss any increases or decreases and the reasons thereof as we understand them. And I could pause for any questions if somebody has one on a specific program.

Seeing none, this is my final slide for this presentation. You know, catch share programs require high-quality and timely fishery data, and they're very complex in some to achieve the program goals. The fee benefits fishery participants by providing the funds for the management, data collection, and timely and responsive services. So it's not just about how we answer questions, but also developing the various tools that our industry relies upon for management of their LAP programs. And without those cost recovery funds, NMFS' ability to manage and support the catch share programs would be limited.

This consolidated cost recovery report was based on input from the industry and the Council to increase transparency, and we appreciate appreciate any feedback so we can continue to make iterative improvements to this report in future years.

Yes, Ms. Vanderhoeven. Thank you, Madam Chair. I, I wasn't really sure where in the presentation to ask my question. But I appreciate Mr. Cheeseman and Mr. Perry being here, um, because I think the other place where there's still a lot of concern about transparency, um, is kind of to Ms. Kimball's earlier question about what's being attributed as incremental costs. And I was trying to think, okay, what's, what's kind of the best way to get there?

Because I'm not always great at asking my questions, as I'm demonstrating right now. And so I looked at from the GC report, just kind of the cases that have settled since the last. So I had real-world examples. And so, like, we've got things like unlawfully transiting Steller's sea lion rookery, and that was an IFQ boat. And so is a cost like that, is that something that OLE is attributing as an incremental cost, or like an observer harassment situation.

Are those kinds of costs being included in what OLE is considering recoverable?

Through the Chair, thank you for the question. I'm not going to say all of it because it's not— it's not going to be all of the costs incurred on those.. But for example, we'll use Ms. Kimball's IFQ example. You know, prior to the LAP program, the IFQ, well, it was a derby day for halibut and sablefish, and it was something that OLE at the time, and this is way before my time, so this is what I was able to gather, was that OLE was able to identify the amount of time, 2 or 3 weeks, that they were going to be able to to do targeted enforcement on those vessels in those ports, wherever those ports may have been at the time, and, and conduct those enforcement actions quickly, swiftly, until the, until the fishery closed. With the increase of time for these fisheries, uh, going from a few weeks to the majority of a year, and the requirements on different permits and areas that these vessels are fishing.

A lot of that would be attributed, in our opinion, to, to the LAP program, because if it wasn't for the extension of the fishery, uh, we would not need to do the enforcement for as long. So for like the sea lion rookery one, IFQ, though they weren't supposed to go into those, or those rookeries before depending on how long it take, or, you know, if it was investigations that we have to do throughout the year, then we would attribute some of that to cost recovery.

Thank you, Mr. Cheeseman. And so I guess I'm trying to figure out then, how can we get some additional transparency there? Because I think if you ask members of the regulated programs, something like transiting a Steller's sea lion rookery is not related to the IFQ program. In that example, those were regulations that existed before the program. IFQ is not a good example, but, but something like that existed before.

And so I think maybe this is where we're looking for additional transparency. And so I guess my question is, do you have recommendations how we might be able to get some of that additional transparency? Because it's clear from public comment that we've gotten, it looks like regulated programs LAP programs and CDQ are being charged costs that are not seen as incremental or meeting the but-for test.

Through the Chair, uh, thank you, Ms. Vanderhoeven, for the question. Um, We put appendices in the memoranda, E and F, in there to explain and, you know, demonstrate how complicated it is to look at myriad cost recovery programs simultaneously. So, you know, the example of the IT system that you said you understand, using that formulaic calculation that back apportionment. I would, you know, I would assert and contend that it's even more fluid environment that OLE operates in.

You know, we, we may do patrols, we may do boardings, and we may, you know, go on one boat that is simultaneously participating in multiple IFQ programs—. I'm sorry, excuse me— multiple limited access privilege programs. So that's why we have chosen to, to apply, you know, the formula and, and do the review by looking at the caseload from prior years. Um, and, and so we have not yet begun to track that in 15-minute increments, um, to determine whether or not, you know, the investigation of the logbook had regulations that preceded the, the initiation of that lap. We just haven't done that yet.

Um, and, you know, I, I believe that that would be administratively overburdensome and, and inefficient, um, to do so, to try to track it at that granularity. Um, enforcement is very complicated and fluid and changing, and we can't predict exactly what we're going to encounter when we're on patrol. We can't predict what kind of noncompliance we may see trends throughout a year. So I hope, I hope that answers your question.

Thank you, Madam Chair. It, it really doesn't. And so I'm happy to talk to you about it more offline, but it, it sounds like, yeah, those things are getting lumped in with what's being charged because it's perceived on your end to be complex. And I don't want to get argumentative, but I think it's a conversation we can have offline, um, because it's, it's really not clear to me in any way, shape, or form at this point. So thanks.

Thanks, Miss Gimbel. I'll try not to Thank you, Madam Chair. The same question, and I— but I guess I just want to get a little bit away from the 15-minute increments. I understand how difficult that would be, um, that it'd probably take just a lot more time that would be recoverable if we were asking people to do that. That doesn't really make so much sense to me, and I know that differs from a lot of the industry comment, but, but I am trying to find a different path forward because it's either that kind of very narrow look and, and a lot of administrative burden, or it's what you have in your document, which is, is basically presuming that most of the enforcement activity occurring within a LAP fishery is recoverable just because it occurs within a LAP.

So we're trying to find somewhere in the middle, and it does not seem like front-loading the costs before they're incurred, that does not seem to meet the letter of the law in terms of incremental actual costs associated with the program. So maybe my, maybe my question is like, what level of your budget, if you can share, for OLE is based on cost recovery and what is base funding that you get from the agency? Because the differences that we're seeing in other regions for OLE, it's like tens of thousands of dollars compared to millions in this region, and that just can't be described through travel to me, and it can't be described through extension of seasons, because with extension of seasons, we've still gotten a lot fewer vessels, fewer permits. So is there anything you can share on, like, are we, are we different in that way with the level of base funding you might receive, which is clearly necessary for you to do your job? But this looks like a budget problem to me, is what I'm getting to.

So is that shareable on the record? Thanks for the question. Through the Chair, I think that your observation is is noted. It's, it's a good one. Um, I, it— I can't tell you exactly how much of the cost recovery is for our, you know, for our salaries versus our base because it changes every time we lose someone.

Every time we do our biannual update, we'll switch people around to different percentages based off their workload. Um, but also we're not front-loading from the— for for the next year, we're utilizing work that was done prior and then utilizing that for the money that is then given to us the following year. So it's not us putting our percentages up for the current time, is going to be based off of what we saw from, from before, but the actual data is data from actual time and, and work done. So just Just for that one, I just want to make sure that was clarified. But it's, it's a good observation, the, the amount difference between our, our, uh, base funds, cost recovery funds, versus some of the other, um, divisions.

I'm not quite sure how they are getting theirs, um, and the differences, but I appreciate that observation.

Okay. Any other questions on the report?

Yes, Mr. Pamplin. Thanks. Thanks, Madam Chair. This is a—. This cost recovery issue is a new one for me, but it's a familiar topic in terms of management of WDFW's budget and all the contracts and complexities that we have over $800 million operating budget per biennium.

And I completely understand and appreciate the complexity of, uh, of enforcement action and the dynamic nature of, of what a field encounter can transpire. So for instance, a WDFW officer on patrol at a wildlife area might be at a lake checking for trout fishing, and all of a sudden there's a drug issue. And so, well, do you code that to a lands issue? Do you code that to tracking recreational fishing? Do you code it to public safety or, or general law enforcement authority?

So, um, but we do, and we do it, and we have a lot of different colors of money. Um, general tax dollars, state license dollars, state licenses that have dedicated purposes, federal contracts, private contracts, local contracts, And we have to be accountable to each one of those fund sources with the activities that we're doing. And so, um, anyway, I just, I just want to offer that it's the granularity that I think people are asking for is doable. And just would want to offer, if you want to connect with my staff offline about how we track our budgeting and things, that that would be a conversation that would be helpful for you as you look to improve your system. Happy to do so.

Through the chair, uh, thank you very much for that, that comment, uh, Mr. Paplin. That'd be something that we'd like to see.

Okay, thank you. I'm not seeing another questions. Appreciate the report.

Ms. Miller.

Good morning, members of the Council. My name is Alicia Miller, NIMS staff. I'm accompanied by Ms. Taylor-Holman, Council staff, and we are here to provide you with a presentation on the initial review draft analysis. For revisions to the IFQ cost recovery program.

And just a brief overview of the presentation today. We're going to go over— keep it high level. You have a lot of detail in the document and in the slides. We're going to provide a short summary of the introduction and background just to remind you of past consideration of this action. Remind you of the specific steps in the cost recovery annual process that we're going to cover, and then get into the alternatives that are analyzed.

We're going to talk about the— we're going to describe each alternative and then talk about the impacts of that alternative to reduce repetition, and then talk— compare them. And there's a brief discussion paper that's included in Appendix 1 that talks about the Golden King crab season start start date, and that's available there. So we have just a couple slides on that. So just to remind you of the origin of this action item, we, the agency, provided information in the December 2024 IFQ program review highlighting the challenges with the IFQ program season dates and the extended season into December. At that point, the council requested a discussion paper looking holistically at— for the agency to identify the challenges and issues associated with all of our cost recovery programs.

In April of 2025, we brought back a discussion paper that identified a range of inefficiencies and challenges with our 8 different cost recovery programs, and we highlighted that this IFQC season timing was the most urgent need to address. Um, at that point, among the requests that were addressed in the annual report presentation that you just heard from Mr. Josh Keeton and our enforcement partners, the council requested that we continue analyzing those options to adjust the cost recovery annual process. And so based on that feedback, we developed a problem statement and suite of alternatives that addressed that highest and most important need, which is the IFQ cost recovery season date. So that's the, the background on what the work that we, the agency, have done to be responsive to that request that we continue looking at these. The other issues that were presented in that April 2025 paper, they remain things that could be analyzed if the Council wished to, to continue looking at those.

But at this point, we have identified alternatives for modifying the, that highest priority issue, which is that halibut and sablefish cost recovery season date.

So action at this meeting, we're looking for feedback or including input and recommendations on the range of alternatives— that are presented in this analysis, we're looking for the council to consider next steps, potentially identifying a preliminary preferred alternative, and consider releasing this action for final action at a future council meeting. Regarding the information provided in the appendix for the Aleutian Island golden king crab season start date, we're looking for the council to consider the next steps on that action, noting that that would be separate from the— this action as it's currently structured. But feedback on how this is structured is also welcomed as well.

In the paper, this is the problem statement that we've developed. It identifies that since 2021, the IFQ halibut and sablefish IFQ season has extended into December. This has substantively shortened the amount of time that NIMS has to complete the annual cost recovery process. And as you heard from Mr. Josh Keeton earlier, the IFQ program is our largest program with the most number of participants and the largest number of invoices that are generated. So it's crunched that time to about 2 weeks over the holidays in December, and, and this problem statement captures that.

So this is what informed the development of alternatives. Just providing you a high-level snapshot of the IFQ program. This is a summary of information that's provided in the document in Section 4, identifying that there's a lot of permit holders, a lot of vessels that participate, and high prices that contribute contribute to that overall fishery value of $158.6 million in 2025.

Not going to get into the detail of the cost recovery process, just highlight for you that there's multiple steps. And so the analysis focuses on the timing for completing all of these steps and when in the calendar year are we doing those steps. With specific focus on the validating of the volume and value report submissions that are used to calculate the fishery value, and also the timing of publishing that notice of standard ex-vessel prices and that fee percentage in the Federal Register.

The suite of alternatives includes the status quo and one action alternative with three elements. That would revise the halibut and sablefish IFQ cost recovery annual process, and I'll get into each of those elements later in the presentation.

So under Alternative 1, the status quo regulations for halibut and sablefish IFQ are covered in Section 679.45. Annually, the IFQ fishing seasons are based off of the halibut season dates that are established by the IPHC, and NMFS subsequently sets the sablefish season date to occur concurrently with the halibut IFQ season. Registered buyer volume and value reports are due by October 15th annually, and there's a regulatory deadline to publish the standard prices and fee percentage in a notice in the Federal Register. In the last quarter of the calendar year, and so that means we're doing that no later than December 31st.

We issue fee liability invoices, and those are mailed to IFQ holders also by that December 31st deadline, and fee payments are due to NIMS by the end of January, on January 31st in the following year. Any unpaid fees at the time we issue permits— that happens in late February or early March. Any IFQ permit holders that haven't paid those fees would not receive their annual IFQ permit, and that's part of the status quo regulations.

So the impacts of this process with the variability that is established in setting the annual season dates means that as the season inches further and further into December, then that time to complete this entire annual process is crunched. So we have a regulatory rigid set timing for when we have to complete all of these steps. However, we have variability when we will have all of the landings and the information necessary to, to do that. So that we cannot calculate the fishery value value until all of the landings are recorded, because current regulations specify that each billing year we are estimating the fishery value for all landings that occur in that fishing year, and the fishing year extends through the end of the calendar year.

And so with a season that ends on December 7th, we have to wait approximately a week for all of those landings to be finalized, which means we are starting this process December 15th. That leaves approximately 10 business days to complete this entire process, issue invoices to over 1,500 permit holders, or 1,400 permit holders, and publish that notice in the Federal Register. So it's really a time crunch in December each year.

Um, this is information that's provided in Table 19 on page 34. It identifies the historic season dates and the date that we have published the notice in the Federal Register, as well as the date that we issued the invoices. Based on our records, we don't have electronic records of the date that the invoices were mailed to participants prior to 2016, so that's just why that information isn't available in the table. But looking at this time series, you can see that in the, the 5 years, 2016 through 2020, the season ended in mid-November, and we were able to issue the invoices occasionally at the end of November or early December in those situations and publish publish the— easily publish the fee notice prior to the December 31st deadline. Since 2021, you can see the season date has been December 7th, and the invoices have been mailed much later in the year, with the latest being 2023 when we mailed the invoices December 27th, and then most recently in 2025 when we published the fee notice on December 31st, the last day that we could possibly publish that notice.

Regarding the registered buyer reports, these registered buyer— IFQ registered buyers, some of those registered buyers are required to submit volume and value reports. So those registered buyers that operate as a shoreside processor are required to submit this report by October October 15th, and they provide data for the volume and value of the IFQ fisheries that they processed in the previous year, and that is data from October 1st of the previous year to September 30th of the current year. So they're providing a year's worth of data, and we're using that to calculate the standard prices and the ex-vessel value for the current year's IFQ fishing season. Due to a variety of factors, including processor consolidation as well as non-compliance with this reporting requirement, we're seeing some data gaps. Some of the reports that are not filed on time results in increased confidentiality of port-specific prices.

For example, port-specific price prices for Sitka were not available for April through July of this past year, and that's one of the ports that we expect that we're going to be able to, to likely have those port-specific prices because Sitka is an IFQ hub. And you can see that and other information in Table 15 of your document. So annually we receive approximately 69 different volume and value reports from registered buyers. Most of these are submitted electronically through eFISH, and the reporting burden is estimated at approximately 1 minute to complete that report. Most of the information is pre-populated, and so the user would just need to review that and submit it to NIMS, and that's why it's a 1-minute estimate.

Otherwise, the manual reports take about 2 hours to complete. Because it requires tabulating an entire season's worth of landings and documenting that and then reporting that. So in aggregate, this reporting burden is estimated at $266 annually for all 69 reports combined. So that's the total value— or total burden, excuse me.

So moving on to the description of Alternative 2. Alternative 2 contemplates It's revising 3 different elements of the halibut and sablefish IFQ cost recovery annual process. I'm not going to read the slide here, but going to get into each of these elements separately in the following slides. Starting with Element 1, this element would remove the regulatory deadline for publishing the fee notice and standard prices in the Federal Register. It would also revise the fee payment due date from January 31st and push that back to February 28th.

So that would shift the timing of this annual process by providing NIMS with additional flexibility and more time to complete the steps necessary to publish that notice. We would continue to publish that notice in the Federal Register, so that information would become available. It's just there wouldn't be rigid a timeline on when it becomes available. And then the second half of this contemplates moving that fee payment due date to a month later, which would also give us a month more time on the front end to tabulate the, the prices. This would push that fee payment due date much closer to the typical permit issuance issuance, which happens late February or early March.

And so the fees would have to be paid before issuing those permits.

Um, looks like I covered a lot of this information already, but I do want to just touch on that. This does— the options presented, or this element would create trade-offs between providing additional information to NIMS for the agency to complete its processes, but it would also create that trade-off with the IFQ permit holders having less time between the fee payment due date and the, the administrative consequence of permit issuance, where we're looking at, have you paid those fees currently with the fee payment due date of January 31st, there's that additional 30 days, or approximately 30 days after the fees are due, before there's any administrative consequence of withholding that permit. So there is a trade-off with the options presented here in Element 1. Ms. Miller, we, we have a question. Ms. Vanderhoeven.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Ms. Miller. Um, This is the piece that I've been struggling with, with this action, because I remembered sometimes the halibut season opens pretty early. And so I went to the IPHC website and looked at opening dates, and it was not that long ago that it opened on March 6th, and not that long before that, that it opened on February 28th. And so if, if we're issuing those fee payment notices on February 28th, I don't— I'm not sure how people are expected to be able to get that paid and get their permit in time for the season opening.

So I'm struggling with how is this not just cutting off the top of the blanket, sewing it on the bottom, and calling it a longer blanket? I understand how it makes things easier for agency, but I'm not, I'm not understanding how it really works then on the other side for participants to be able to be ready to go when the season opens.

Through the Chair, Ms. Vander Hoeven, thanks for that question. And those are exactly the trade-offs that the analysis identifies as that it would provide additional time on the the end of the season for NMFS to do its processes, but it does crunch that permit issuance. And you're right, there— we're not changing the process to establish those season dates, and so if there were an early season opening, that would create some administrative friction with the, um, a February 28th fee payment date. So those, those would be the trade-offs.

Go to Ms. Gowan, then Ms. Kimball. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you for the presentation. And building off of that, I'm wondering if the agency contemplated exceptions to allow the issuance of quota prior to the fee payment due date, similar to what's contemplated in the Golden King Crab Appendix in this document.

Through the Chair, Ms. Gohan, that's not an option that we've analyzed in this document, but if that is something that Council wanted us to look at, theoretically we could. Thank you. And Ms. Kimball.

Thank you. My question was on the— well, the same timing question that's been talked about, but on the note that at a minimum, NIMS would issue invoices 30 days prior to the fee payment due date. Is that proposed to be in regulation, or is that just a commitment put in the slide?

Uh, through the chair, Ms. Kimball, um, that's our standard practice with all, uh, fee collection programs is that we issue those invoices 30 days, um, at least 30 days prior to the payment date. So that would continue under any change to the timing under for IFQ. Yeah, Mr. Kerlin. Thanks, Madam Chair. I think I may have been going in the same direction that Ms. Kimball was, but Ms. Miller, in thinking about your answer to Ms. Vanderhoeven's question, the intent would still be to give the industry 30 days after we issue the invoices, even if we're shifting the timing, right?

So we wouldn't be issuing the fee notice and expecting payment on a, on a shorter timeline. Is that correct? Through the chair, Mr. Kerland, that's correct. We would expect payment 30 days after invoices.

Okay, so moving into Element 2 of Alternative 2, I I do want to note that the elements included under Alternative 2 are designed to be for the Council to consider either independent of one another or selected in combination, so they're not mutually exclusive. And under Element 2, we've presented 3 different options for modifying the date range for the landings that are billed in the annual cost recovery cycle. So, um, the options vary in that when that cutoff date would be established. Um, Option 1 would be the earliest cutoff date of October 1st. Option 2 would establish a November 1st cutoff date, and then Option 3 is December 1st.

Um, and so this, uh, image, uh, is Figure Figure 3 on page 39 of your document, and really the red box illustrates that we're really talking about what is happening in this time frame. That's the end of the year before— at the end of the fishing season and before the next permit issuance, which happens in late February, early March.

As a, as a general statement about the options included under Element 2, Element 2 would establish a cost recovery process that is independent from the fishery season date. So that would allow us to calculate the fishery value and tabulate the costs and do all the things that we need to do in the annual cost recovery process independent of when the fishery ends. And so that's one of the, the advantages of the ideas presented under Element 2, and the options vary in how much of those landings occur in that time period where we're processing the cost recovery end-of-year process. So Option 1 is that earliest season cutoff where there are approximately 15% of halibut landings and 20% of sablefish landings happen in that time frame from October, November, and December annually. This option would align the fiscal year that we're using to tabulate our costs with the landings that we're including in the fishery value calculation.

Under Option 2, this would establish— well, Options 2 and 3, these would establish later cutoff dates of November 1st and December 1st. These would provide less time for NMFS to complete that annual cost recovery process, less time comparably than to Option 1, but however, it would include delaying billing for less of the landings. So with a November 1st cutoff date, that's approximately 5% of the halibut landings and 9% of the sablefish landings. And then finally, with Option 3, the December 1st cutoff date, this provides the least amount of additional time. However, it is some additional time, approximately 1 week, and would result in the lowest amount of fee liabilities being delayed until the next billing cycle, and that's approximately 1% of halibut and 1% of sablefish landings annually.

Moving on to Element 3. Element 3 deals with modifying the submission of those volume and value reports. To increase compliance with and reduce the data gaps. So the first option— I guess I'll start by saying these options each get at this a little bit differently, and they're not mutually exclusive, so they could be chosen independently or in combination. So Option 1 would create an administrative consequence for those registered buyers suppliers who fail to submit a volume and value report.

Option 2 would require the submission of volume and value reports more closely in time, or within 2 weeks of the final IFQ landing for that processor, or which— or October 15th, whichever is earlier. And Option 3 would increase the frequency of volume and value data submission to quarterly or twice annually.

Getting into the impacts of these options. So under Option 1, this is that administrative consequence would be to withhold their registered buyer permit the following year. This could create an incentive to comply in a timely manner with some more submitting this information because there's a real consequence consequence for, for failing to submit.

However, that administrative consequence would occur approximately 5 months later because permits are issued at the beginning of the next IFQ fishing season, and these volume and value reports are due the previous year.

Option 2 would modify the deadline for submitting the volume and value report to ensure that that's happening more closely in time to the processor's actual operations. So requiring it either by October 15th or within 2 weeks of the last delivery.

For buyers that are receiving landings throughout the fishing year, this would represent no change from the status quo. But for buyers who are receiving a landing— IFQ landings only for a portion of of the fishing year, there would be— this would mean that there's a variable deadline that's dependent on their operations, and it would rely on them knowing when they receive their last IFQ delivery for the season.

For registered buyers that think that this is their last delivery and submit their volume and value report, if they were to take IFQ deliveries after that, they could modify that registered buyer volume and value report that had been previously submitted. However, it would mean reporting twice, and so it could— any uncertainty in when they're receiving their last IFQ delivery could result in additional reporting to ensure that they're in compliance with this requirement.

And finally, option 3 would increase the frequency of reporting., to quarterly or twice per year. Um, more frequent reporting, um, could make this be a more routine, um, data submission, um, but it would increase that reporting burden. Um, and also more frequent reporting, um, could mean that we have less data gaps if there's compliance with an earlier report and, um, non-compliance with that final report, for example.

So to summarize, the options under Element 3 could improve reporting compliance. The data that we receive in this volume and value report would remain the same as it is under the status quo.

However, these are, are ident— these These options are aimed at improving the compliance with that, and I do note in the analysis that just improving compliance with the status quo would result in the same improvements that we would expect to see under the options analyzed in Alternative 2. I believe there's a question. Thank you, Ms. Kimball. Thank you. I just have a couple questions on Element 3.

I mean, the first is on Option 1. The slide says what the non-compliance would result in, but the option itself in the analysis does not say what the consequence would be if you were late in submitting your report. So is that NEMSIS suggestion that that is what the administrative action would be under this option? Or does the council need to define what that looks like in a motion? Uh, through the chair, Ms. Kimball, um, because we developed these options and alternatives, we're, we're definitely seeking feedback on what the specifics would be.

Um, the idea with option 1 would be similar to the administrative consequence for not paying fees, the IFQ permit. Is withheld from IFQ permit holders. Um, and so, as described in the paper, it would be to withhold the registered buyer report, uh, permit, um, until the report is received. Um, but additional clarity would be helpful, uh, in a council motion.

Thank you. And then just generally, under Option 2 and Option 3, under Element 3, I mean, I'm a little bit confused by the conclusions. I, I feel like making people guess on when they're getting their last IFQ delivery is not going to improve compliance and would mainly mean a lot of people would be out of compliance by no fault of their own. And then under Option 3, potentially requiring the reporting requirement 4 times a year instead of once per year. Also does not intuitively seem like it will increase compliance.

So the conclusions on that being an improvement over status quo are really curious to me. I guess my question is, did the agency also consider the agency administrative costs with trying to track every buyer's last delivery and ensure that they're compliant with that particular date, which will now be different for everybody, and the administrative costs of now receiving buyer reports 4 times a year as opposed to once per year. Those seem like increased administrative costs to me, to the agency, which of course would be recoverable under cost recovery and increased costs to the fleet. So are those things that we could draw out in the next version of this analysis? They seem like problematic to me.

Through the chair, Ms. Kimball, thank you for pointing those out. Those are considerations that that we could put in the next iteration of this analysis, and would— we would definitely take a close look at the additional administrative burden.

Okay, so I think I just have one or two more slides just to compare the elements under Alternative They get at improving the end-of-year process in different ways. Element 1 would shift the fee payment due date and remove the deadline for publishing the fee percentage and standard prices in the Federal Register. Element 2 would separate that billing year from the fishing year by establishing that cutoff date for when we would process the annual cost recovery cycle. And then Element 3 is aimed at improving the volume and value data that we have to calculate the standard prices and fee per— fishery value that is used to calculate that fee percentage.

So getting at the next steps, we're looking for input from the council, the public,, and, um, direction on the range of alternatives and elements, um, that should continue to be analyzed. Um, we're looking for consideration of, um, the next steps, uh, in moving this forward, potentially to, um, final action at an upcoming meeting, um, and, uh, potential direction from the council on identifying a preliminary preferred alternative. And as Ms. Kimball noted, there's a number of things that, that we would analyze in the next iteration. I'm just noting that there are sections in the document where we note that we'll explore the net benefits to the nation, as well as the Magnuson-Stevens Act and Halibut Act considerations in the next iteration of the analysis. And we would also provide an assessment of the implementation consideration of the options and elements that would move forward.

And with that, that concludes the report on the main cost recovery document. And I'll just pause to see if there are any more questions on that before we move into the Aleutian Island golden king crab appendix. Yes, Ms. Kimble. Thank you. I have a question, but And maybe, Miss Miller, it's not appropriate for you to answer, but is, is there an opportunity to— since recoverable cost is such an issue right now, to, to kind of give an analysis, and maybe it's this one and others, a sense of like, are we increasing recoverable costs under these options, or are we decreasing recoverable costs under these options?

It, it may be an ex— an extension to other analyses is not specific to this one, but you're at the table and it, it's such an issue. And to be transparent when we're thinking about making management changes, it seems like a good category to include. Is that something you could consider? Uh, through the chair, Ms. Kimball, thank you for that question. Um, yes, that's something— that's a section we typically include in, in our council analytical documents, um, to address the cost recovery considerations.

And since this entire analysis is about cost recovery, I can, I can definitely add a section in the next iteration that addresses that. Are we increasing or decreasing? But generally, when we're modifying actions that are specific to a limited access privilege program, the staff time and work that goes into implementing those actions are recoverable costs. And we tend to include a section in the analytical document to identify the types of activities that are necessary for implementation. So that's what I'm getting at with the implementation considerations bullet point that's on this slide.

So I view that as within information about increasing or decreasing costs, that would fit under that bullet point and, and what I'd provide in the next iteration.

And thank you for that. And just as follow-up, and I, and I understand, even though I think it's good for us to remind ourselves every time we do an analysis, you can charge us for it. But, but I actually meant more substantively on options that counsel's looking at, you know, are those really moving us in the direction of more recoverable costs versus less? So not just in the preparation of the analysis and the rule, but are actual decisions on changing management. So I think you understand my question now, and I just appreciate you considering that.

Through the Chair, thanks, Ms. Kimball. Yes, we'll consider that.

Thank you, Ms. Gone. Thank you, Madam Chair. And just a question, I'm curious, when I looked through the analysis, I didn't see a list of like stakeholders consulted. And given that some of these alternatives are impacting, I'm just curious if as you were framing these options if you did consult stakeholders?

Through the chair, Ms. Goan, um, through— as I note, um, in one of the earlier slides, um, this topic has been discussed at several different council meetings, um, and so other than stakeholder input, um, and discussions that occurred during those previous council meetings, there weren't any additional conversations. We're, um, here at at this council meeting bringing it forward and looking for input from the public. Thanks for that.

Thank you.

All right, with that, we just have a couple slides relating to Appendix A, which is the Aleutian Island golden king crab season start time action. This was first brought forth by the council in June 2021 as a motion for a discussion. Paper and combined with the cost recovery action before you today, given the alignment between the two issues. The June 2021 Council motion asked to identify potential regulatory or administrative changes that would allow EAG and WAG IFQ to be issued or fished prior to August 1st.

I won't spend too much time on this slide. This just gives a brief overview of the season timing considerations specific to Aleutian Island golden king crab. This crab stock is— season timing is unique, and it opens before all other crab fisheries on August 1st annually. Stakeholders have repeatedly sought modifications to shift the season date earlier, both at the Board of Fish and through the council process, including through this, this action back in 2021.

The state has the authority to shift season dates as early as June— sorry, July 15th, though the regulatory date is— opening date is August 1st. The state has shifted the season date back to July 15th in recent years to accommodate for the cooperative pot survey. In most years, they only shifted the season date back for the CDQ fishery, and there are no associated administrative issues that have been identified with, with this solution. However, all Aleutian Island golden king crab fisheries, CDQ, IFQ, and ACA, were opened on July 15th in the 2019-2020 crab year, and it's specifically this early IFQ issue and/or IFQ season opening date piece that creates a mismatch in the timing, of the cost recovery process.

Permit holders who do not pay their cost recovery fees by the, uh, July 31st deadline are not issued IFQ or included in the QS calculation pool. Therefore, if season— IFQ season dates are open prior to that date again in the future, it is unlikely that NMFS would be able to issue IFQ permits before August 1st in the future without a regulatory change.

Given this issue, NMFS has identified a couple potentially— potential regulatory pathways or approaches that would enable Aleutian Island golden king crab IFQ to be issued earlier in the year. The first is to modify the crab fishing year for AAGKC or for all CR program fisheries This was not recommended by NMFS due to the foundational nature of the crab fishing year terminology in the regulations and the issues associated with bifurcating the AAGKC crab fishing year as, as a separate defined fishing year from all other CR program fisheries crab fishing years, as detailed in the document. The other potential regulatory approach is to create an exception for AAGKC permit issuance that would allow AAG, KC, IFQ, and IPQ permits to be issued prior to that fee payment due date. Now, if the Council does wish to continue to analyze this issue further, NMFS does recommend that this option is considered.

Now, the next steps on this action— so just a very— this concludes the very quick overview. The Council could consider whether to take further action on this item, and if so, could This could come back in the form of a discussion paper, or the Council could develop a purpose and need and suite of alternatives for analysis. And if so, then this would come back for initial review.

Thank you. Are there any questions on this last part?

Yes, Ms. Kimball. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Holman. This was so long ago. I, I, I guess I was surprised to see it lumped in here, but appreciate the agency, April, and you able to track and keep, keep track of these motions.

But given that, and, and having no written public comment on this, uh, appendix, is there— have you been receiving any notice from stakeholders, or maybe we'll get verbal public comment today, or anything about the continued interest in this? I recall it was very few stakeholders originally, and I'm just trying to understand whether there's still a perceived need for this action, um, versus like what the substance of the potential solution might be. Through the chair, thank you for the question, Ms. Kimball. No, we have not received any further, um, notice or comments from the public to ident— to signal that there is still interest in this issue. I'll also note that this was originally brought forth as a, uh, in public comment to the council in response to the early, the earlier shifting season opening dates back in 2019-2020.

That was the solution identified by Fish and Game at the time to accommodate for that cooperative pot survey done in the Aleutian Island golden king crab fishery. There was not a cooperative pot survey done in 2025, nor is there plans to do one again in 2026. And so this, this combined with the fact that the state has pivoted to the solution of just issuing CDQ early rather than CDQ, IFQ, and ACA, this, it appears that this is a fairly limited in scope issue, and we are bringing this forth at this time to see if there's any remaining public interest, and if so, that could be identified within public comment for this issue. But no, we have not received any to this date.

Okay, I'm not seeing any other questions. Thank you for the presentation. Thank you.

So I know we have 2 AP motions on this. Um, we're pretty close to the lunch hour, so I'll, um, suggest we break for lunch, come back out 1:00 PM, and we will begin our, um, our afternoon session with the AP report. Then following the AP report, we'll take public testimony on C4. Okay, thank you.

Welcome back from lunch, everyone. So we are ready to begin our AP report on C4. Following the AP report, we'll be taking public testimony. So please sign up if you haven't done so before the end of the AP report. Thank you.

Ms. Riddell. Good afternoon, Madam Chair, members of the council. For the record, my name is Chelsea Riddell, co-vice chair of the advisory panel, and I will be giving the AP report on C4. We have two motions.

The first motion reads, the AP recommends move— moving cost recovery report and program improvements to final action with the following primary preferred alternatives. PPAs are bolded. Alternative 1, status quo.

Alternative 2, a PPA, revise the halibut and sablefish IFQ cost recovery annual processes. Element 1, remove the regulatory deadline for publishing the Notice of Standard Prices and Fee Percentage in the Federal Register and revise the fee payment due date from January 31st to February 28th. Element 2, APPPA, modify the date range of IFQ landings used to calculate annual cost recovery fee liabilities. The annual billing year would include IFQ landings from Option 1, October through October 30th, Option 2, November 1 through October 31. Option 3, the PPA, December 1 through November 30th.

Element 3, also a PPA, modified the submission of volume and value reports. Option 1, selected as the PPA, create an administrative consequence for registered buyers who fail to submit volume and value reports. Option 2 requires submission of volume and value reports within 2 weeks 2 weeks of the processor's final IFQ landing of the season, or October 15th, whichever is earlier. Or option 3, increase frequency of volume and value data submission to quarterly, quarterly, or twice per year. The motion passed 16 to 0, and with that, I can take any questions.

Thank you. Are there any questions on the first motion?

Okay, singnam, thank you.

All right, this is the next advisory panel report, and it's just labeled wrong. So it says that this is the IFQ cost recovery motion, but it is not. We just did that one. All right, uh, the motion reads, the AP recommends the council adopt the following purpose and needs statement and list of alternatives for analysis. Purpose and need section.

Sections 303 and 304 of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act authorize the collection of fees to recover the actual costs directly related to the management data collection and enforcement of any Limited Access Privilege Program and Community Development Program . The MSA is clear that cost recovery narrowly applies only to actual costs incurred for specific provisions directly related to a LAP or the CDQ program, not all aspects of vessel or processor operations. Long-standing NOAA policy has determined the actual cost directly related to is applied as the but-for principle for— of incremental cost, i.e., only incremental costs, those that would not have been incurred but for the existence of a LAP LAP or CDQ program are eligible for cost recovery.

Although many NIMS offices in the Alaska Region appear to adhere to the MSA statutory requirements and NOAA policy, there is clear evidence that NOAA management offices, specifically the NOAA Office of Law Enforcement, has not clearly established the statutory, statutorily required link between the fees being levied on LAP and CDQ program participants and the actual incremental costs directly related to those programs. The council, under its authority under Sections 303 and 303 and consistent with Section 304 of the MSA, intends to unambiguously define the actual costs that are directly related to and recoverable from each LAP and the CDQ program. This action is necessary to bring accountability and transparency to the cost recovery program as required by the MSA, NOAA policy, and federal accounting requirements. Ensuring appropriate and transparent cost recovery is strongly supported by Executive Order 14276, Restoring American Seafood Competitiveness.

The alternatives read: Alternative 1, no action, status quo. Alternative 2 and 3 are not mutually exclusive.

Alternative 2, revise cost recovery regulations for each limited access privilege program and CDQ program to define actual costs directly related to each program. Actual costs are those that are listed in the subpart of 50 CFR 679 and 50 CFR Part 680 implementing each program to include any amendments that are directly related to the program, noting compliance assistance has been a longstanding feature of NOAA OLE activities and is not cost recoverable. Enforcement of regulations that are not directly related to and implemented under a LAP or the CDQ program are not cost recoverable. Enforcement activities are not cost recoverable until a specific regulation defined as as incremental is identified. Rent and utilities and general personnel benefits that are provided to all employees of a cost recovery organization, i.e., medical, vacation, sick leave, are not cost recoverable.

Assigning predetermined fixed percentages of personnel, travel, contracting, or other costs to specific LAPS or the CDQ program is not cost recoverable. Option 1: include Pacific Cod Trawl Cooperative Program, PCTC, Crab Rationalization Program, CR, American Fisheries Act, AFA Amendment 80 Program, Aleutian Islands Pollock Community Development Program, Halibut and Sablefish IFQ, Central Gulf of Alaska Rockfish Program.

Alternative 3: define how actual costs directly related to each lab CDQ program shall be collected. No fee shall be paid until each entity collecting costs has demonstrated to the regulated public clear evidence that the costs are directly related to the program as follows: follows personnel contract costs, number of personnel, hours worked in 15-minute increments, and description of program-specific tasks completed as an incremental cost. Specific to NOAA OLE, provide the following information for each investigation billed to cost recovery: citations of the regulation investigative violation, number of officers assigned to the case, hours billed by each officer assigned to the case in 15-minute increments, total amount billed in the investigation. AP recommends that the council ensure that the analysis clearly and accurately outlines the actual cost to directly related associated with each LAP and the CDQ program, with careful consideration of the MSA and NOAA policy on cost recovery. The AP recommends that the council ensure that the directly regulated public be provided the opportunity to clearly describe costs that are and are not associated with each LAP and the CDQ program.

The motion passed 16 to 0, and I can take any questions.

Thank you for the report. Yes, Miss Vanderhoeven. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Miss Riddell. Um, I have 2 immediate questions.

The first, I'm looking at Option 1 under Alternative 2, and it looks to me that's all of the current programs and CDQ, and so I'm not clear on what Option 1 is intended to do that would be different if the option just wasn't there. Does that make sense?

Um, through the chair, yes, Miss Vanderhoeven. So it was my understanding that yes, these are all of the current programs plus CDPB. But they were specified to make it clear that all of those should still be included. The AP did not discuss whether or not it should be included as an option rather than just a list, but you're correct.

Thank you, that's helpful. And then my second question is regarding that very last sentence recommending public opportunity to clearly describe costs. And I guess for me, again, this is a structural question.

Every time it comes before the council, there's an opportunity for public comment. Um, I know I, I've heard some discussion about maybe like a work group like the West Coast has done, but at the same time this motion is looking to move to an analysis. So I'm not sure if like that work group is what was intended.

Um, how, how does staff analyze something if they haven't gotten that input yet? So I'm, I'm not sure how the AP saw that flow happening. Yes, thank you. Through the chair, um, it was the AP's understanding that AP felt that there was enough information in the reports that we have already received to begin an analysis, but the specific detail of figure— of sort of the council or the, the public having an opportunity to weigh in on the costs individually, that that could be conducted at a work group. So there's still overall enough to initiate an analysis, but that those specific details and considerations from the public could be done at a workgroup, as you mentioned, similar to the West Coast.

But the AP also didn't say that had to happen and was not intending to say that it should happen.

Yes, Ms. Baker.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Ms. Riedel.

I have, I think, a very general question about how— what the AP is suggesting. You're very clearly—. The AP very clearly is putting forward a purpose and need and alternatives for an analysis, which I assume to be an analysis of regulatory changes.

And I can see an alternative to the recommendation is to revise cost recovery regulations for for each lab.

Regulations, as I understand them, apply to the regulated public.

Am I reading Alternatives 2 and 3 correctly, that this would be looking at an analysis for NIMS to implement regulations to regulate itself? That's how I'm reading it. And I just—. I'm kind of—. I try not to be a process person too much, but I'm kind of struggling with that.

Did you talk about that at all with the AP? I'm not expecting you to answer that if you didn't, but please, can you answer that if the AP discussed it?

No, Ms. Baker, through the chair, the AP, to my recollection, did not directly discuss that. The only reason that the AP did discuss that in a related sense, that This was warranted because the request had already been made to NOAA enforcement to comply with the same, and then, um, other agencies provided that information, and the subsequent report in 2026 again clearly showed that it wasn't meeting MSA and other policies.

Any further questions?

Yes, Miss Gohan. Thank you, Madam Chair. It's not on this motion in particular, so if I should wait, I can.

Yes, Miss Kimball. Thank you. I just wanted to understand that, uh, Miss Riddell, the discussion under Alternative 3— I hope this isn't repetitive. I was trying to read this while other council members were asking questions, but we would be defining in regulation how the costs are collected and that there would be— did you ask this— there would be some process in place to, to ensure there was demonstration to the regulated public prior to those costs being collected? What was the discussion around that?

Yes, thank you, Ms. Kimmel, for the question. Through the chair, I don't—. To my knowledge, there wasn't any further discussion other than what I had communicated to Ms. Vanderhoeven. Um, it was just communicated that the West Coast had had this process that in overhauling and looking at their cost recovery program, public weighed in very specifically on the actual cost directly related portion. Um, but I—.

The AP didn't discuss where in the process that fell.

Any further questions on this part of the motion? I'll move on. Okay, Ms. Gowan.

Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you for the presentation. I'm wondering if the AP had a discussion on the golden king crab appendix that was in the halibut sablefish cost recovery analysis.

Thank you for the question, Ms. Goin. Through the chair, no, the AP did not have any discussion there. The AP did ask one testifier if they had any information to inform the AP, and the AP didn't get any comments similar to the council in written, so there was nothing really for the AP to discuss. And there wasn't a CRAB representative on the—. At the table, so.

Okay, I'm not seeing any further questions. Thank you so much for the AP report. Okay, that brings us to public testimony. I'm going to pull up the sign-up list here.

As a reminder, individuals and organizations will have 3 minutes. For individuals and companies, 3 minutes. Organizations and associations, 6 minutes. Looks like we have 8 people signed up. Um, I had a request here to take, uh, Chris Woodley first and then, uh, Andrea Kajkala.

Good afternoon, Madam Chair, members of the Council. My name is Chris Woodley. I'm the Executive Director of Groundfish Forum. So thank you for this opportunity to speak. To comment on NOAA Fisheries' 2025 cost recovery report for Alaska.

Groundfish Forum is one of the trade association— or is the trade association for the companies and vessels that participate in the Amendment 80 Limited Access Privilege program in the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands. This fleet has been paying cost recovery fees since 2016. Groundfish Forum is one of over 20 associations and cooperatives who signed on to the comment letter submitted to this agenda item.

And while I'm not up here to speak on behalf of these myriad groups and cooperatives, all of whom have a varied history with cost recovery, I do think that Groundfish Forum's concerns have much in common with those of the wider industry. As such, we recommend the council adopt the unanimous, unanimous AP motion and proceed to initial review with this action. Uh, first I want to acknowledge the improved NOAA report. NOAA has made progress with the 2026 report and reflects improved attention to transparency, detailed discussion of legislative history and regulations, and agency policy. And we also certainly appreciate that, uh, certain overhead expenses such as rent, lease, and utility costs are no longer being charged to the— to LAPP stakeholders through cost recovery.

While these are very positive developments, the report also raises significant concerns, particularly related to whether NOAA Office of Law Enforcement cost recovery practices remain consistent with the statutory, regulatory, and policy requirements that govern these programs. For nearly a decade, NOAA has consistently represented that cost recovery is intended to recover only the actual costs that are directly related to managing, monitoring, and enforcing a LAP or CDQ program. The guiding principle has always been that recoverable costs must be incremental costs, costs that would not exist but for the existence of the CAT Share program itself. The 2025 Cost Recovery Report repeatedly reaffirms the standard. In fact, the report states that recoverable costs must be directly associated with the program, must go beyond general fisheries management, and must exist because the program exists.

Despite this clear direction, NOAA OLE appears to have adopted a very different standard. The report reveals that NOAA does not— NOAA OLE does not employ a but-for assessment, but instead, and as we have heard today, considers the majority of work performed by enforcement officers and agents investigating violations within LAP fisheries to be cost recoverable. This suggests that enforcement costs are billed simply because an activity occurs within a LAP fishery rather than because the activity is uniquely incremental to the LAP program itself. That distinction matters considerably. Cost recovery was never intended to become a funding mechanism for general fisheries and enforcement activities.

If Congress had intended all enforcement costs within the LAP fishery to be recoverable, it could have said so explicitly. Instead, Congress limited recovery costs to, to those that are directly related and incremental.

We are also concerned about OLE's transparency. The council previously requested information regarding investigations, staffing, and hours charged to cost recovery.. No OLE responded saying that it does not track individual enforcement activities in a way that allows those costs to be tied to specific investigations or specific LAP-related activities. Instead, costs are apparently allocated using other vague workload assessment methodologies. This current approach does not follow the letter or intent of cost recovery law, regulation, or policy, and the lack of transparency The lack of transparency makes it impossible for industry, the council, or the public to independently evaluate whether billed costs are truly incremental and directly related to a CAT share program.

I want to note that these decisions have a significant impact on the cost recovery totals for Alaska LAPP programs, and those costs are significantly out of alignment and, and scope with other regions. The report shows that NOAA OLE costs exceeded $3.8 million in 2025 and represented roughly 42% of total Alaska catch share program costs in 2025. In contrast, comparable LAPP programs in other regions show dramatically lower or even zero enforcement costs being billed to cost recovery.

So Groundfish Forum, as a member of the 20 associations that signed on to the industry letter, requests that the council adopt the AP motion and move this to initial public review. A clear regulatory framework would improve transparency, provide consistency across programs, and ensure that cost recovery remains faithful to the intent of the Magnuson-Stevens Act. Uh, thank you for your time and consideration, and I'd be happy to answer any questions. Thank you for your testimony, Mr. Woodley. Are there any questions?

Yes, Miss Kimball. Thank you.

Uh-oh. No, I have a very simple question on, um, because I am interested in the differential treatment between our region and other regions, um, not really in the purview of OLE themselves, but in terms of kind of their base budget and their cost recovery budget and those proportions. And so I just really just missed I missed the piece that you noted in terms of the differential between our region and other regions. Was that simply on the OLE costs that are attributable to cost recovery, or was that also related to what level of base funding they get through the agency? Through the chair, Ms. Kimball, the analysis that we did, and we included it as Table 1 in our public comment letter, has a breakdown region by region.

Region of the specific cost recovery programs, and for those programs where they are capturing that information, they actually had a line item of what their OLE costs were. So that, that's what that basis of comparison is. It does not speak to the overall budget of those programs or the scope of those programs. Thank you.

Yes, and Mr. Muller.

Yeah, thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Mr. Woodley, for your testimony. The OLE report that we heard earlier for lunch there mentioned meeting with stakeholders and industry relative to putting this— their report together on the transparency issue that's been raised to the council. Was your Was your organization a part of that outreach from OLE? Through the chair, Mr. Moller, we do meet the Alaska Seafood Cooperative, which is our harvesters cooperative.

We have an annual skippers meeting every January, and we do invite NOAA OLE to attend that, and they do come in and meet with us for about an hour. Also during that week, We also typically meet with all of our individual member companies. I have attended these meetings for several years, but I don't think we've ever really talked about the specificity of cost recovery or any of those issues. We've talked more about just, you know, compliance with existing regulations, if there's any changes to the regulations, or if there's a particular priority that NOAA enforcement is going to be looking at for the year.

So yeah, thank you for your testimony. All right, thank you. So Andrea Kekula is up next, followed by Linda Benken.

Good afternoon, Madam Chair and members of the council. For the record, my name is Andrea Kekula. I'm the executive director of the United Ketcher Boats, UCB represents the majority of Ketcher vessels harvesting pollock and Pacific cod in the Bering Sea. I'm speaking today in support of the advisory panel's unanimous motion to initiate, initiate an analysis on cost recovery. Before I begin, I would like to thank Chris Woodley with the Groundfish Forum for his leadership on this issue, as well as the many organizations that joined the industry comment letter submitted under this this agenda item.

The breadth of support reflected in that letter is significant and demonstrates that this is not a concern isolated to one sector, fishery, or region. To be clear, UCB supports sustainable fisheries management, strong compliance programs, and effective enforcement. The invite— the advisory panel's motion recognizes that cost recovery is intended to recover actual costs directly related to a LAP or CDQ programs, and that transparency and accountability are essential components of that system. The purpose and need statement and alternatives provided in the AP motion is a reasonable pathway for examining how those costs are defined, documented, and communicated to the regulated public. UCB supports moving forward with the analysis because we believe it is important for both industry and the agency agencies involved to have a clear and shared understanding of which costs are recoverable, how those costs are calculated, and how they are linked to specific program requirements.

Just as importantly, this process provides an opportunity for the Council, NIMS enforcement personnel, and the regulated community to work together— to work through these questions together in a transparent public forum. The Council has heard concerns from a broad range of stakeholders, and an analysis is the appropriate step to fully evaluate those concerns and available options. For these reasons, UCB supports the AP motion and encourages the council to move forward with an analysis. Thank you for your consideration, and I'm happy to answer any questions. Thank you for your testimony.

Are there any questions?

Okay, thank you. So Linda Banken is up next, followed by Corey Lesher.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Linda Benken, testifying for Alaska Longline Fishermen's Association. We were also signatory to the group letter and thank Chris Woodley for his leadership on this. Um, we, we join them in thanking the agency for the work they've done to make cost recovery charges more transparent. Um, it was really helpful to have that paper to read through, but along with others who signed the letter, we are concerned still about some of the ambiguity around the cost to the industry relative to enforcement and wanting to have a little more clarity around what costs really should be charged to the industry that are directly associated with or CDQ programs.

So we support the motion that came to you from the AP. I'm not sure I could answer all the questions that were raised about that motion relative to process or how some of the transparency and public comment would work, but believe this issue does deserve council action and some more direction. Having listened to the presentation before lunch, I can say we don't want to cause undue complexity for, for OLE and tracking time spent on this action. But even our small organization has to track time with the kind of granularity that was discussed here by Mr. Pamplin. And maybe there is some kind of middle ground that can be found that gives us the information that we need and make sure that the charges to the fleet really are in compliance with the Magnuson Act.

I also wanted to comment on the IFQ cost recovery issue before you, at least briefly. We did submit written comments on that. We recognize that the extended season for the IFQ sablefish/halibut fisheries has created some administrative bottlenecks Thanks for the administration. We're supportive of the changes that they have requested. If you ask me about priorities, I'll definitely tell you we want small sablefish first, but we are supportive of them making those changes to make their workflow more smooth, that be more smooth for them.

We support the AP motion. Um, and I think I'll just end there. Happy to answer any questions. Thank you for your testimony. Any questions?

I'm not seeing any. Oh, Miss Gohn. Thank you, Madam Chair. Sorry, I was slow to get my hand up. Um, thank you for the testimony, Miss Bingen.

On the IFQ program in particular, um, do, do you have thoughts on the element where the It would have a February 28th date, which really compresses that window on getting your permit and getting payment in.

Yeah, thank you for that question. I mean, we were a little bit worried about shrinking that timeframe. I understand it'll be the same if you're talking about the beginning of the season as what we have now. There would still be 30 days. I think people have had time to get their payment in if they agree.

With what they've been charged. At times, the— what fishermen have actually been paid for their fish is different from what the agency assumes is standardized prices. And if they contest it, it can take a while and can lead to a delay in issuing that permit. I think what's proposed here doesn't change that. It keeps that window the same.

I think the one we were a little more worried about was under Alternative 3, and we had thought that Option 3 only gave the agency 2 more weeks, which didn't seem like much of a change given the amount of work that goes into writing new regulations. And we had suggested maybe Option 2 as a middle ground that gave the agency a little more time but didn't shorten opportunity or didn't move too much of the accounting year over to the next year. The AP went with a different action there, Alternative 2. Yeah, Option 2. I guess we are okay with either if the agency feels like they can make that Option 3 work.

Thank you for your testimony.

Corey Lesher is up next, followed by Edward Poulsen.

Good afternoon, Madam Chair, members of the council. For the record, I'm Corey Lesher with Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers. ABSC signed on to the group comment letter that was submitted under this agenda item, and I'll be speaking that today. Um, I'll keep my comments brief. Uh, I'm before you to offer our support for the recommendations, um, in the group sign-on comment letter, the sentiments expressed by testifiers before me, as well as the AP motions provided.

I'd also like to acknowledge The progress that we saw outlined in the report and the presentation that we heard earlier today, particularly the response to Council and industry requests that were outlined there in Chapter 1, the forward steps that NOAA and partner agencies have taken to reduce overhead expenses that are no longer included as part of the cost recovery program. I'd also acknowledge and just appreciate the size and scope of the federal waters here in Alaska and the necessary programs and resources that are required to maintain compliance and enforcement in the region, and we're supportive of those programs and offices needed to do so. Um, so similar to the testifiers, um, before me, we're asking the council to initiate action to clearly define through regulation the distinction between those baseline fisheries enforcement and incremental LAPP enforcement activities to ensure alignment with regulatory requirements per the MSA. Now, Madam Chair, I'd like to remove my ABSC hat and speaking on behalf of the Aleutian King Crab Research Foundation, the research foundation overseeing Aleutian Island golden king crab, the issue of the golden king crab season start change that was buried in Appendix A. My apologies for missing this earlier in time to, to provide testimony to the advisory panel, but I did have the opportunity to connect with the 5 entities, the active entities in the fishery, so both captains, vessel owners, or representatives and have received unanimous feedback for them seeing no need for further interest in changing the season start date.

As outlined in the presentation we heard this morning, it's currently set for August 1st, and, and we understand that there's opportunity to start the survey early in July. I think that's July 15th, and that's sufficient So I'm happy to elaborate on that further if, if there are any questions, but I wanted to provide that, that feedback today. And that concludes my testimony.

Thank you. Miss Gone. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you, Mr. Lesher, for your testimony. My question's on the Golden King Crab Foundation, and you mentioned unanimous support. That's from all stakeholders in that fishery?

Yes, I didn't, I didn't speak to 100% of the stakeholders, but I did reach representatives from every vessel or entity that participates in the program.

Thank you for your testimony. So, Edward Paulson is up next, followed by Peggy Parker.

Madam Chair, members of the council, my name is Edward Paulson, and I'm here to specifically speak to the part of the action regarding the Golden Crab— Aleutian Island Golden Crab fishery. And I just wanted to reiterate what Corey said. I'm a participant in that fishery, and we do have consensus that leaving the date August August 1st is, uh, where we are right now. We, we are not interested in trying to change it to an earlier date. Um, and with that, I'll take any questions, but I just wanted to make sure you, uh, we were caught a little flat-footed to it.

It's— things have changed in the years that we were trying to pursue this. I think staff did a good job of trying to summarize, um, the, the changes that have happened in the meantime. And at this time, uh, will take a little work off the, off the plate.

Thank you, we appreciate your testimony.

Peggy Parker's up next, followed by Glenn Merrill.

Sorry, good afternoon, Madam Chair and members of the Council. I'm Peggy Parker. I'm the Executive Director of the Halibut Association of North America. We represent the majority of processors who are first buyers and processors of Pacific halibut in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. Under C4, revise the annual IFQ cost recovery process.

We appreciate the staff's work on this RIR. And also appreciate the excellent questions from the Council following the various presentations this morning. HANA recognizes the needs for improvement in the cost recovery process, but given the wide range of elements and options under Alternatives 2 and 3, we agree with those who have expressed concern that additional cost recovery expenditures may be the unintended consequence of some of these changes. That said, under Element 1, Hannah would support this change, which moves the fee payment deadline forward a month, with one caveat: the added risk of moving could result in IFQ holders not receiving their permits before the season starts. There's less than a week between February 28th, the proposed deadline, and March 6th, the recent opening day for halibut.

If this risk could somehow be mitigated, Hannah would support that change. Otherwise, we would support dropping the element.

Element 2—. Sorry, let's get this up.

Excuse me. Element 2, modifying the date change of IFQ landings used to calculate annual cost recovery fee liabilities is to align the cost recovery calculations with the fishery year. The annual billing year would best be set at Option 3, December 1st to November 30th. In recent years, December 7th has been the last day of the season. For Element 3, we see Option 1 and Option 3 as clearly adding administrative costs and perhaps being unnecessarily harsh for processors.

Option 2 then is preferable, although it pretty much assures that most processors will be filing a second report since the historic date for season closure is mid-November, if I understand that element correctly. Uh, we support an updated RAR reflecting input from this process. I think there's been a lot that's been said here that would add to this, um, whole process. Thanks for the opportunity to testify, and I'm happy to take questions.

Thank you for your testimony.

Not seeing any questions. Thanks. So Glenn Merrill is up next, and Heather Mann will be our last testifier.

Thank you, Madam Chair, members of the council. My name is Glenn Merrill. Today I'm representing both Glacier Fish Company and Northstar Fishing Company. Collectively, our companies participate in 4 limited access privilege programs and/or the CDQ program for which we pay fees, 3 in Alaska and 1 here on the West Coast. I want to start with appreciation I really do personally understand the challenges of providing this information.

I really appreciate the agency's willingness and OLE's willingness to provide us with additional information. I think it's been very helpful. I do support the AP motion, and I think there's a theme that we've had throughout this meeting, which is the best way to ensure that we in the directly related— regulated public understand what it is that we have to do is through clear regulations. That assists us with compliance. I think it also provides very clear understanding for the agencies that are involved in the cost recovery program what exactly these terms mean and a consistent interpretation of those terms.

The way we get there is through our normal analytic process. We initiate an analysis, we have extensive discussion about these things, and we come up with regulations specific to some questions that came up earlier on the AP report. The council has a specific role that is recognized under the MSA under Section 303. The council shall develop a methodology and meet— and the means to identify and assess the cost recovery fees that are effective. That is applicable both to limited access programs that are— were implemented after 2006, but there's also the ability under the MSA to reach back and look at and apply these same criteria to other limited access programs as well.

I would encourage the council and through the AP motion to do so. Where might this end up? And I think speaking to some questions that came up during the AP motion, there is a process that is used on the West Coast and there are regulations that specifically define how cost recovery is calculated specific to those programs that are the troll limited access programs for the West Coast, there are provisions that state actual incremental costs mean those net costs that would not have been incurred but for the implementation of the trawl rationalization program, including additional costs for new requirements of the program and reduced trawl sector-related costs resulting from efficiencies as a result of the program. I think that's helpful for you to understand, and it's where we may end up. Ultimately at the end of the day with the AP motion: a better understanding in regulation about how the directly regulated public is regulated, how cost recoveries apply, and consistency throughout all of the agencies that apply these fees to the directly regulated public.

Thank you again for your time and happy to take any questions. Thank you very much. Um, Ms. Kimball. Thank you for your testimony. I am unfamiliar with the West Coast regulations to the extent, like, do we have good feedback that those have been working in the way intended?

I mean, I think one of the concerns that was heard was providing regulations that the agency would write regulations to regulate itself, and that's a little bit unusual. But if that's what the West Coast has done, what has been the outcome of that? Has it changed how incremental costs are determined, or has it just created more transparency. Through the chair, Ms. Kimball, I think it's done both. I think it's provided greater clarity, and I think it's helped to understand what exactly those, uh, costs— how those costs are calculated.

I think also, as you'll probably hear from others who've been involved extensively, uh, in the West Coast process, is that there's been an iterative ongoing process through workshops to be able to understand exactly how these processes are implemented. So I think it has been effective in trying to identify savings, which is a specific statement in the regulatory language relative to the West Coast, and also the additional costs.

Thank you for your testimony.

Heather Mann is our last testifier.

Good afternoon, Madam Chair, council members. My name is Heather Mann. I'm speaking on behalf of the Midwater Trawlers Cooperative. MTC strongly supports the AP motion on cost recovery, and we appreciate the thoughtful work that went into developing both the purpose and need statement and the alternatives for analysis. The motion correctly identifies emphasize what many fishermen have been saying for years.

There is a growing disconnect between what the MSA authorizes agencies to recover and what fishermen are ultimately being billed for. The AP notes that Sections 303 and 304 of MSA authorize recovery only of actual costs, and you've heard a lot about that. The AP further recognizes NOAA's longstanding interpretation that recoverable costs should be limited to incremental costs, the old but-for. The but-for situation and standard is important because it goes directly to congressional intent. Cost recovery was never intended to be a mechanism for allocating general agency overhead or broad fisheries enforcement activities, like transferring through a rookery, for example, to a relatively small group of participants simply because they operate in a catch share The AP motion correctly identifies a fundamental concern that NOAA Office of Law Enforcement has not clearly established the statutorily required connection between the fees being assessed and the actual incremental cost directly related to individual programs.

I believe this concern deserves serious consideration by the council. This issue became very real for MTC members when participants in the PCTC program began receiving their first invoices from cost recovery in 2025. Vessel owners immediately began asking basic questions: What specific costs are we paying for? What enforcement activities were charged? How are these costs allocated?

What methodology was used to determine what costs were directly related to and in support of the PCTC program? These are all reasonable questions, and unfortunately we have not got clear answers. As someone who was directly involved in the development of this PCTC program, I have another concern, and Glenn talked a little bit about this before, but Section 303, and I do have an attachment if you can put it up, um, does say that when establishing a limited entry, a limited access privilege program, a council shall develop a methodology methodology and the means to identify and assess management, data collection, analysis, and enforcement costs directly related to the program. Yet during the development of Amendment 122, I do not recall the council ever developing or debating a methodology for identifying recoverable costs, allocating those costs among participants, or determining how OLE costs would be attributed to the the program. The council did spend years discussing allocations, structures, processor participation, sideboards, ownership caps, many other important elements of the program, but we did not have a comparable process devoted to developing the cost recovery methodology contemplated by MSA.

This concern is reinforced by NIMS' own statements in subsequent rulemaking. NIMS explained that the annual PC the CPCTC cost recovery process, quote, builds upon existing cost recovery requirements implemented under other LAPS in the North Pacific, end quote. To me, that raises an important question. If Congress intended councils to develop the methodology for identifying and assessing recoverable costs, what role did the council actually play in developing that methodology now being used to assess fees. I have similar concerns regarding the Gulf of Alaska Rockfish program.

The AP motion appropriately addresses these concerns. I think it's important to note the AP motion is not anti-enforcement, it's not anti-management, and it's not an attempt to avoid paying legitimate costs. It's simply a request for accountability, transparency, and adherence to the standards established by Congress, NOAA policy, and federal accounting principles. The AP also correctly recognizes the participants in these programs already bear substantial costs beyond cost recovery fees, including observer coverage, cooperative management, quota management costs, extensive reporting requirements. So this makes this even more important.

Uh, finally, um, I will say I personally don't need a nationwide review to know that there is inconsistency between programs. I was deeply involved with the West Coast Rationalization Program since development, and I coordinate nationally, um, through an organization I participate in. So I have colleagues in all regions with cost recovery programs, and every single one is different. Uh, at the same time, the cost for participating in North Pacific fisheries are super expensive, especially in New factor in fuel cost. Really, it's my opinion that anything short of the AP motion under— basically undermines the industry and the AP collaboration, and it makes me kind of reconsider the role of a really well-functioning AP that provides advice to the council.

It also gives a green light to the agency, and particularly OLE, to continue business as usual, and I think that's problematic to the regulated public. Any further delay to moving something concrete forward is business as usual, and this imposes huge costs on participants and allows NIMP simply to continue writing appendices that they feel justify expenses with really no response from the Council saying, yes, we agree that these are all appropriate. And I can see I'm running out of time even though I've been talking as fast as possible, so I'll stop there and And I'm happy to answer any questions. Thank you very much for your testimony, Ms. Mann. Yes, Mr. Tom.

Thanks, Madam Chair, and thanks, Ms. Mann. I'm curious, given we've heard a couple times in the comments the comparison to the West Coast fisheries, and given you've had interest in, in both areas, um, would you care to comment on how the nature of the fishery changed with the development of the West Coast West Coast program before and after the LAT program, and then a fishery in Alaska like the PCTC. Like, what's your view on like how much did that fishery change before and after the implementation of the program? Just wanted to get a sense of that, of the magnitudes. Uh, through the Chair, just to, just to clarify, you, uh, Mr. Tom, you mean through the rationalization program itself?

Well, in both the PCTC program as well as the West Coast trial program, it ended the for fish. That's one of the biggest things that occurred. And so the fisheries, particularly on the West Coast, it became much longer. It wasn't managed by 2-month trip limits, so there was quite a bit of management that went into that. Curiously though, we never got a before and after comparison of what it costs to run the fishery before and after, which is another thing, and NOAA guidance we're supposed to have.

And then in PCTC, I think it maybe stretched things out and ended the rates for fish, but the seasons are different up in PCTC than what we have on the West Coast where it's a 12-month fishery. But from my perspective, those two things were, were some of the biggest changes. And then also self-management. So like I mentioned in my testimony, when you're in a a rationalized program, whether it's the West Coast one or PCTC, you have co-ops in some cases, in the North Pacific in all cases, you've got to pay for the observer coverage, you have a co-op manager, you have an inter-co-op manager, you pay for SeaState, so you have all the information so you can manage yourself in real time. All of that stuff came along with a rationalized fishery.

Does that answer your question?

Yeah, I think that helped a lot. And maybe just your perspective, just your perspectives on like, did it increase or decrease the need for enforcement? Just to, you know, as one example. I mean, you mentioned the season lengths changing, but are there other aspects that may, you know, given the accountability that's provided in the fishery? Yeah, thanks for that question through the Chair, Mr. Tom.

I think that on the West Coast in particular, the need for enforcement was reduced, and I think that the, um, records would show that, um, because you don't have the race, you don't have the trying to qualify the 2-month limits. There's 80-some-odd species on the West Coast. 28 Of them were in one rationalization program, um, and so having that all encapsulated within the self-management part, the enforcement definitely, um, was reduced. And I can tell you for sure, the costs are nowhere near what they are in the North Pacific.

Thank you for your testimony.

That concludes our public testimony on C4. Um, let's take a, a 15-minute stand down to consider public testimony and see if the council will return and see if the council would like to take action on C4. So let's come back at 2:15, please. Thank you.

Council members, please come back to order.

Hey, so we have taken our staff presentation and public testimony on C4. Ask if the council would like to take action. Ms. Vanderhoeven. Thank you, Madam Chair. I have a motion that I sent to staff, and I'll wait for it to come up on the screen.

Okay, thank you, Madam Chair. Motion reads: The council appreciates the efforts to date to improve transparency and accountability of incremental costs billed to the LAP and CDQ programs in cost recovery reports. Although my— excuse me, although many of the NIMS offices and partner agencies appear to adhere to the MSA statutory requirements and NOAA policy regarding cost recovery, the council is concerned that the NOAA Office of Law Enforcement has not clearly established the statutorily required link between the fees being levied on LAP and CDQ program participants and the actual incremental costs directly related to those programs. The council, under its authority under Sections 303 and 303, and consistent with Sections 304 of the MSA, implore NIMPS to unambiguously clarify the actual costs that are directly related to and recoverable from each LAP and the CDQ program. To ensure accountability and transparency to each cost recovery program as required by federal law.

Ensuring appropriate and transparent cost recovery is consistent with Executive Order 14276, Restoring American Seafood Competitiveness. To achieve that goal, the Council requests the following changes to current procedures be implemented starting with the current billing cycle. Regional Administrator establishment of recoverable cost categories requires Council consultation. Specific to NOAA OLE recoverable costs, enforcement activities are not recoverable except for specific enforcement activities directly attributable to the LAP or CDQ program. Number of investigations and boardings per program and total hours billed must be— must demonstrate how the cost satisfies NOAA— excuse me, NOAA incremental cost policy guidance to justify the incremental nature of the costs.

For recoverable costs that apply to more than one LAP or CDQ, the billing division or partner must demonstrate how cost proportioning was determined, describe the apportioning formula used for that individual project or investigation. And provide at the time of billing an accounting of the recoverable costs accrued to the LAPP or CDQ for that billing cycle by division of NOAA or partner agency, i.e., actual costs used in the calculation of the fee. And with a second, I can speak to the motion.

Thank you for the second. Ms. Kimball.

Um, thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Ms. Kimball, for the second. Um, I'd like to thank the agency for continuing to work with the council toward a level of transparency and accountability that the directly regulated public understands what their fees are and that they meet the legal and policy requirements. We've come so far in this iterative process, but I think we still have a little more to go to get there. I'd also like to thank the AP and public for their very helpful comments.

I hope they see where their work has been incorporated in this motion. I recognize that both public comment and the AP motion requested the council initiate a regulatory amendment as the next step in the process, and if this motion passes, I assume that some of them will be disappointed. But I do think that with this motion, we can resolve the issue nearly immediately without the time it currently takes to get a package through the Council process and rulemaking. I do, however, want to be abundantly clear that the ongoing resistance to Council requests for transparency that we've seen from OLE continue to be problematic. I anticipate that with this Council's previous requests on this issue, the agency will report back at an upcoming meeting and with the status of our requested changes, and if we can't get to a point that satisfies the council and the directly regulated public, we will need to consider initiating a regulatory package similar to what was put forward unanimously from the AP.

Additionally, it's my intention that as this motion is crafted, this approach will apply to all existing LAP and CDQ programs and can apply to any future programs in the region where cost recovery is required. The first bullet requires the regional administrator to consult with the council for approvals of recoverable costs. My intention is that for any change to accounting or reporting methods within the council's authority, those proposed changes first come before the council with an opportunity for public comment prior to implementation. I see this as a safeguard to ensure that our efforts to get an appropriate level of accountability and transparency don't slip backwards over time. The bullet specific to OLE is an effort to get the level of transparency necessary to ensure costs are truly incremental and satisfy the But For policy directive by NOAA.

Further, it responds to the concerning comments made by OLE that they consider consider nearly all of their costs to be recoverable. Requiring the specific regulation or regulations being investigated goes to ensuring the costs satisfy the but-for test. Reporting the number, um, the hours billed, um, by investigation basis may not be easy or as efficient for OLE, but it's inconceivable that OLE can't do it. We all deal with vendors like shipyards who break out their billing by project code and further to parts and labor. Even my lawyer breaks his time down in 6-minute increments by client and project.

So I, I have confidence that we can find a way for OLE to do that. The third bullet pertaining to projects or investigations involving more than one lab or addresses projects like the IT example provided. That makes perfect sense to me. My intention is to carry that same methodology where it may be appropriate for other divisions or partner agencies. And finally, the bullet requiring supporting documentation be included when invoices are sent out.

Currently, when invoices are sent out, there's only a total amount due with no explanation. The breakdown of costs and explanations of how the fee was determined isn't known until the annual cost recovery report is provided to the council. I was pretty shocked when I learned that, um, and so my intention is that the same level of detail provided in the annual cost recovery report for the direct costs by division or partner— and I think I heard staff refer to it as the cost category table for each program being regulated is what would go out when that fee notice goes. And clearly that information is available because that's what went into calculating the fee. And with that, I would be happy to take any questions.

Thank you for the motion and rationale, Ms. Vanderhoeven. Are there any questions?

People are perhaps still reading.

I'll just take a moment.

Miss Vanderhoofing, can you repeat process-wise what you anticipate coming back to the council on bullet 1 and the Yeah, the mechanism and opportunity for public engagement.

Thank you for the question, Madam Chair. I think similar to what we've seen in this iterative process, the cost recovery report has come back with where they've been able to implement the changes we've requested. And so we would continue to see that as part of the council process. We would be able to receive public input.

And like I said, I'm, I'm cautiously optimistic that we can get where we need to be over the course of this current billing cycle and not have ongoing issues.

And I'm sorry, I forgot the other part of your question. You covered it. Thank you.

See if there are any questions. Yes, Miss Kimball. Thank you, and thank you for the motion, Miss Vanderhoeven. I'm, um, maybe this is too in the weeds, but just in— have you thought through, or does this motion provide any options for how in bullet 2 to be more specific to OLELI about recoverable costs, how to apply that that "but for" statement. I'm thinking that for so many of these programs, or all of these programs, we know the number of vessels that were participating pre- and post-catch share program.

We know the number of processors, we know the days fishing, we know all of that kind of information prior to a catch share program being established and post. Is that some of the kind of information you would expect NOAA to understand or look at when they're trying to determine the "but for" question? If we're trying to get to incremental costs?

Um, through the chair, thank you for the question, Ms. Kimball. I, I think that's going to be very situational depending on what the particular investigation is, right? Um, in, in questioning during the report, um, there I asked a question about things like stellar sea lions that doesn't have anything to do with the LAP program. Um, and I think from comments that we've gotten in public comment and through the AP, um, I think the question is, for a lot of the current lack of transparency in charges, is that programmatic things rather than related to, like, number of participants beforehand. It's It's more, is it part of a LAP or is it something that has nothing to do with the LAP at all?

And I hope that answered your question.

It does. I guess I'm trying to get to the core of, you know, some of the rationale being used currently is that the season is longer or that there needs to be more presence on the water, but in several of these programs, the fleets have actually shrunk. The season looks very similar to what it did before. So I appreciate it. You didn't get into that level of detail, so I shouldn't push that on you in the bullet.

I'm just, I guess, expressing my interest in that level of thinking.

Thank you, Ms. Baker.

Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you, Ms. Vanderhoeven, for the motion. And I also have a question about the first bullet in terms of changes to current procedures. And I'm remembering some public testimony we received that this council's current review of the cost recovery report is not sufficiently— is not sufficient to meet our requirements under the Magnuson-Stevens Act for cost recovery. And so do you see this as one step for the if the regional administrator or the agency establishes the recoverable cost categories and then the council weighs in on that, is, is that kind of perhaps a way to get at that level of concern that was expressed in testimony?

Um, through the chair, thank you, Ms. Baker, for the question. I think certainly, I think, um, the other thing I think this bullet accomplishes. Um, I, I think our current regional administrator has a pretty good understanding of what level of accountability and transparency this council is looking for. Um, not looking for this to be durable, you know, 10 years from now when there's a new one, um, that there's an obligation to have that consultation with the council. So that we don't backslide on the progress we've made.

Thank you. Mr. Carlin. Thanks, Madam Chair. Just building on this discussion, Ms. Vanderhoeven, I guess the way I interpreted the first two bullets together, and I'm looking for some validation from you if this is consistent with your intent, but if, for example, the agency looks at all of our enforcement categories and, and subcategorizes that in some manner into bins that we determine, well, these bins would be appropriately charged and these bins would not, that we would bring those categories back to the council for some discussion and validation. Is that kind of what you envision?

I think that would certainly be a part of it. Thank you, Mr. Kerlin.

And to— I'm not seeing any other hands, so I'll ask another question just to, you know, Mr. Kerland's clarifying point. Did you—. We—. There was reference in public testimony and some questions drawn out about about the working group model in the West Coast. I'm just thinking about the value and the potential value in having assistance from an industry work group to provide more focused feedback and guidance to the council should we be commenting on some potential future changes to guidance and cost recovery, and I'm wondering if you had put any thought into that in your development of the motion.

Thank you, Madam Chair, for the question.

I did put some thought into that, and I'm not as familiar as others might be with the West Coast Workgroup and how that works. And because I wasn't initiating a regulatory package to go forward, I didn't incorporate it the way that the AP did. I certainly think that if we continue to have ongoing concerns or needs to, needs to modify cost recovery like we've done in this iterative process, we, we could look at developing a workgroup, maybe kind of like how we do with the FMAC committee, right? They review the annual report and then bring recommendations to the council. I think that would be reasonable.

But while I tend to be a skeptic, I also tend to be an optimist. And I, like I said, I, I think we're getting to a point where we may not need that workgroup going forward. But we can certainly revisit that at any time. Or if somebody else wanted to initiate that, I would not be opposed, but I'm not prepared to.

Okay, thank you, Miss Vanderhoeven.

Any other questions, any amendments or comments?

Yes, Mr. Carlin.

Thank you, Madam Chair. So I think I may have made a statement sort of like this a year ago when we were discussing cost recovery reports that I just want to make clear that I really welcome the scrutiny of the agency's cost recovery process. I mean that in all sincerity.

If there is not broad public trust in how we are administering these provisions, that's a problem. And we are committed to working on that and trying to resolve that. I do think we've made quite a bit of progress in transparency and having the comprehensive report. And then after the first iteration of the comprehensive report across all the programs, building in a number of revisions in response to feedback. It's not perfect yet, but we're going to keep working on it.

So really appreciate everybody's patience. I understand the frustration around these issues, and I'm committed to trying to get us to the point where there's more comfort with this whole process.

Thank you. Ms. Gowan. Thank you, Madam Chair, and I just want to say appreciation to Ms. Vanderhoeven for her leadership on this motion. I'll be supporting the motion, and I appreciate the agency's comments and, and really want to commend the agency on being— continuing to be responsive. This is starting to be an iterative process, and really appreciate the improvements that we've been seeing here in the agency's efforts.

So thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Um, thank you, Miss Vanderhoeven, for the motion. I'll, I'll be supporting it. I, I do think we have a problem, um, and I appreciate Mr. Kerlin's remarks about trying to continue to make progress. I mean, this is real money to an industry that, that in some cases is facing very tough times or very small margins.

I mean, $9 million, sometimes $11 million in cost recovery fees, and And I really appreciate having the regional staff and the leadership from OLE at the table to answer questions. It's much appreciated that they're here in person, but I do think we need to make meaningful progress on this, or it's just going to become a bigger and bigger issue. So I know the agency is, is strapped, but I think providing the spotlight that you did on it in the, in the report that was provided and And then continuing to make progress beyond even this motion, I think, will be, uh, very helpful. I don't think this issue is going to go away, so I think we need to be really committed to tracking it. I hope that this is a meaningful step forward.

I appreciated your comments on, you know, if not, we can look at a regulatory amendment, but this might be a quicker means. Um, I personally think a quicker means is dealing with the OLE budget., and we can speak to that a little bit later. But I'll be supportive of this step, and I do appreciate the working that you did to provide this for us. So thanks, Mr. Muller. Yeah, thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you, Ms.

Vanderhoeven, for the motion. I too will be supporting the motion. I think the potential expanded path or expedited path to address this issue that's been brought in front of the council. Hopefully it makes some sense versus a full-blown regulatory package, of which we all know takes more time than any of us would like. But that being said, I also would support, you know, your assertion about bringing a full-blown regulatory package back to this council should this action not meet meet, you know, the expectations of the public, the industry, and all stakeholders involved.

So thanks again for the motion.

Thank you. Any other comments on the motion?

Mr. Seymour.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Yeah, we heard today that, you know, folks would like more clear— more clear idea of what, you know, the cost of recoverable costs are. And I, I also express that sentiment. I hope that today we can make a little—. In the future, we make a little more progress than we did today.

And I hope that the agency has heard this as well and takes this seriously and continues to work with the industry, you know, to maintain that trust and to be transparent in the future. So with that, I will be supporting this motion.

Thank you. Any further comments?

Okay, thank you. Oh, Ms. Watson. Thank you. Through the chair, I just wanted to offer a quick statement to the extent that it's informative and helpful for the council members today. Uh, as noted, there's two relevant statutory provisions, uh, read together.

The council develops essentially the how, so that's the methodology and means for NIMS to identify and evaluate the management, data collection, and enforcement programs that should be charged to cost recovery. The MSA then mandates that NIMS collect a fee to recover the actual cost directly related to the management, data collection, enforcement of any LAP or CDQ program.

Against this backdrop, I just wanted to offer a few comments. Uh, first, actions, um, like RA consultation with the Council on Recoverable Costs, demonstration of how cost proportioning was determined for costs that apply to more than one LAP or CDQ program and the provision of accounting of recoverable costs for a billing— for the billing cycle. These sort of process requirements seem to squarely fall within the MSA's directive that the council consider the how, or essentially the methodology and means. As I understand it from the motion and from the discussion at the table, NIMS would respond to the council's requests in part through this iterative process that we've been going through, uh, the annual cost recovery report and feedback provided by the council during the agency's reporting. Uh, this is part of the agency's administration of cost recovery under the MSA.

The actual administration of the cost recovery program is the responsibility of NIMS. Second, NOAA GC recognizes that there are continuing questions about what constitutes constitutes recoverable costs. Following the council motion, assuming it passes, NOAA GC will continue to work with our clients across NIMPS to assess this request as to whether costs— whether there are certain costs that are not recoverable and whether the processes for calculating these costs are appropriate. Given the current agency-wide efforts reported, we intend to work on that internally. Uh, finally, just note that the council has consistently asked for more transparency in documenting agency costs.

We wanted to flag that there are legal restrictions on some information that the agency can provide and release publicly in this context, primarily restrictions on PII and enforcement-related materials. Much of this would overlap with the exemptions that we would apply, uh, in a FOIA request, for example. Uh, we work closely with NIMS and OLE to ensure that the release of any information complies with our legal requirements and will continue to do so. And I'm happy to answer any questions, but I just wanted to provide a few comments to the extent they're helpful. So thank you.

Thanks, Ms. Watson. See if there any other comments.

Thank you for all of your work on this, Ms. Vanderhoeven. Um, and I would like to echo appreciation for the agency and their responsiveness to previous council requests, um, and the sentiment of others that obviously some more work needs to be done to address this discrete issue. Um, and I also appreciate your comments on your thinking of the— in regards to the workgroup and its connection to, you know, if we were to initiate a regulatory action. I, I, I still want to put a little bit of time in in thinking through this a little bit more and maybe absorbing this motion, um, and, uh, and talking to some folks before we get to staff tasking to see whether or not such a group might have some benefit within the realm of, of what we're looking at here. Um, very focused, you know, I just want to ensure I understand any resources from staffing perspective on that, and would— the thinking would be to rely very heavily on industry engagement with very specific questions.

So, and so would appreciate the public's feedback on that before we get to staff tasking, and we can potentially revisit it there. So, um, with that, are there any other comments?

Any objection to the motion?

Okay, seeing none, that motion passes without objection. Are there any other actions for C4? Um, yes, Miss Cohen.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I have a motion to offer, and once it gets displayed, I'll read it.

The motion reads: the Council understands there's a national effort ongoing looking at consistency across regions as appropriate regarding cost recovery program methodologies and categories of recoverable costs under limited access privilege programs. The Council recommends sending a letter to NOAA Fisheries encouraging timely completion of this effort and asking to see a summary of results with a particular interest in NOAA Office of Law Enforcement around the country and their methodology for determining incremental costs, what the cost categories are, and how personnel track time spent towards limited access privilege programs. And with the second, I can speak to it.

Thank you for the second, Ms. Baker.

Thank you for the second, and I'll keep this short. I appreciate the effort, transparency, and continued improvement by NOAA Fisheries regarding cost recovery. I also appreciate Ms. Vanderhoeven's motion and see this motion as complementary to hers by gathering information and getting a better understanding of cost recovery programs nationwide. Depending on the response to the letter, it should help us make meaningful progress on this issue. As we heard during the presentation today, the agency is currently having a conversation internally regarding their cost recovery programs around the country with a goal of consistency among programs and where there are differences a better understanding of why and what characteristics of each region might necessitate those differences.

And I appreciate the comments by General Counsel under the previous motion noting there may be limitations on the level of detail regarding costs that can be reported back from the agency. As we've heard, there's much interest among affected stakeholders in Alaska fisheries subject to cost recovery and better transparency and understanding of recoverable incremental costs and the methodologies, particularly by NOAA's Office of Law Enforcement. I understand this national cost recovery effort is ongoing, and while the agency would likely provide the council with an update with or without a formal letter from the council, I think a letter emphasizes the council's interest in this topic and in an update on the results. Happy to take any questions.

Thank you for the motion, Ms. Gowan. Are there any questions?

Any amendments to the motion?

Yes, Miss Kimball.

I have a— I have an amendment. If I just sent that, the amendment reads The letter should reflect concerns with the approach to OLE cost recovery in the North Pacific region and a request for information to understand the base funding provided to NOAA OLE in the North Pacific compared to other regions and the proportion of cost recovery fees contributing to each region's annual budget. And with a second, I'll speak briefly to that. Thank you for the second, Mr. Sugata. Ms. Kimball.

Thank you. Just briefly, I, I'm very supportive of the, um, Miss Cohen's motion on sending a letter. Um, in reading it, I guess I wanted to express a little bit more. I wouldn't want the letter to just reflect that we'd like to see the results of the consistency review. I, I really have already expressed my, my feelings on the record a couple times about seeing this really as a budget problem in our region, the OLE in particular being treated differently from other regions in terms of base budget that contributes then to the incentives or the need to backfill that budget with cost recovery.

And so I'd like to express, I mean, if we're going to look for consistency across regions, I don't want to be the model in that. I would rather them look across regions and have us be treated more similarly to other regions in this case. So I guess it looks like a really positive letter. I want to put a little bit more detail on our concerns in the letter. And that's the basis for the amendment.

Thank you. Are there any questions on the amendment?

Any comments on the amendment?

Okay. Any objection to the amendment?

Seeing none, that amendment passes without objection. So that brings us to to the main amended motion. Any comments?

Thank you for your work on this. Let's go on. Any objection? That motion passes without objection.

Any further action? Mr. Kerlin. Thank you, Madam Chair. I have a motion on the cost recovery Process Improvements, and I'll wait for that to get on screen.

I'll just note, as this is coming up, it includes some redline and strikeout text, and staff brought to my attention a bit too late to fix it that some people have— may have a little difficulty seeing the red text, so I apologize for that. Lesson learned.

Council moves the IFQ cost recovery process initial review analysis forward for final action with the following revisions to the purpose and need and suite of alternatives, with additions shown in red line and deletions in strikeout. The preliminary preferred alternative elements and options are identified in bold below. Purpose and need. Since 2021, the International Pacific Halibut Commission has extended the halibut fishing season to end in December, and IPHC is expected to continue a December ending date for the foreseeable future. Annually, NMFS establishes the sablefish IFQ season dates based on the season dates established by the IPHC for halibut.

The extended season for halibut and sablefish has reduced the amount of time NMFS has to perform administrative tasks necessary to calculate the IFQ cost recovery fee percentage and determine individual fee liabilities under regulations at 50 CFR 679.45, posing risks that NMFS might not be able to complete the fee collection process in a timely manner before permits are issued for the next fishing year. The administrative steps necessary to assess fees for the halibut and sablefish IFQ fisheries are designed to run concurrently for all IFQ holders, including both sablefish IFQ and halibut IFQ. Additionally, data gaps with IFQ registered buyer volume and, and value reports reduce data quality for calculating port-specific standard prices and the overall fishery value. Action is needed to revise the halibut and sablefish IFQ cost recovery administrative process to accommodate later fishing season end dates in December and improve IFQ registered buyer volume and value reporting. And I, I won't read through all the alternatives, but I'll just highlight the preferred— preliminary preferred alternative would be Alternative 2, revise the halibut sablefish IFQ cost recovery annual processes Element 2, modify the date range of IFQ landings used to calculate annual cost recovery fee liabilities.

The annual billing year would include IFQ landings from Option 3, December 1st through November 30th. And Element 3, modify the submission of volume and value reports by implementing an administrative consequence for registered buyers who failure to submit volume and value reports NIMS would not issue a registered buyer permit until the previous year's volume and value report is submitted. And that's my motion.

Thank you for the second, Ms. Vanderhoeven. Mr. Kerling. Thank you, Madam Chair. My motion is consistent overall with the AP motion with 4 differences, and those are that it revises the purpose and need statement It splits Alternative 2 Element 1 into two options. So the two options are removing the deadline for publishing the notice and revise the fee payment due date.

So either or both of those could be selected at final action or not. The third difference is that it specifies what the administrative consequence would be in Element 3 Option 1, specifically that NIMS would not issue a registered buyer permit until the previous year's volume and value report is submitted. And then, uh, fourth, it simplifies Element 3 by dropping options 2 and 3, given the administrative complications discussed during Council questions on the report from agency staff. The changes to the purpose and need incorporate updates to more specifically state the need for action, including the need to improve volume and value data reporting. As I noted, my option splits Element 1 from the draft analysis into two options that are not mutually exclusive, so they could be chosen individually or in combination.

That's a structural change to Element 1 to clarify that there are two decision points in the element, as it does not substantively, substantively change the options analyzed. Consistent with the AP motion, I've identified a preliminary preferred alternative. Although the AP didn't include Element 1, and I am likewise not including it as part of the preliminary preferred alternative, I support exploring these two options separately and continuing to consider these options for potential selection at final action.

Under Alternative 2, Element 1, the AP rationale against including Element 1 in the PPA was focused on the impact of changing the fee payment due date With the revisions to the structure of the element to split those two changes into separate options that can be selected individually at final action, the Council could recommend removing the notice publication date without also modifying the fee payment due date. Option 1 would provide additional flexibility on the timing of publishing the notice in the Federal Register, and the notice would continue to be published just on a more flexible time schedule. And specifically in support of the PPA that I'm recommending, Alternative 2, Element 2, Option 3 would establish a set date range for cost— for the cost recovery billing cycle. Option 3 would allow NIMS to begin the annual billing cycle in December, which would provide approximately a week more time to complete the annual process by the regulatory deadline and would postpone delaying billing for the lowest amount of end-of-season landings of the three options, and that'd be approximately 1% of all halibut and sablefish landings, at least based on the past 5 years. For a final action, I would ask that the analysts provide a bit more detail on the amount of landings that are typically made from mid-November to early December, and that would allow the Council to determine if perhaps an intermediate date between November 1 and December 1 may appropriate and, and could be selected at final action.

And then finally, for Alternative 2, Element 3, Option 1, the language I've offered just adds an incentive for— sorry, specifying the, the administrative consequence adds an incentive for registered buyers to turn in the volume and value reports which are needed for NIMS to calculate fees. And I'd be happy to take any questions. Thank you for the motion, Mr. Kerlin. Are there any questions?

Any comments on the motion? Or excuse me, any amendments first?

Any comments on the motion?

Okay. Getting off easy here. Thank you very much for all of your work on this, Mr. Kerlin. Um, are there any objections to the motion?

Seeing none, that motion passes without objection. Any further actions? Yes, Ms. Gowan. Thank you, Madam Chair. I have a motion to offer on Aleutian Islands golden king crab.

And once it's on the screen, I'll read it.

The motion reads, the Council takes no further action on a change to the season start time for the Aleutian Islands Golden King crab fishery as outlined in Appendix A to the Regulatory Impact Review for a proposed regulatory amendment to revise the annual IFQ cost recovery process. With a second, I'll speak to it. Thank you for the second, Mr. Muller. Thank you for the second. Thank you for staff for keeping track of the issue from a June 2021 council motion and for seeing an opportunity to address it as part of this cost recovery action in Appendix A to the analysis.

Changing the season start date for Aleutian Island golden king crab is included in the council's work plan towards Executive Order 1 SB 4276 as provided under the agenda item B1 at this meeting. It's in row 15. As we heard in public testimony, there's no longer interest in the Golden King crab fleet in changing the season start date for the fishery, and appreciate hearing from testifiers that there is unanimous consent from every vessel and entity in the fishery on that. Therefore, this motion proposes no further action on the issue and would mark it as completed in our work plan for the executive order on seafood competitiveness. Happy to take any questions.

Thank you. Are there any questions?

Any comments? It's pretty straightforward. Thank you, Ms. Cohen. Any objection? Okay, that motion passes without objection.

Any other actions?

Seeing none, that concludes our C4 agenda item.

So we will be moving on to our, uh, C5 agenda item. We'll, we'll take just a very brief 5-minute, uh, mid-afternoon break. Sorry everyone, we have to make up a little bit of time where we are behind schedule. So we will begin our presentation on C5 at 3:15. Um, we will be aiming to get through our AP report, and there's a— depending on the trajectory here, we may begin public testimony, but I'm, I'm sorry, it's a little too early to make that call.

So we won't— we likely will not get through public testimony, but will begin. So if you, if you have time constraints, please let me know, and if we can fit you in this evening, we will. Thank you.

Council members, please come back to order.

And as I announced before break, we're going to try to make it through our staff presentation and AP report on C5. We'll see if we have time, um, at the end of the day to begin public testimony. We will close public testimony sign-up this evening before we break so we can plan for timing through the agenda tomorrow. We do have some people on our next agenda item leaving tomorrow, so we will have to begin our D1 agenda at least at the, at the latest, probably after lunch. So just to give everyone a an idea of how much time here.

Thank you.

Good afternoon. See how fast we can get through this. Madam Chair, members of the Council, for the record, this is Anita Kroska and Taylor Holman, Council staff. Today we are presenting information on the analysis for C5 Gulf of Alaska Tanner Crab Protection Measures. This is an EARIR document for initial review.

Joining us for additional questions, we have John McCracken and Mike Fye here in person, and online we have Mark Stickert from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and Dr. Mallory Jaeger and Molly Zaleski from the Alaska Regional Office.

For the purposes of our presentation today, we will focus on a majority of the sections in the document, some more in depth than others, and I won't walk through all the pieces that we will cover today, but I do want to highlight here that Alternative 3, it will be discussed at the end of the presentation.

Mm-hmm. Apologies, technical difficulties. Um, this slide encapsulates a brief history of this action. Um, in the figure you'll see the recent history. In 2023, this action was originally initiated, And it's gone through a discussion paper phase and an expanded discussion paper phase before you, the council, adopted a purpose and needs statement and a suite of alternatives in April of 2025.

We did wanna note that there is a long history of management considerations for crab protection measures before this action, some of which we will cover at a higher level later in this presentation.

This slide speaks to some of the background and purpose and need for this action. Um, some of the key considerations, uh, considered at the time are listed in the top bullets that I won't read verbatim. They're just there for your reference. This ultimately resulted in this action today, and I wanted to read through these just really briefly to remind us what we are looking at. The council is considering management actions that can serve and protect Tanner crab while minimizing negative impacts on the Central Gulf of Alaska groundfish fisheries, including establishing a new groundfish fishing area closure on the east side of Kodiak Island in areas known to have high densities and abundance of Tanner crab, and considering a process to evaluate the effectiveness of the existing Gulf of Alaska Tanner crab protection areas around Kodiak Island and determine whether modifications are needed.

We'll go through the alternatives next.

For Alternative 1, that is our status quo alternative. That is the no action alternative. Alternative 2 would implement a new closure on the east side of Kodiak Island with the objective to minimize groundfish fishery interactions where high densities of Tanner crab are known to occur and during life stages where Tanner crab are vulnerable to fishery interactions. In Alternative 2, um, the council listed an intention to establish criteria and timeline to review, review the effectiveness of the closure area. Under Alternative 3, the council is evaluating existing closure areas to protect crab around Kodiak Island.

After an evaluation has been completed, the council will consider options for modification or removal. This alternative, Alternative 3, is framed within the analytical document more like a discussion paper in its own section that is outside of the RIREA analysis. So again, we will not dive into Alternative 3 information until closer to the end of the presentation.

For Alternative 1, we have this map here that summarizes the complex landscape of existing closures around Kodiak Island. It does not include every single closure, but just those that are relevant to either protecting crab or to the groundfish fisheries that are fishing in this region. The existing crab protection closures are in 4 different categories. You'll see them listed in different colors of purple and one in green. The first type is Type 1, that is a year-round closure that is implemented in a few different areas around the island.

Then there's a Type 2 that is from February 15th to June 15th. Type 3 that are open unless otherwise closed. And separately from those is the Marmot Bay Tanner Crab Protection Area, which is to the north adjacent to another Marmot Flats Protection Area, which is a Type I. Just to note that the Type I, II, and III closures were put in place to protect red king crab at the time of implementation. The other groundfish closures are included as they have the possibility of providing some degree of incidental protection to the crab species in those areas that they overlap.

All right, we're— here we're diving into Alternative 2, and we have 3 elements. The first element are the 2 closure area options. You can see in the bold blue outline Option 1, that is statistically Statistical Area 525702, and then very close to it to the west is outlined in gray, that is the— what we are calling the custom closure or the custom area. That overlaps a portion of 4 different statistical areas, and that's important when we walk through, um, our methods for apportionment in that custom closure boundary. Those statistical areas are all ones that are also adjacent to the first closure option.

In, in choosing these options, the first option was one that has been considered in past crab protection measures, as it overlays some known densities of crab. Option 2 was chosen, that was put forward by the Kodiak Crab Alliance Cooperative, KCAC Group, in the April 2025 council meeting during their testimony as an option for consideration. And their— I think their intention was to draw a boundary option centered around some Tanner crab abundance densities using heat maps provided by Alaska Department of Fish and Game them during that meeting.

On to element 2 for the closure duration options. Um, the first one is fairly straightforward, that is year-round closure. The second option, uh, from February 15th through June 15th matches the duration of that Type 2 closure that I mentioned on the previous slide, um, those which were structured protect red king crab during their softshell phase. And the second seasonal closure option, April 1st to June 15th, excuse me, aligns with the period between the directed Tanner fishery closure date and the Tanner crab season, or the Tanner crab survey start date. That, so it overlays that gap in time.

And then finally, for element 3, there are 2 options. One includes groundfish pot and both non-pelagic and pelagic trawl gear, and the other option includes non-pelagic trawl gear. And I should mention, and you'll see another version of this figure later in the presentation, this is simply a bathymetric map. Um, it may show up gray or white on your screen, I don't know. Those are just areas that indicate indicate the, uh, shelf region on your bottom right of the figure.

And then colors that are brighter yellow or green indicate deeper areas, and the purple colors indicate shallower areas. And we really wanted to orient you to this figure sooner than later because it demonstrates a really important aspect of where we are finding canter crab in this region and where the Alaska Department of Fish and Game survey is conducted.

So before we dive into the description of fisheries and our analysis in the EA and RIR, we wanted to go over two slides of methods with you. This first one reviews our method for custom closure catch value and PSC apportionment. We developed this method to estimate catch volume, value, and PSC occurring within the custom area. And this is important because any area that we analyze that does not follow regular regulatory boundaries that are how data is reported mean that we have to make up some kind of method to estimate what those values are.

The, um, and so therefore, uh, actual values such as those reported for 525702, because it is a statistical area, were not available. Um, and I noted earlier that the custom closure option, and you can kind of see it, I know it's a bit washed out on the bigger screen, you can kind of see here that it overlaps, uh, pieces of other statistical areas, and that's why— important foundation for how we came up with this method. We had to pivot to this too because other ways to spatially apportion these values were not available. There is a catch and areas database, there's a legacy version that is being currently developed into a 2.0 database with a lot of work being put into it, but it wasn't quite ready for our analysis at this time. And that could offer us a potential for a higher spatial resolution in the future should it become available.

So this method that we utilized basically gets at the spatial activity using observer vessel track data. So we aggregated, um, I think it's 14 years in our analysis. We looked at where those observer tracks are, meaning where the toes were, and then we figured out the portion of those toes in the portions of the statistical areas and then created a proportion or percentage that we applied and summed to create the custom closure area value. And that was— that differs by gear type and also statistical area. Some assumptions here, because this is an approximation method: one, the vessel tracks are accurately representing the spatial distribution of fishing effort within each hauler set.

That is one of assumptions. And 2, the observer coverage is representative of fleet-wide fishing patterns within each statistical area. Again, observer data only in an area with variable observer coverage can be an issue, so we made sure to aggregate all of that activity across the 14 years to provide a more stable characterization of that fishing activity, but that doesn't account for any annual variability in fishing behavior, species distribution shifts, changes in environmental conditions that may occur from year to year. So it's a static method.

My final note here, and this will apply as you see the data coming forth, is that as this is an estimate based on these assumptions, Cautions should be taken when interpreting the data and when comparing the data to other proposed— the other proposed closure area, especially when the values are relatively close together. You'll see some footnotes on the slide here if you want to dig into those methods more. That's referring to tables and pages within that document. And I also want to note here that the approximate approximation method that we use for Alternative 3 is different than this method, and we'll cover that later.

Those same— whoops, I didn't switch sides.

Those same observer vessel tracks, that data that we aggregated across time, was used to create track catch density maps. These are maps depict vessel tracks weighted by catch weight, and this is provided in the document for non-pelagic trawl, or NPT, or pelagic trawl, PTR, by closure duration options, so they each have 3 panels. But we do not provide a map for groundfish pot fishing due to the low overall coverage in that fishery, even with aggregating the data.

Something I want to note here, and, you know, there's some limitations to how we can use this map at this time due to the use of the Observer Vessel Track data. There are some limitations to what we can say for inferences, but how we use this here in this analysis was to provide inferences for two things: spatial fishing patterns, understanding generally where fishing has occurred in the past, and also relative density of that fishing. Again, this is only separated by gear and not by fishery due to the limitations of the data at this time. I also want to make really clear that these maps do not at all or in, in any way depict vessel fishing bottom contact or any subsequent habitat disturbance.

All right, with that, we'll get into Chapter 3 of the analysis. This chapter provides a description of the fisheries relevant to this action. For this presentation, I'll primarily primarily be focusing on Section 3.1, which describes the affected groundfish fisheries and the current groundfish fishing activity that occurs within those areas considered for closure. This information is particularly helpful to describe those status quo conditions under Alternative 1 and is also used within the analysis of Alternative 2 to estimate the activity that may be displaced as a result of this action.

So first, I'll get into the target fisheries that are occurring within the proposed area closures. This slide helps get a sense of the seasonality of the different— those different target fisheries, as well as the gear types in which harvests occur in those fisheries. The blue sections, as shown by the brackets, depict the seasonal closure windows within Element 2 of Alternative 2., and the X's on the rows show the months in which harvest occurred in each target. Fisheries here are sorted by annual catch volume harvested from the proposed closure areas, and I'll note that the bulk of the fishing activity in these areas occurs in the pollock, arrowtooth flounder, and shallowwater flatfish fisheries. These are all conducted with pelagic and non-pelagic trawl gear.

Pacific cod was also a primary target fishery in the area in terms of volume, prior to the stock collapse. However, after that stock collapse in 2017-2018, there's less Pacific— a lower amount of Pacific cod volumes that are taken from the areas. Now, in the next couple slides, I'll be describing fishing activity that occurs within the proposed area closures to activity that occurs within the Central Gulf as a whole, and as a whole within each target fishery or within each gear type., and those proportions are then used to demonstrate the proportional reliance on those areas. So this slide gets into Section 3.1.2, which is specific to the groundfish pot activity that's occurring within those proposed area closures. The takeaway here is that very little activity occurs within the proposed closure areas in the— with groundfish pot gear, and essentially no activity with groundfish pot gear is occurring within those seasonal closure windows.

Now, when we're talking about groundfish pot impacts in this analysis, we're really talking about the Pacific cod pot fishery alone because no, almost no sablefish catch occurs in the areas. Now, this table and the tables within the next couple slides are a summary of the data within, this one specifically is for Tables 3.3 and 3.4 of the document, But all 3 of those tables for the next couple slides to show the average proportion of Central Gulf groundfish pot activity that occurs within proposed area closures between 2012 and 2025. Now, for this table and the following tables, the values are presented as averages of activity that's occurring within 55-702 and activity occurring within the custom closure. And for groundfish pot gear, there's really negligible differences between those 2 values. And between the activity that's occurring within the two closure areas, or considered closure areas, although it is estimated that 525-702 yielded slightly higher, slightly more groundfish pot harvests.

All right, next, this describes the pelagic trawl fishery activity occurring in the areas. Nearly all pelagic trawl fishing activity within the post-closure areas occurs in the pollock fishery. The areas are important for the B-season pollock fishery occurring in the fall, with about half of all pelagic trawl, uh, CVs fishing in Area 525/702 annually. The areas yield about 1/10 of total Central Gulf pelagic trawl catch volumes and values annually, um, on average between 2012 and 2025. Now you'll see, um, in those seasonal option rows that there's really no activity that's occurring within that Pollock A season, which overlaps with that first seasonal option.

The second seasonal option rarely overlaps with Pollock A season at all. But you can also see that seasonal— those seasonal trends within the figure on the right, which provide another way to look at the spatial and temporal fishing patterns for pelagic trawl gear activity in the Central Gulf. I'll note that slightly more activity occurs in the custom area than Area 525702 in the pelagic trawl gear sector. Effort appears to be distributed along Barnabus Gully, and the custom area captures a little bit more of that gully system. So that's why you're seeing a little bit more activity in the custom area.

Next, pelagic trawl— non-pelagic trawl fishery activity. The NBT fleet and NBT fisheries would be the most impacted by the action because they utilize the areas year-round and within those seasonal closure durations. The areas yield about 10% of total central Gulf non-pelagic trawl catch volumes, and again, those seasonal closures overlap a period of high nonpelagic trawl fishing activity, specifically in the flatfish fisheries. Like pelagic trawl gear, about half of all nonpelagic trawl gear central vessel— uh, catcher vessels operate in Area 525702 annually. Now, for most nonpelagic trawl target fisheries, our estimates indicate that there's more fishing activity occurring in the custom area than 525702.

You can see those patterns again shown on the map on the right. Where effort appears to be distributed along Barnabas Scully. However, for the shallow water flatfish fishery specifically, our estimates are showing that more volumes are yielded from 525.702 than the custom area, and you'll find a little bit more detail by target fishery included in the analysis on Tables 3.14 and 3.15.

But this next slide also describes a bit more of a breakout of the target fisheries that are harvested with the non-pod trawl gear. This gear type is used in a variety of different target fisheries within the Central Gulf and within the proposed area closures. The graph on the right shows the percentage of total Central Gulf catch by target fishery that is caught within the proposed area closures. Now, the takeaway here is that the area has yielded a very high proportion of total Central Gulf catch, specifically in the Goa shallowwater flatfish fishery. And then that table on the right then translates that to the relative importance of each target fishery to the Central Gulf non-tropic trawl fleet.

This table shows each target fishery occurring in the Central Gulf as a percentage of Central Gulf's total non-tropic trawl catch and value. This table here, the target fisheries are sorted by the percentage of valuable that's attributable to each non-pelagic trawl target fisheries, with all of the rockfish program target fisheries lumped together at the top.

Now, I will note here that vessel-level dependence on each target fishery, of course, varies, and proportions of dependence by target are not drilled down for this analysis, but we do drill down into the dependence of vessels on the total catch from 55-702 to with non-project trial gear within Section 3.1.

Okay, Section—. With that, I'll get—. Oh, I see a question. Excuse me, Ms. Kimble. Thank you, and you can stop me, Ms. Holman, if you're getting to this, but in the—.

On that—. The slides aren't numbered.

Yeah, that one. Does that— is there a way to break out the catcher processor and catcher vessel data, or would that be confidential because there's too few catcher processors? Like, part of our— part of what we're trying to see is, like, level of dependence from the community as well, so those delivering shoreside would be of more interest to me. Through the chair, thank you for the question, Ms. Kimball. In terms of year-by-year values for CPs, in some years that would be confidential and we couldn't break that out.

However, if we were showing a longer-term average, that would be possible. Additionally, we have those vessel-level dependence tables within— sorry, I have a table of contents here— within Section 3.1.4.1 for non-platric trawl gear. That vessel-level dependence information is specific to Ketcher vessels because, as we know, they're, they're more reliant on the target areas because of their proximity to Kodiak. And additionally, we have a little bit more detail for NPTCVs alone within Section 3.4, which is the SIA section that shows dependence and engagement by community. For each gear type fleet.

And Ms. Gone. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you for the presentation so far. And help me out here, it's late in the day. Um, looking at this slide and also connecting it to the slide before, if I'm understanding it correctly, all of these fisheries combined make up that— in the slide before where it's around 10% of the total catch by these fisheries for non-pelagic trawl. Is that correct?

Through the chair, Ms. Cohen, to clarify, do you mean the graph, the graph on the left of the screen, all of that is contributing to the 10%? Yes, that is, that is correct. This, this graph here is just breaking out that 10% and showing by target fisheries. So essentially, they're, they're not, the areas are not of importance to rockfish program target fisheries, However, they are highly important to the Gila Shad waterfowl target fishery.

Okay, this next slide describes and summarizes Section 3.5 of the document. You'll find a more expansive discussion of the processing sector in Kodiak within that section, including considerations of the seasonality of Kodiak's processing operations, fluctuations in processing employment over the years and throughout each year, as well as the species breakouts that are processed by month.

In summary, and the takeaway there is that processors in Kodiak have a very diverse portfolio, and there's fluctuations in activity, revenue, and employment that occur over the course of the year. And these are really driven by the seasonality of some high-volume or high-value fisheries that are landed in Kodiak. Including the pollock and Pacific cod caught during A season or B season, both of which are combined within that groundfish category on the graph on your screen, as well as that summer salmon season where that's shown in teal, where that really drives processing activity. And then also, I'll note that while intermittent, the Tanner fishery can also drive seasonal processing and activity and employment early in the year prior to the start of A season, dependent of course on the GHL of Tanner in that year and whether, whether the fishery is open. Now, what I'm highlighting for you in this graph specifically is the relation of that seasonality to those seasonal time closure windows that are considered within the, within the motion.

Both of those seasonal time closure windows that are considered overlap what's referred to as the gap season or shoulder season occurring between Pollock and Peacock A seasons and the summer salmon season. Now, I'll note that this graph again doesn't break out targets beyond just the larger groundfish category, so this does lump flatfish, rockfish, and other ground species— groundfish species in together. But as you can see, groundfish are one of the, one of the species that are processed, one of the species categories, I should say, that are processed during that shoulder season time, along with sablefish, herring, and halibut as well, that help support operations. Now, we conducted, we had some discussions with individual processors in Kodiak to get more context on this gap season, and you'll find that within section, sorry, Table 350 on page 86, a summary of that information by processor., including the species that they process by month and general employment fluctuations over the course of the year in a relative sense. So that, that will give some additional context on the species composition of that gap season.

And Ms. Kimball. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Sullivan. I just still want to understand, and I'm going back and forth between the analysis and your PowerPoint, but is, is there a way to break out? I think the, the point for the council is trying to understand like what level of importance that particular shallow water flatfish fishery provides to processors and the community and, and vessels in that shoulder season.

So is there a way to break that out from groundfish, and, and is it helpful to also see this kind of a graph in years prior to 2022? We're capturing a time here when flatfish was almost non-existent due to markets. I think that you're well aware of that, and that's in the narrative in the document, but just for a, for a picture, is it possible to see earlier years than this and to break out flatfish? Through the Chair, Ms. Kimball, yes. For the next iteration of now this analysis, we can certainly break out this graph further, including a more granular look at what the composition of that groundfish catch is during that shoulder season.

We could take a look back further. That would then kind of help describe processor operations also in years where Tanner crab was not open or did not have as high of a GHL. I will also note that I'm I'm not sure off the top of my head if we have 2025 data in yet, but this graph nor historical lookbacks would account for the fact that the rockfish program fishery opening dates were recently moved back to April 1st to kind of help cover some of the reductions in flatfish catch that have happened over the last decade or so.

Thank you, that would be very helpful. And on that, I was ask on the Tanner crab side as well. There are years in which that was closed, but also years in which the Tanner crab fishery was much more significant than in these years. So I— maybe a longer time series would be helpful on balancing some of those. Thanks.

Thank you. And Ms. Vanderhoeven. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Ms. Holman. Thinking about Ms. Kimball's question.

I think we've got some boom and bust stocks, and so it, it might be helpful for you to look and if there, if there is a lot of interannual variability or if there's some consistency, and I would leave it up to your discretion how to present that based on what you find, but I, I think there might be a lot more variability than we see in like Bering Sea stocks?

Through the Chair, thank you, Ms. VanHoven. Yes, our focus for 3.5 is currently looking at, in, I guess, within a year, the seasonal fluctuations, but we can certainly look at interannual fluctuations as well.

Alright, this next slide covers Section 3.2 of the document describing the Kodiak Tanner crab fisheries. This includes the Tanner crab subsistence, sport, and commercial fisheries and harvest occurring within the either within the statistical areas adjacent to the proposed area closures, or sorry, overlapping with the proposed area closures, or the waters adjacent to those proposed area closures. So we'll get into the commercial side first, just because we have a lot of good data there. The commercial fishery for Tanner crab in Kodiak has been intermittent, as I briefly alluded to within the prior slide. The fishery openings and harvest limits are sporadic, and since 2012, we've had a closure between 2014 and 2017, as well as one in 2021 and 2026.

The areas considered foreclosure overlap and lie adjacent to areas that are important tanner crab harvest locations, and this is true for the commercial side as well as the subsistence and sport side. The graph on the right shows the, within the blue chunks of those bars, that shows the proportion of the commercial tanner crab catch in Kodiak that occurred within the statistical areas that overlap with the proposed area closures. I'll highlight that here because that is different than the custom closure apportionment methodology that we were able to use for groundfish. This, this is likely a bit of an overestimate of the Tanner crab catch that's actually occurring within those areas, but it is a way to, is a way to describe that, just noting that that is a bit of likely an overestimation. Within the period shown, the Tanner crab harvest from the statistical areas of interest, those are those 4 overlapping statistical areas, that accounted for at least 10% of the harvest in all years and over 50% of the harvest in 2 years.

Now, in both years where the harvest from those statistical areas of interest exceeded half of the total Kodiak District commercial Tanner crab harvest volumes, those were years where only the east side and southeast sections were open to fishing. Those are the sections that overlap with the areas that are considered for closure in this action.

Now, on the subsistence and sport side, efforts in these fisheries tend to be concentrated around Kodiak communities, and the proposed closure areas lie adjacent to Uugak Bay, which is accessible to the Kodiak Road system, and Sicliutik Strait, where the community of Old Harbor is located. You'll find some additional information on the subsistence and sport fisheries for Tanner crab detailed within Section 3.2.2, but one of the key takeaways is that nearly a fifth of Kodiak Island households use Tanner crab and that sharing of Tanner crab resources is common within Kodiak Island communities. Ms. Holman, we have a question. Ms. Goen. Thank you, Madam Chair, and I think you answered my question as you were describing your methodology here.

To capture the directed fishery, but my, my understanding of part of this concept in the action is that this is an important area for production of Tanner crab, but the idea is those Tanner crab would likely migrate or move out of the area that we're looking at in particular. So it sounds like your methodology captured some of that fishing that might be happening just right outside of these proposed areas. Do I have that correct?

Through the Chair, Ms. Golan. Yes, the methodology here does capture the fishing that occurs within the statistical areas that overlap the closure areas that are considered, but not necessarily only the crab that are harvested within those closures. I will note that is because of data limitations, however, just because we don't have that observer apportionment methodology that we were able to use for groundfish. Um, but I, I would let Anita speak to whether that also is a, is a method to account for any movement of Tanner crab that may occur beyond just the closure areas.

Through the chair, thanks for the question, Miss Cohen. Um, as she was noting, this is a different data stream, so it's really hard to translate those approximations methods, just by its nature. It's a very different— yeah, different data in general. I think it's something that we could drill down to more specifics in the future, and we'll kind of get into what we do or maybe know about crab movement, but a lot of that to say is that we don't expect them to be as highly mobile in this area. Mark is online.

Mark, do you want to add anything to any data limitations for the separating out the harvest for the custom area?

Through the Chair, no Anita, I think you've covered that quite well. As it was noted, you know, the state doesn't have an observer program dedicated to Gulf Tanner crab fisheries. This figure shows that. You know, just given the on-again, off-again pulsiness of the fishery, it's just not feasible for us to maintain an observer program. And so we make—.

We're able to sort of estimate sort of the outcomes that we might expect from observer data, and then we integrate that into our harvest control rule and reflect that through our annual setting of exploitation, or, you know, the GHLs for the fishery. So, yeah, the We, we do apply a fair amount of spatial management for this fishery. So basically, we manage each one of these gullies basically individually, and each one gets its own GHL, and preseason votes have to register. And so we concentrate effort into these gullies, and so we have a high degree of confidence of total removals, but within these really small management sections, we don't have sort of resolution of catch location data beyond the statistical area level.

Thank you, Mark.

Okay, the final slide within the Description of Fisheries section here, I'll get into participation and engagement by community, which is in Section 3.4. We conducted a quantitative evaluation of different data streams to find the communities that were most substantially engaged in and/or dependent on the impacted fisheries. This includes the Central Gulf groundfish pot and trawl fisheries, as well as Kodiak Tanner crab fisheries, including commercial, sport, and subsistence. And we also looked at it through a processing lens of both of groundfish pot and trawl harvest as well as Kodiak commercial Tanner crab harvest. The takeaway here is that unsurprisingly, from a community perspective, Kodiak is the most centrally engaged in and dependent on the fisheries that are impacted by this action as measured by multiple indices.

You can find additional detail on that on page 68.

Okay, and with that, I'll get into Chapter 4, Chapter 4 describes the potential economic and social impacts that may arise from this action. And for this presentation, I'll be focusing on the methods and assumptions behind that evaluation, as well as the expected effects of Alternative 2. You already heard about the baseline conditions and status quo fishing patterns within the prior section, so those will not be repeated here.

The impacts described within this section are evaluated as comparison to status quo fishing effort and patterns. The extent of reliance on areas for target fishing can be estimated with some degree of certainty using current and historical fishing patterns as a proxy for future dependence under Alternative 1. However, analyzing the effects further than reliance does involve a greater degree of speculation because fleet behavior is dynamic and is influenced a wide range of variables. For catch redistribution, we assume that impacted vessels will seek to replace catch volumes and values first within the same target fishery, or they may increase participation in other target fishing efforts. Now, we assume that here, because the Kodiak fleet is comprised of multi-year and multi-species boats, these vessels have more flexibility across fisheries and may target to other may switch to other targets if the cost to replace catch within one target are too high and if pivoting to other fisheries is feasible and economical for that vessel.

For example, vessels with the Central Gulf Trawl LLP endorsement often use both non-pelagic trawl and pelagic trawl gear, as shown in Table 4-1, and therefore a vessel may seek to replace their non-pelagic trawl catch and revenues that were displaced from this action or from the action under consideration through increased participation in pelagic trawl target fisheries, as one example. We also assume that catch may be redistributed spatially or in some cases temporally if a seasonal closure option is chosen. This— we assume here that spatially— spatial redistributions are the preference and that temporal redistribution will occur only if catch is not able to be replaced spatially or alternative fishing effort or that fishing effort pattern is preferred. In terms of the costs associated with adjusting fishing behavior, these are not fleet-specific, and in general, any vessels that are directly impacted by Alternative 2 may incur increases to operating costs if current fishing effort patterns within the closure zones and times are optimal for that vessel and/or gear type, and if comparable alternative patterns are not found.

That I will pivot to discussing first the impacts of Alternative 2 on the groundfish pot sector. We assume that these impacts would be minimal in nature because harvests in this sector have been low in the last decade and revenue dependence is low. We assume it is highly likely that any displaced pot catch volumes would be recoverable because fishing efforts have largely occurred outside the closure areas within the last decade. Before the Pacific cod stock collapse, there was slightly more activity that, that occurred within those areas, like 5% of total Central Gulf Pacific cod pot catch volumes. However, after this stock collapse in 2017-18, there's been lower levels of activity, and therefore that indicates that there are many comparable or preferred fishing areas available.

Because the fleet has moved outside of these areas in, in lower TAC years. I'll also note that seasonal closures would largely eliminate any impacts. There's really little, if any, overlap with the— between the Pacific cod pot season and those seasonal time closure option windows.

Next, for pelagic trawl gear sector, the sector would be impacted under an annual closure because the areas are important for bee season pollock harvests. In terms of vessel level dependence, most vessels are highly diversified, and harvest from the proposed closure areas comprise less than 10% of annual revenues for the majority of Platter Trogir vessels, though there are vessels with higher levels of dependence as shown within Section 3.1.3.1. We assume that displaced catch volumes would be recoverable through effort displacement in either adjacent adjacent areas or comparable fishing locations that are not adjacent to the proposed closure areas, albeit with potential increased costs. Also note that any catch redistribution efforts will also be constrained by factors such as existing closures, as Anita showed us in that map under Alternative 1, as well as spatial catch specifications as described within the groundfish section of the EA.

Right, next for the non-pelagic trawl gear sector, the sector would be impacted under any closure duration, whether seasonal or annual. Note that catch displacement is likely to occur under any scenario because the seasonal closure windows overlap a period of high non-pelagic trawl fishing activity, unlike for other gear types. We assume that target displaced catch volumes in most target fisheries are recoverable through through spatial effort displacement, and that temporal displacement is also a possible option if the seasonal closure option is chosen. If costs to redistribute catch within a target fishery are too high, which may be possible in specifically the shallow water flatfish target, we assume that vessels will attempt to pivot to other target fisheries. This would vary, of course, depending on vessel-level decision-making and the licenses and endorsements that vessel may have.

Now, in terms of vessel-level dependence, most vessels are highly diversified. The areas are more important to the CVs than the CP fleet, and therefore the vessel-level dependence information in Table 313 on page 56 does show CV vessel-level dependence only. The harvests from the proposed closure areas comprise less than 10% of annual revenues for the majority of non-pledging vessels. 12 Vessels that are operating those— in those areas. Between 2012 and 2024, an average of 1 to 2 vessels annually earned between 10 and 20% of total annual revenues from 525702 NPT harvests, and an average of 1 vessel annually relies— relied on the areas for more than 20% of those annual revenues.

And in 4 of those last 13 years, that vessel with high dependence relied on the areas for over half of their annual revenues.

Now, from a community perspective, Kodiak communities, and namely the city of Kodiak, are most centrally engaged in and dependent on the fisheries that are impacted by this action, as measured by multiple indices. Now, in general, the magnitude of change that's expected to occur due to the proposed action is not expected to extend to community spending patterns in a discernible way. Kodiak's community is diverse, including in other fisheries, and the revenue derived from the proposed closure areas comprises a small proportion of Kodiak's total fishery ex-vessel revenues, even when added in combination, as shown in Section 3.4.

For processors, some indirect economic impacts may accrue to shoreside and stationary float loading processors that receive landings from affected groundfish vessels. For example, operational changes and costs could extend to shore-based processors if distance traveled interrupted the flow of deliveries or resulted in smaller, lower quality products. This could also occur if flatfish volumes were to be displaced temporarily. This could also displace processing efforts that would otherwise be concentrated within that gap season, and depending on exactly which to which season catch is displaced to, conflicts and interference with other processing efforts would arise.

Finally, for Tanner crab users, any localized benefits that may accrue, as Anita will discuss later within the EA, may improve opportunities for subsistence, sport, or commercial users. However, the magnitude and likelihood of this is unknown.

Localized impacts to any Tanner crab users do rely on the extent to which benefits benefits to Tanner crab recruit to a level that impacts abundance or availability of legal-sized male crab.

And again, as Anita will discuss further in the EA, displacement may offset benefits. And I will pause here before passing the mic off to Anita for the EA.

Thank you, Ms. Kimball. Thank you. I just—. Thank you for that. Yeah, I agree with the conclusions on processors that it varies much by the option being chosen.

Is there— are you going to go into— I think the displacement situation is something I just really want to understand better. Like, is— are you going to go into the likelihood of displacement causing a temporal shift in operations for on the vessel side or the processing side, or is that just something we'll kind of left uncertain. Through the Chair, Ms. Kimble, I can certainly expand on that within the next iteration of the analysis, but as described briefly earlier, we expect temporal displacement to be kind of the last option in the menu of options that vessels will likely choose from when trying to replace that displaced catch or revenue, first within the same target fishery, Next, outside of the same target fishery, and third, outside of the times in which they were originally catching that volume within. And I can describe that a little bit better within the analysis in the next iteration as well to provide more info.

Ms. Holman, can you expand on that a little bit as far as how— I guess you're describing it as a little bit as a hierarchy of kind of your decision-making, and is that from conversations with fishermen in the fleet, or how did you, yeah, come to that assessment? To the chair, to the chair, we came to that conclusion not through discussions with the fleet. This is through looking at the ex-vessel revenue and looking at the importance of different fisheries in different times of the year. We did talk with processors about the importance of those, the flatfish and rockfish catch within that gap season, and therefore, given the importance of those fisheries within that time, we do expect that spatial displacement is much more likely occur than any temporal displacement, especially because of the, the relative importance to processing efforts, therefore additional value to the species during that time. And yeah, again, I can certainly talk to stakeholders a little bit more on the harvesting side and see their hierarchy of how that would, how they would expect to change behavior in response to this action, but that is primarily based on discussions with processors on the value of keeping that, keeping fisheries and catch within that gap season.

Thank you, I appreciate that. I think it would be helpful to cross-reference with harvesters in the next iteration. Thanks.

Alright, moving on to the EA portion of the analysis. I wanted to walk through just a really quick few crab life history facts for you so we can all be on the same page, and you'll recognize the bathymetric map on the right. That's just a zoomed-out version. The, again, the blue box is showing shows Option 1 closure and the gray box shows Option 2. And you'll notice that in around Kodiak Island, there is— there are several areas of high bathymetric relief, which we think are important for Tanner crab and also seem to be really productive areas for groundfish fishing.

The other polygons around the island, which may be difficult to see on that big screen, on the screen represent the other Tanner crab protection areas that we walked through earlier, the Type 1, 2, 3, and the Marmot Bay Tanner crab protection area. The bay and gully systems seem to be really important for Tanner crab in terms of where they seem to be persistently found. The bay systems are connected to the offshore gully systems. So, for instance, in that image, you'll see a label that says Barnabas Gully that is connected to some bay systems inshore, and those are— this whole area and that bathymetric relief is thought to provide refuge from tidal forces and sites where settlement occurs, soft sediment such as mud and sand that Tanner crabs seem to like to bury in.

In terms of their migration, we don't know a lot. We don't have any satellite tagging data, which would be optimal to show us individual movement over time, but from some mark-recapture tagging done in the early 2000s, We kind of understand that they're thought not to migrate out of the Tanner crab regulatory sections that ADF&G manages through right now.

Some limitations to that, of course, but it seems to hold true to based on survey observations over the 40-year period that they've been observing this system. There does seem to be some sort of ontogenetic shift where juveniles are found in the base systems and inshore in those more protected areas, and as they grow larger, they move offshore into those connected gully systems.

So there's some connectivity there, but not necessarily connectivity from that region to other gully systems around the island. Another thing to note that is, has been apparent with this stock since the year 2000 is that they undergo a really cyclical recruitment cycle where a lot of crab move through the system every few years, every 3 to 5 or 6 years. And if you look at the figures in the document 512 and 513, you can also see that reflected in the general pulses of the population, both at the Kodiak District level and at the combined district level across the broader region. And this kind of matches, um, what we know about their maturity cycle, um, which is thought to be between 5 and 7 years.

Um, this table here speaks to events that occur with Tanner crab that have to do with their molting and mating cycle.

On the left here, you'll see a variety of molting and mating events, both for female crab and for male crab. We think that Tanner crab may be more vulnerable during their softshell phase, as was also thought for red king crab when the other closures were implemented. And one of the main takeaways here is that when you look at those gray bars that denote the timing across the calendar year, any of the closure duration options will offer some potential level of conservation benefits. Option 2A, which covers the February 15th through the June 2015 cycle covers more of the softshell phase. And if you look, 1, 2, 3, 4, the fourth from the bottom line, those are the encounters that the ADFNG survey sees of male and female softshell crab that can occur as late as July.

And that also varies by region around the island. But That's kind of what they're seeing here. That closure duration option 2B still covers the core softshell molting and mating events where there is thought to be a vulnerability. Then the year-round option would also include protections or potential protections for the life stage where you can see that middle bar that goes across the entire year, and that is when female crab are incubating their egg clutches, and that's an external flap on their body, and that usually lasts year-round. And there's also listed some other activities and events that we wanted to compare just to show you that there wasn't a ton— there there's still some parity in other regions of the Gulf.

One thing to note here too is that to our knowledge, we could not find any information on Tanner crab shell hardening duration. That could potentially add a bit of time as a buffer to, for instance, the end of that window when after the April-May time period, their shell shells are still hardening. We know from lab studies with red king crab that the shell hardening takes up to 74 days, but we do not know how that translates to Tanner crab.

The last thing I wanted to note here, what seems to be the common thread with all of these molting and mating events, is that there's the timing of the spring fight phytoplankton bloom that seems to drive these events. And that obviously can vary every year, but it is thought to occur in April and May and at least peak in that time. And that is when the eggs are also released and they are going through their hatching period. And so as the diatoms are settling, the crab are also settling to the menthos in the inshore areas, and there's that synchronous timing happening there. Thank you.

We have a couple questions for you. Sure. Mr. Kerlin, then Ms. Glenn. Thanks, Madam Chair. You mentioned potential increased vulnerability during these sensitive life stages, and I apologize if I didn't pick this up in the analysis, but I'm wondering if if there's anything there to help us understand sort of the, I guess, how much more vulnerable during these periods compared to vulnerability in general.

I presume there's, you know, some concern about injury and mortality from gear interactions with the crabs at any time of year, but is there any information to help us conceptualize how big a distinction it is between the molting and mating period and other times of year.

Through the Chair, thank you for your question, Mr. Kerland. That is pulled from various sources of research that softshell crab are more vulnerable, but the extent or magnitude of that when gear interacts is a challenging one to characterize. There's been some work that I'll mention on a later slide that was trying, that was getting at what happens when non-pelagic trawl gear is interacting with crab. And they noted, and other studies have noted, that.

Crab just don't— they just, you know, inherently don't have as much protection because their shell is still hardening, so impacts would be greater. That study and others speak to mortality or perhaps some injury rates that is directly observed, but that's still a tough one to really quantify at this time. So we are making some assumptions to that degree or magnitude of vulnerability.

Thank you. And Ms. Cohen. Thank you, Madam Chair. My question is on the females and incubating their egg clutches. So, you know, you're noting that that's happening year-round.

Do we have a sense of how many of those females are in the gully there, in that Barnabas Gully?

Through the chair, thank you for your question, Ms. Cohen. I'll have to pull that out from the tables in the document. They do, for instance, the ADFNG trawl survey does estimate abundance by sex and maturity, so that is something we could figure out. Does your question pertain to the primiparous crab that are doing their first molt, or to the multiparous crabs that are not molting anymore, or both?

You're using words way bigger than I can use. I would say both. I'm just, I'm curious for those females that are carrying eggs, like how how many of them are in that gully? And because if we're looking at a year-round closure, do we need to be looking at a year-round closure in that area? Uh, through the chair, thank you for your clarification.

I'm sorry that I didn't introduce those words. Um, they just referred to the life stage of the crab is that, and the primiparous are just incubating their eggs for the first time. They're reaching their first— they're reaching their terminal molt. Um, the data is available. In a few different ways in the annual ADF&G trawl survey report.

They do track clutch fullness, and by that metric, you could also just have a better understanding of the proportion of crab that are undergoing those life cycles. In the document, I did not separate out those life stages, but I think it's something that could be estimated for the region.

So, um, on this slide I wanted to give you just a little bit of a snapshot of what is going on for the annual abundance trends in this region, as well as some high notes on the ADFNG harvest strategy that they employ to manage crab, Tanner crab in this region.

The main takeaway here is that the population on the east side of Kodiak is the, has the most crab in the Kodiak District. It is the densest area of Tanner crab. For instance, you'll see on the slide, Statistics for 2025, um, didn't lay out other years, but you can find more information in the document. Of the two closure area options, the custom closure had somewhat more crab than the Option 1 closure, 525-702. Part of that can be attributed to the fact that there's just more of the gully system contained within the custom closure boundaries, where we seem to find really persistent locations of crab.

Though their abundances may shift over time, their locations seem to be pretty stable. So of the entire Kodiak District estimated population for 2025, the east side section had 30% of the population and the highest number of mature males compared to other sections for the last 5 years. And when I say the word section, that is referring to the handful of Tanner crab management sections around the island. The Eastside section and Southeast section both overlap the existing proposed closure area options. The Southeast section is actually to the southwest of the Eastside section, and that contained in 2025, 34% of the population., and also had the highest number of mature females.

Again, this is, can be pretty cyclical, but the point here is that this region contains a pretty high proportion of the population of Tanner crab. 2018 Was a really notable year for Tanner crab. That was in this modern ADFNG trawl survey, large mesh trawl survey, the largest recruitment event since 1988. You'll see on this size composition graph on the right of your screen, this plot shows you just the males for the Kodiak District, and Kodiak District includes all of those sections together around the island. So we're not focusing in on the east side here for a moment.

As you follow the cohorts through from 2018 and look down diagonally, you'll see that pulse in the population follow through, and a portion survived to legal size, which you'll see labeled on the right hand of the plot. That's 144 millimeters or 5.5 inches. You can see that, that really strong cohort survived and produced a larger harvest. If you look a little bit further down on that figure, starting around 2023, that is our next bigger cohort that we are tracking right now, and it has not reached that enough of the crab have not reached legal size to open the fishery and be above their GHL limits. So the fishery is closed this year.

In terms of the harvest strategy that the Alaska Department of Fish and Game employs, they've had 3 different ones since the survey start for the, at least for the large mesh trawl survey in 1988. The most recent survey— sorry, survey— the most recent harvest strategy was implemented in 2022, and that's really important because they incorporated other measures to manage their stock. There were many notable advancements, so I'd refer you to that page in the document that you'll see listed there. One of them includes this idea of a female dimmer, And all that really means is that they're using mature female abundance compared to the long-term average as a way to dial the harvest strategy, and also compared to the mature male abundance to get what they would like for their harvest of legal males that year. One other notable advancement I want to mention is that they eliminated the use of a molting mature males calculation because it really wasn't that long ago, only about 20 years, that the scientific community accepted that Kyanosites crab, tannerin snow crab, reached a terminal molt.

That was kind of a revolutionary thing. So there are a lot of updates employed here.

This slide includes maps provided by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game from their trawl survey. I would point you to Appendix 1 if you would like to see a multitude of maps by sex and maturity status by year. These maps here, they combine the entire time period, the all 14 years, and these are very simply just survey density heat maps that demonstrate the spatial distribution of these sex and maturity classes. The female and male juveniles on the left there, you can see that generally the densest part of the population is like we were talking about before in those inshore areas and up into the gully systems, the more protected areas.. And then you can see for mature males and mature females that there are, um, denser areas outside of those base systems and pouring out into the, uh, closure area options.

Um, the survey biologists and others have noted that there seems to be some sort of spatial segregation of the sexes too. Um, and then in that second to last plot are legal males. That is simply just the proportion of males that have reached harvestable size from that mature male population. That's why it looks so small, because it really is just a sliver of the population shown in there. And so this kind of helps us verify this idea that juveniles are further inshore, and as they age and grow, they move further offshore in their as they grow larger.

And also, if you look at those annual maps, you'll see that pulse of cyclical recruitment. But again, we want to emphasize that the location seems to be very persistent within these gully systems. And we know that there's some limitations to using a fixed grid survey to understand or provide inferences for areas that are outside the survey footprint. So, Dr. Mallory Jaeger from the Alaska Regional Office created these species distribution models and maps.

These maps here on the screen depict subareas of occupied habitat based on habitat-related abundance. And they allow us to make those inferences about areas both within and outside the survey footprint. Abundance information and environmental covariates are included in the models to make these inferences. And so you can see those yellow hotspots are the upper 25th percentile that are predicted to be there. And if these look familiar to the EFH 5-year review process, they kind of are.

Um, there's some similar approaches, but, uh, some difference in method and, uh, how they applied those subarea percentiles.

The maps are separated by, or we focused on, mature females, mature males, and then the final map you'll see all Tanner crab combined. That's all sex and maturity stages, and as well as both surveys. We wanted to see if we saw some comparability in that persistent location between the state survey and also the NIMS survey, and we do. And again, the most notable thing we see here is not just the location of the hotspots, but the fact that the, uh, Tanner crab population is persistent again in these gully systems. That's kind of where they're predicted to be, taking into environmental covariates.

If you would like to see a really detailed rundown, uh, see the document Section 5.1.2.1 and Appendix, uh, 2 for more information and for annual maps.

Maps. Ms. Kimball. Thank you. Thank you for that. I, I just want to make sure I'm understanding this.

These distribution models were created based on habitat characteristics so that we could see what's the likely species distribution in areas that are not surveyed. Is that what I'm getting at? Does that mean— is that what you're getting at? Through the chair, thank you for your question, Ms. Kimball. Yes, you're right.

We are trying to make better informed inferences about where they might be located based on environmental covariates that include habitat covariates as well. And it— I know it's a lot of detail, but if you have interest, in Appendix 2, we list some of these covariates that seem to be important for mature males versus females. And Dr. Mallory Yeager is online if you have any further detailed questions as well.

On this slide, I wanted to provide a high overview that acknowledging that there are a lot of other potential sources of mortality that may be acting on the Tanner crab population in this area. Just, you know, aside from directed fishing pressure and groundfish PSC. Many of these sources of mortality are better understood for the Bering Sea stock, and if you have any interest in digging into those, there's a really great new— it's pretty new— document that the AFSC produced for the Tanner crab stock in the Bering Sea. It's the Ecosystem and Socioeconomic Profile, or ESP, document. That's where I borrowed a lot of this information from, and they've also borrowed a lot of information and research from the Kodiak area as well, assuming that they're— they are similar enough to learn from when combining all that research.

I wanted to pull out unobserved mortality here. That's a big question, that is a really tough one, tough nut to crack.

The Unobserved Mortality Working Group report is a great resource that lists a lot of categories of ongoing needs for research to fill some gaps. The main takeaway here is that we can't quantify the magnitude of unobserved mortality impacts at this time. There's two research studies listed here as examples of research that has been done with non-pelagic trawl gear, and I mentioned this briefly earlier to Mr. Curland. And to my knowledge, there is limited to no research on observed mortality for pelagic trawl gear interactions with crab.

Miss Kimball. Thank you. Previously you mentioned the spring bloom timing, and I really only think about that in the Bering Sea, but were you saying that that, the timing of the phytoplankton bloom is affecting crab recruitment, or there's research on it affecting crab recruitment in the Gulf? That seems, it's such a big indicator, it seems like, in salmon survival in the Bering Sea based on the timing of that bloom that I didn't quite get what you were saying there. Through the chair, thank you for your question, Ms. Kimball.

In the Gulf, there have been some research studies around Kodiak Island that tie that concept of the spring bloom timing.

It is something that bears more research. And what's difficult here too is that this, Tanner Crab Stock does not have more advanced modeling efforts, such as a stock assessment, to kind of tease apart the impacts of, and the cumulative impacts of some of these things that go together, like what this source of mortality or this event may provide to the population. But it, at least from that research, we can kind of tell that it it does maybe have an impact on recruitment.

All right, for this slide, I'm going to review, um, Tanner crab PSC, um, that we have provided in the document. You'll see a quick summary by counts or number of crab, and then also by rates, which are crab per ton of groundfish catch. The table here is one of many, and I know it's a bit small, but we have a really large time period of analysis, so there are a lot of numbers in the table. You'll see another version of that in the document on page 155.

One of the takeaways here is that the non-pelagic trawl gear has the highest rate or and counts of PSC on average, and that the numbers are very similar between the closure areas, but they are a little bit higher in the custom closure area option 2B. On a seasonal sense, PSC counts decrease for non-pelagic trawl and are minimal for pelagic trawl and pot or groundfish pot gear, which kind of tracks with that description that Taylor provided earlier of groundfish fishing activity in region. Seasonally, PSC rates, um, the rates themselves slightly increase for non-pelagic trawl. And this is where we were starting to try to get at, um, what is going on in adjacent stat areas, um, so we can make some qualitative conclusions about, uh, impacts from redistribution of fishing effort. Um, an adjacent statistical area, 525630, that is the stat area just to to the south.

It is touching Stat Area Option 1, the 525702. Um, that, uh, statistical area has a slightly lower PSC rate than, uh, either of the proposed closure areas, whereas Statistical Area 535632— and that is just to the southwest and still adjacent to the proposed closure areas— has a much higher PSC rate than either closure area option. At this level of analysis, this indicates some potential for a change in PSE rate if fishing is displaced due to the implementation of a time and area closure. It would be very much dependent on the amount of fishing that was displaced, what fishing or what fishery that was, their resulting CPE, the location that they go to, etc., which is something that was, with the information at hand, very hard or hard to predict. Um, if they shifted into areas with higher PSC rates, there is a potential that some of those conservation benefits that may be gained by closing an area would be offset, um, by having more, uh, PSC in a neighboring area if they, for instance, chose to move to a, uh, in an area immediately adjacent.

Um, one final note here that I wanted to make on this table and all of the PSC tables for Tanner crab: 2020 was an odd year. Um, as you know, COVID happened and had an impact on what, uh, on coverage rates for observers, and so we think that those values are likely, uh, overestimates. And the resulting, the impacts on observer coverage and the redistribution of efforts there resulted in them using PSC extrapolation from fleet-wide rates or broader areas. And so all that to say is that at least in the year 2020, those rates and counts may not be representative of fleet interactions with crab that year.

I have a question for you, Ms. Baker. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you for that. And on the point about the displacement, potential displacement, um, I, I noted yesterday during the SSC report on this agenda item, I did ask them, the co-chairs, about it. Uh, the SSC made a couple of recommendations you know, they were assuming there was another iteration of this analysis and recommended developing— the analyst develop quantitative effort displacement scenarios to bracket likely net effects on Tanner crab PSC, and then using those scenarios, recommending the analyst consider a retrospective analysis to quantify how Tanner crab PSC might have changed had the closure been in effect.

I was listening, Ms. Kroska, to what you just said in terms of, you know, the, the analysis that's here in front of us. It was a bit challenging for you to sort of do what I'll just call, you know, the, the first level displacement analysis. Do you—. I know you haven't had a lot of time to really think about this, but my concern is that sounds really difficult if maybe not possible, these SSC recommendations on first blush. And do you have any thoughts on— have you been able to give that any thought?

And I'm just to set expectations in terms of what might be possible if you tried to pursue those recommendations.

Through the Chair, thank you for your question, Ms. Baker. I've thought about it some there, and there are other examples from other analyses. Um, I will say the two examples that they referred to, the Bristol Bay red king crab closure action a few years ago and the very current chum salmon analysis, are both in the Bering Sea region. So it's not an apples-to-apples comparison in the Gulf. The data streams are more limited.

I do think that we'd be able to explore some of those options. Um, they They did, to my memory at least, provide some bookend examples of if we didn't have the data support for really advanced modeling efforts, such as Fleet Movement Models, to kind of understand what's going on, that examples of models that we've seen used in those other analysis, we could at least list a lot of caveats and use the information at hand here and provide scenarios of what that might look like based on the information we do have for PSC rates and locations. So I think it'll bear more exploring. It may not be to the full extent that we've seen in Bering Sea analyses, but I think some version of that is— has potential. I will say PSC information is inherently limited when we start really drilling down to really small areas, and then by year, and then by vessel, and by, you know, etc.

So we may shift to some combination of methods that we've, like, such as those, those we presented earlier with the approximation method where we were just trying to understand some proportions and approaches through observer track data, um, and we're also considering exploring the use of location data from, uh, pelagic fishing through the trawl EM program as well.

Um, Miss Baker put it well, this is our I would say, first cut at trying to understand displacement.

Here you'll see 3 images that we've seen before in the presentation, and we put them side by side so we can kind of do a visual comparison. On the left, you'll see the species distribution model map for mature male tanner crab, and in the middle, you'll see the year-round option map for non-pelagic trawl track density, and on the right you'll see pelagic trawl track density.

Again, we use these just to kind of get some initial ideas of where fishing activity has historically occurred and where it could potentially shift to. Again, this is not— this is only showing where fishing has occurred, but it does not demonstrate CPE, bottom contact, or PSC rates right now. So with all of those caveats, um, we think that it's at least reasonable to assume that a redistribution of some or all of the fishing activity from a time area closure could result in increased Tanner crab PSC and some assumptions about unobserved mortality elsewhere. Um, and if that redistribution does occur, there could be some potential for offset benefits that were gained by implementation of a closure.

Just to reiterate that when you compare any of those species distribution model maps to the track-catch density maps, again, we're seeing that same story that the gully systems are important to Tanner crab, but they really are also important for groundfish fishing. There's a lot that's happening in the same area that is directly overlapping, driven by these what we think are productive gully systems around Kodiak and also in areas of high bathymetric relief around the islands. We didn't yet include PSC rates for other statistical areas outside those adjacent statistical areas, but if fishing is displaced to areas outside the closure area options, Again, we may think that there's a potential for some offset of the benefits gained here.

We see the patterns of fishing here occurring in those, those gully systems where crab also are. So there is a prediction that there will be some sort of interaction.

Impacts from increased fishing intensity on Tanner crab is unknown. So for instance, If you look at that Barnabas Gully system, which is encapsulated by those boxes on the trawl track density, those are also statistical area boxes. If fishing pressure or fishing activity that was once spread across the length of the gully system is displaced from one of these proposed closure options and concentrated in a smaller area of the gully system, the impacts to the local Tanner crab stock from that increased fishing activity are currently unknown. As a whole, our lens here, when we were thinking about our qualitative descriptions for impacts to the Tanner crab stock, we were thinking just in terms of localized impacts and not to the population level. That is something that we could try to at least attempt to discern in the next cut in terms of proportions of PSC to the overall estimated abundance here.

Um, here you have a summary table that is also found in the document, um, just summarizing the general takeaways by element in the Alternative 2. Um, I'm not going to read through everything here because we've covered some of those pros and cons along the way. Um, but one of the main takeaways is that the custom closure area may offer the greatest potential conservation benefit to Tanner crab for protection. One of the reasons is that it just inherently includes the more of that gully system, which also then includes more of the Tanner crab population as compared to the other option, statistical area 525702. And again, we are considering displacement impacts and potential offset to those benefits.

Yeah, and that's all I have for the Tanner Crab EA portion. In the next 2 slides, we will cover the rest of the components of the EA. So if you have any questions about Tanner Crab, okay.

On this slide, you'll see a summary of the 3 of the EA components: groundfish, Chinook PSC, and halibut PSC. At a high level, Alternative 2 is expected to result in fairly minimal impacts to these 3 EA components at the stock level, and that outcome is expected to be the same for either of the proposed closure area options.. And the only stock I wanted to highlight here are flatfish. As you've heard through the thread of our story, the shallow water flatfish complex is important catch, and it also exists in this— excuse me— in this area in fairly high concentrations.

Again, an important area for groundfish fishing and for the Tanner crab population, or the local Tanner crab population. So we think that it— there could be a potential for moderate localized impacts to the stock there. If fishing, again, for shallow water flatfish with non-pelagic trawl was displaced, this could result in a redistribution of fishing. And again, we— it is really challenging at this level of information to predict what increased fishing intensity or displaced fishing elsewhere could have on the Tanner crab— or sorry, not Tanner crab— on these, these stocks as a whole, but we don't expect it to be anything meaningful at the stock level.

The proposed action relative to the no-action alternative would likely result in minor impacts to the stock level. Again, we're talking about flatfish. Given their really low TAC utilization,, and also the, their potential broad spatial distribution of, uh, where they are fished at, at least with the knowledge that we have on hand for this iteration. And finally, I'll move on to the last EA component, um, habitat. This slide, uh, outlines a qualitative assessment of alternative 2 impacts on habitat that you'll see in Section 5.6.4.

The results here demonstrate historical fishing activity, which is something that we've been presenting throughout, but the big difference here is that this relies on the legacy catch-in-areas database. This information goes from 2012 and only goes through August of 2022. That was at the point where they've shifted away from that legacy database. So this does not represent current fishing activity and is another component that we see potential for updating in the future should that new 2.0 database come available. These results here are from the Fishing Effects Model, the fishing module portion.

That does not include recovery and susceptibility rates that speak to habitat disturbance. The plots here on the right are separated in rows. The top row is Option 1 closure area, and the bottom row is the Option 2 custom closure area. The main takeaway here is that there's minimal difference in, uh, estimated contact area between the two proposed closure areas.. And if that looks like a lot of bottom contact area by gear type, just know that this is bottom contact area that is summed by month to produce a value for a year.

So it can, in theory, be higher than the area of the closure that we're looking at, but that is just to talk about general ideas about fishing activity patterns, and it does not directly correlate to habitat disturbance. Um, again, this is not showing unique habitat area disturbed, just a summation for each year on the plot. So again, we're expecting some similar impacts that we would see in the other EA components with displacement, where if bottom contact decreased due to the implementation of a closure and a gear restriction,, we might see that displacement elsewhere offsetting those benefits. I mentioned the— that future iterations could include updated results from the Ketchenarius 2.0 database and also results from other portions or modules of the fishing effects model if the council would like to request that. And last thing I want to note here is that ongoing research that you'll hear a lot about tomorrow under the pelagic trawl gear option under the Gear Innovation Initiative.

They are updating bottom contact adjustments for pelagic trawl gear, so that could change these plots and tables that you'll see in the document.

We have a question before we move on. Miss Gohn. Thank you, Madam Chair, and I'm just looking at the graphs to the right there. And if I look at the Option 1 on all months, it looks like the pot gear and pelagic trawl gear bottom contact areas are fairly low. And my question is on the both Option 2A and 2B to the right of that, I can't see, it looks like the pot and pelagic trawl gear overlap at near zero.

Am I seeing that correctly? Through the chair, thank you for your question. I'm sorry, it's tough to see. In the document near or on page 186, you'll see tables that replicate those numbers exactly, but your general conclusions are right. It's because of the shift of those fishing activities out of the area during those time windows.

And Ms. Kimball. Thank you. I, I'm just, I must be tired. I'm having a hard time figuring out what these figures are telling me, but is there a way to just show the percent of the area that is trawled or the percent of the area that is fished with pots or something, something like that, is to give us a sense of how much of the area that we're proposing to close is actually used? Through the chair, yes, that's certainly possible in the next iteration if the council should request that.

And I think that we could also figure out a metric that would speak more to the fishing footprint, which is, you know, taking away all of the summation and the overlap of those activities. Here we're just looking at the fishing activity description in general. Thank you.

All right, and that, that does wrap up our slide deck for Alternative 2. We can pause for any further questions on 2 before before I get into Alternative 3. Seeing none, I will— the next following slides discuss Alternative 3, which is an evaluation of the existing crab closure areas in the central Gulf and around Kodiak Island. The crab closure areas around Kodiak Island were shown by Anita in the start of the slide deck, but I'll review them again here. Alternative 3 evaluates these closure areas and considers option for modification or removal.

The areas include the Type 1 through 3 areas, which were originally implemented for red king crab protection and conservation back in the '80s and early '90s, as well as the Marmot Bay Tanner crab protection area implemented in 2014. Now, Alternative 3 is a discussion paper style analysis and was not included within the EA and RIR. You will find within Chapter 7, which includes Alternative 3, a broad overview of the objectives of these closures, the rationale and history behind the closures, as well as recent crab abundance and PSE estimates, as well— and finally, some considerations regarding these closures. I'll also note here that the development of evaluation options under Alternative 3 may inform the development of criteria and timelines to review effectiveness under Alternative 2.

So the closure areas for red king crab protection, the Type I through III closure areas, were first implemented in 1986 to promote rebuilding of severely depressed red king crab stocks around Kodiak by reducing bycatch mortality. These areas were later grouped into different protection frameworks. First, the Type I areas have the maximum protections. These are closed year-round, and these were determined in selected because they contain larger portions of female red king crab distribution and abundance based on data from the 1960s. The Type II areas are closed from February 15th to June 15th.

These also, between the two, the Type I and Type II areas, these two areas were thought to encompass almost the entirety of the female red king crab abundance distribution around Kodiak,, and the Type 2 duration was thought to encompass the entirety of the softshell phase. Type 3 implement— Type 3 areas were implemented later in 1989, and these are threshold-based closures. So these are open unless otherwise closed, and that closure occurs via, if an abundance-based threshold is triggered. This has yet to occur. This threshold is based on abundance levels not seen since the 1960s or 1970s.

Yes, Miss Baker. Thank you, Madam Chair, and I do have a question about the Type 3 areas, and I'm just not finding it in the analysis. And I, I know, Miss Holman, you know the answer. Um, appreciate that the Type 3 areas have never been triggered and that the threshold— excuse me— hasn't been updated. As, as the threshold currently stands, my understanding was um, the information was based on a POT survey that ADFNG had done to inform that threshold, and ADFNG no longer conducts that survey.

Is that sort of another important thing to know about the Type 3 closures? Through the Chair, Ms. Baker, yes, that, that is another important thing to note that we'll highlight later in the analysis or later in the presentation as well. But that POT survey Yeah, the abundance threshold here was fertilized females per pot, and that was different for different red king crab districts around Kodiak. So districts with higher abundance back in the '60s, that fertilized females per pot threshold was higher for those areas than ones that say had less red king crab back in the, back in the '60s. So again, those those are outdated, both in terms of what the threshold is and the mechanism in which to determine that that threshold has been reached.

Right, moving on to the Marmot Bay Tanner Crab Protection Area. This was passed by the council in 2010 and implemented in 2014 and was established to protect Tanner crab by reducing Tanner crab bycatch in Gila groundfish fisheries and reduced gear contact from non-pelagic trawl gear.. There was also a trailing amendment implemented alongside the Marmot Bay Tanner Crab Protection Area, which was the trawl sweep modification regulations, which required elevated— elevating devices in Central Gulf-directed flatfish fisheries. This was implemented to decrease gear contact with crab on the seafloor. Now, I'll also note here that the Marmot Bay Tanner Crab Protection Area also originally included some observer coverage requirements in other areas with high Tanner PSC, as listed in the closure area options that were considered within the table on the right-hand side of your screen.

However, in 2014, at the final rule, NMFS deemed the requirements were no longer necessary to improve Tanner crab PSC data, which is why those observer coverage requirements were included. Because observer data was low and improvements were deemed necessary prior to further consideration. However, after the observer program was restructured in 2012, in 2014 at the final rule, those were no longer deemed necessary.

All right, my next slide here describes the red king crab abundance around Kodiak and PSE estimates within and around the existing closure areas as described in Section 7.4.

The takeaway of this slide is that the stock remains in a depressed state and the majority of the stock is confined to Aleutak Bay. This is include— this is shown on the blue circle of the left-hand image on your screen. Aleutak Bay lies adjacent to the Aleutak Flats and Towers area. Therefore, in the table on the right, you'll see that 18% of the surveyed abundance is within that the federal waters that are— lie within the Aleutec Flats and Towers Type 1 area. But the middle figure on— middle map on your screen, that includes both the federal and state waters.

So you'll see 95% of surrogate abundance is included in both the waters outside of Aleutec Bay and within the state waters within Aleutec Bay. Now, also, I'll note here that the PSC estimates on this slide and the next slide for Tanner crab This PSC method does differ from the PSC apportionment method that Anita described, and within the bulk of the analysis of Alt 2, this PSC method sums the PSC occurring in overlapping stat areas rather than trying to apportion it to the closure boundaries, which do not follow the ADF&G statistical areas. So therefore, this is a conservative estimate which may state overstate BSC counts. But that being said, less than 1 crab a year, 1 red king crab a year is all that was caught in BSC outside of Altatac Flats and Towers between 2012 and 2025.

Now for Tanner crab, Anita spoke to this within the EA section, so I'll keep this brief. This, the Tanner crab are more widely distributed than red king crab. And as you already heard, the bulk of the stock is located within those east side and southeast sections, which overlap the proposed closure areas in Alternative 2. Again, those PSC values shown on the table on the right-hand side of your screen are conservative and likely overstate the amount in each area. I'll also note that the Marmot Bay Tannic Crab Protection Area PSC counts and the Marmot Flats PSC counts within the table 7-6 in your document, those are, those are combined.

So that's not numerically highlighted here, but they were historically high but declined over time and are now, are now zero in 2025.

This slide summarizes the considerations that we've highlighted for existing crab closure areas around Kodiak Island, also within Section 7.3 of your document.

The—. As a summary, the Marmot Bay Tanner crab protection area, as I mentioned earlier, does have low abundance and low PSC rates relative to other Kodiak crab protection areas. For the Aleutak Flats and Towers Type I area, this is where the last remaining portion of the red king crab stock is located. For the Type I Marmot Flats area, this may provide incidental Tanner crab protections because it overlaps a portion of Chiniak Gully. For the Type 2 areas, all areas, the seasonal closure duration that was chosen back in the '80s was, was based on data from the 1970s and '80s, and this potentially could be revised to ensure that it encompasses the entirety of the soft-fill phase as we know today with any updated research that may be available.

The Chiricoff Island closure area, I didn't highlight this on the previous slides, but there's no survey that is— the survey is not conducted in the Chiricoff Island area. Therefore, abundance is really difficult to quantify out here or out there. And then the Barnabas Type 2 area, this is the sliver that is completely encompassed by the custom area proposed for closure in Alternative 2. You'll see that outside Sikilitik Island on the map on your screen. For Type 3 areas, as I mentioned earlier, these have never been triggered and the benefits have never been afforded.

This, and as described earlier as well, there's an outdated threshold because that was based on abundance data from when the stock was in a much better state, and it also, the trigger itself is also outdated.

Finally, for all closure areas, Kodiak waters have a complex landscape of closures, some of which overlap with the crab closure areas under consideration for evaluation or otherwise provide some incidental protections. These overlapping closure areas do make it difficult to parse out or attribute the effects of specific closures, which also complicate evaluation processes.

With that, I can pause for any questions. I'll, I'll turn it through before briefly describe my next steps.

Ms. Baker. Thank you, Madam Chair, and I really appreciate what you've presented for Alternative 3. I recognize that alternative was in a different state than Alternative 2, and, um, I think given, uh, the exercise that we're trying to undertake in Alternative 3, I think the information you've provided was very helpful. So thank you. Actually a little bit more optimistic than the SSC may be in that we could identify, you know, the existing objectives for when the areas were established and identify some metrics.

But first, my question is actually not related to that. It is more— it was something unfortunately I missed yesterday when the SSC co-chairs were here, but it does relate to Alternative 3 in the SSC report, and I'm hoping you can help me understand the SSC discussion a little bit more. It's the reference comments on page 21 of the SSC report, um, relative to evaluating, uh, you know, whether to modify or remove current closure areas. It says experimental data are preferable in that evaluation but more difficult to collect and, and take time to generate. And, um, do you— was there a little more discussion on what, um, was meant by experimental out data versus— well, yeah, can you help me with that a little bit?

Uh, through the chair, thank you for your question, Ms. Baker. Um, that wasn't a super extensive portion of the discussion, but from what I understood from that, uh, you know, an experimental approach could look something like opening an area for a little while and seeing the recovery dynamics opening an area for a little while and measuring how much the Tanner crab abundance and PSC levels after it's been open to fishing again. I think that their acknowledgement there was simply one of like, this would be nice to have but maybe not practical in a short-term sense, and so how do we incorporate that? And acknowledging that there might be a mismatch in terms of like what we could do experimentally and what could be an approach for right now.

Through the chair, thank you for that. And so that really helps clarify. I wasn't sure if, um, experimental referred to just collecting data a different way around these areas, but what I'm hearing is that it might actually be a different way of thinking about evaluating these closures. Modification could be A modification to a current closure, for example, could be like you said, opening up a portion of a currently closed area, not all of it, but a portion of it for a period of time. And then after that period of time, evaluating if in those metrics you've identified, you can identify any differences between the area that was open and the area that remained closed.

Is that maybe something along those lines? Through the chair, thank you for your, uh, Question and clarification too. Um, I— that was kind of my sense. I— again, they didn't dive too much into what an experiment could look like, but there was some excitement about what it could look like, um, because there really isn't a lot in this area, um, that really speaks to that kind of experimental setup in a before and after. And it does take a little while.

Um, we had mentioned And one example of this research from the Alaska Deep Sea Coral and Sponge Initiative, their final report, they wrapped up their big initiative in 2024. And one of their many research products that they are finalizing right now was an examination of what happens when you open an area again. And so hopefully that will be informative. Is not completed at this time.

Okay, thank you.

All right, I won't spend too much time on this slide given our, given our time and that indications that we may still be taking the AP report this afternoon. But there are next steps highlighted for the Council here, which are relevant to both Alternative 2 and Alternative 3. And I'll pause here for any final questions.

Any questions on next steps?

Thank you. Thank you for all of the work that you put into this presentation and the analysis. Greatly appreciated. Thanks.

So we will be taking our AP report and breaking for the day after the AP report. We'll be closing public testimony at the conclusion of the report this evening, and we'll be beginning public testimony at 8:00 AM.

Uh, good evening, Madam Chair, council members. For the record, I'm Heather Mann. I'm one of the co-vice chairs on the AP, and we were going to deliver— I'm going to deliver our motion on C5, Tanner Crabbe projections.

The AP recommends that the council request a second initial review of the Tanner Crab protections analysis with the inclusion of 5 new closure options and a new element under Alternative 2 and a revised Alternative 3. Additions are in blue with deletions struck out. And Madam Chair, I'm not going to read the stuff that was already there and wasn't changed. Is that all right? Yes, thank you.

So, Alternative 1— nope, that was there already. Alternative 2, closure area. We've added Option 3, which is AWTA Option 1. Option 4, which is AWTA Option 2. Option 5, which is MTC Option 1.

Option 6, which is MTC Option 2. And Option 7, which is Tanner Crab Fleet Option. And I'll just note, at the end of the motion, there are photographs of So, not exact of what the closures would be, but something to give you an idea.

Element 2 and 3 remain the same. And then Element 4, periodic review of new closure for efficacy. Criteria that could be considered when reviewing efficacy include, but are not limited to, benefits to the abundance of the Kodiak Tanner crab stock, impacts of fleet displacement on Tanner crab, halibut, and salmon PSC, socioeconomic trade-offs for the Tanner crab fleet, the trawl catcher vessel fleet, and shoreside processors. Option 1, review efficacy every 3 years. Option 2, review efficacy after 5 years.

Alternative 2 elements are not mutually exclusive.. And then under Alternative 3, evaluate the existing Marmot Bay Tanner crab protection area and all Type 1, 2, and 3 closures around Kodiak Island for modification and/or removal using biological, fishery-independent and dependent information available. Element 1, Marmot Bay Tanner crab protection area. Option 1, remove the Marmot Bay Tanner crab protection area. Option 2, modify to a seasonal closure.

Suboption A, February 15th to June 15th. Suboption B, April 1st through June 15th.

Element 2, Type 1 closure, Allataq Flats and Towers area. Option 1, modify the existing closure boundaries only to maintain the closure inside Allataq Bay with an additional 5 nautical mile buffer of closure area outside of Allataq Bay. The remainder of the area outside of the modified closure would be reopened to non-pelagic trawl gear. Option 2, modify the existing closure boundaries to maintain the closure inside Aleutak Bay with an additional 10 nautical mile buffer of closure area outside of Aleutak Bay. The remainder of the area outside of the modified closure would be reopened to non-pelagic trawl gear.

The closure would remain an annual Type 1 closure area. Element 3, Type 1 closure, Marmot Flats area. Option 1, remove the Marmot Flats area Type 1 closure. Option 2, modify to a seasonal closure. Suboption A, February 15th to June 15th.

Suboption B, April 1st through June 15th.

Element 4, Type 2 closure, Sherikov Island area. Option 1, remove the Sherikov Island Type 2 closure area. Option 2, modify to a new seasonal closure date, April 1 through June 15th. Element 5, Type 2 closure, Barnabas area. Option 1, expand Type 2 Barnabas closure to year-round.

Option 2, modify to a new seasonal closure, from April 1st through June 15th. Element 6, Type 3 closures. Jericho, Horse's Head, Barnabas, Outer Marmot Bay. Option 1, remove all Type 3 closure areas. Option 2, all Type 3 closure areas should be seasonal with suboptions A, February 15th through June 15th.

Suboption B, April 1st through June 15th. Sub-element A, modify regulations to allow pelagic gear to be deployed in the closure area while non-pelagic gear is on board regardless of the monitoring category. Alternative 3 elements are not mutually exclusive. Sub-element A can be selected with any combination of Alternative 3 elements 2 through 5 that remain Type 1, 2, or 3 closures, closure areas.

Lastly, the AP recommends the following updates and/or improvements to the analysis: move all discussion of the GOA catch-a-processor fleet to an appendix, remove all CP harvest and value data from the next iteration, including in calculations of total non-pelagic groundfish harvest so that shoreside impacts are not minimized. Examples are Tables 324 through 327. Include an expanded time series going back to 2005 through, through 2025 in the next analysis. The existing time series of 2012 through 2025 should be kept for comparison. Show complete data consistently across fisheries where it is available.

For example, Table 320 shows ex-vessel value from the commercial Tanner fishery, but does not include columns when fishery was closed and does not include average annual X vessel amount for the time series, including the years with zero value. Include additional species distribution modeling results for mature female, mature male, and all crab with survey years 2006 to 2025. In Chapter 4.3, the vessel and community level dependency and impact section for each gear type should include processor impact section, for each gear type. In actions that affect a crab or groundfish catcher vessel, access to resource processes are directly impacted and should be considered as such. This should also include consideration of the importance of the April-May shoulder season for Kodiak.

When discussing the scope of the action or impacts to processing, only the current number of processors, not historical, should be used. Used. Better incorporation of the GOA Pacific cod stock crash in 2017 and the resulting impacts of predation on Tanner crab in the analysis. Incorporate the required use of elevated sweeps in the Central Gulf of Alaska flatfish fishery on additional potential benefits to the life stages of crab. Incorporate pollock catch monitored Pollock catch monitored by EM into all harvest data.

Describe observer coverage categories and rates for each groundfish fishery and the Tanner crab fishery impacted by this analysis as it relates to PSC. Engage with trawl industry vessel operators for more context. Detail observed and unobserved mortality from the directed Tanner crab fishery. And finally, species composition to add species composition and X vessel value of non-pelagic trawl trips from the newly proposed closure areas. And the amended main motion passed 14 to 0 with 1 abstention.

And you can see several pages of rationale that follows. And I would be delighted to answer any questions. Thank you very much for the AP motion and report. We'll see if there are any questions. I know there was a lot here, so— yep, Ms. Vanderhoeven.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Ms. Mann. Um, I apologize if I missed it in the rationale. My question is regarding the new alternative to Element 4 regarding the periodic review for closure efficacy. Um, and I see the list of criteria, and I Those basically make sense.

My question is, did the AP have any discussion about, like, what the scale of those would be or the criteria? And I look at, like, the first one, benefit to the abundance of Tanner King crab, and that could be 1 crab or 1,000 crab. It could be a percentage. It could be whether or not there was a directed fishery. Was that discussed at the AP?

Uh, through the chair, and thank you for the question. Uh, we mostly— the conversation at the AP was sort of piecemeal what had happened at the SSC, having not had the benefit of being in the room or having that report delivered to us. And so we were trying to think about what would— what, what could measurable impacts be for new closures. And we've heard at the state and through the presentations that measurable objectives is really important, but into the level of detail about these, no, then we didn't have a deep discussion.

Thank you. Mr. Pamplin. Thanks, Madam Chair. Thanks, Miss Mann, for the, the report and all your work on this.

Um, for element 1 in the closure area, um, the staff looked at 2 options already. On one of the options was just the stat area, the other one there was a fair amount of gymnastics that had to occur to kind of compile the information for that analysis. And I was just curious if the AP, in developing or suggesting 5 additional areas, did, did you interact with staff about the feasibility of, of clipping data that would work for an analysis in those very obtuse-looking areas? Thanks. Uh, through the chair, Mr. Pimplin, uh, thanks for the question.

So in our interactions with staff, we did ask, um, a couple of questions toward the beginning of the presentation that were more around, can you overlay these with the sandbox and things like that. And then, um, during our deliberations and discussion, it was certainly recognized that this was an additional number of areas. They are all slightly different from each other, so it's not like it's just one side is moved. So we felt that there was a lot of existing information, but more so a lot of folks that would work with the, with the staff with their net zero and all of that to help them get the waypoints correct. But we certainly recognize this was an additional number.

I don't know if we heard this in public comment or in discussion, but Options 1 and 2 were not informed by groundfish pot fishermen or groundfish trawl fishermen, and so the 3, 4, 5, 6, and 6 all were informed by those participants, if that helps.

Ms. Kimball. Thank you. Ms. Mann, can you characterize though for the options provided by the groundfish fleet, because I think the Option 7 is self-explanatory in the map, but what was the basis for, for those new closure area suggestions? I mean, was it just in general? Was it trying to retain areas for groundfish that are important while also focusing on the areas where you see a high density of crab, or was there some other objective?

Through the chair, Ms. Kimball, it was a combination of both those things. Several folks that fish in the trawl fisheries also have fished Tanner crab, or just from their experience on the water. And so the idea really was to maintain the areas that are really productive for groundfish at the same time as the highest densities of Tanner crab. And I mentioned the sandbox before, but I know for the MTC options, that was a really important part, and I believe so for Alaska whitefish trawlers too. But yes, you characterized it correctly.

It was trying to really maintain some of those really key areas, but being responsive to the request to look at high-density Tanner crab areas.

Yes, Ms. Baker.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Ms. Mann. My question is in Alternative 3, and Alternative 3 Element 6, the Type 3 closures, and I just want to make sure I understand. We had a little discussion about that with, with staff. It looks like, uh, Option 2 that the AP is recommending, uh, to, uh, modify the Type 3 closures from a trigger-based closure to just a temporal closure, a seasonal closure.

So the triggers would go away and the seasonal, uh, whatever Through the chair, Miss Baker. Yes, that's correct.

Mr. Muller.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Miss Mann, for your AP report here. My question is on Alternative 2, Element 4, on the periodic review. Um, Option 1 is a review after 3 years, Option 2 after 5 years. We heard through staff reports that the maturity cycle is 5 to 7.

Can you elaborate a little bit on the AP discussion, why the years were 3 and 5 and maybe not included up to 7 years? Uh, through the chair, Mr. Muller, my recollection about that discussion wasn't that it was tied to the life cycle. Um, it was more that we didn't want to go 5, 10, 15, 20 years without having something to look at. And I think if I'm wrong, someone will correct me in public comment, but that's my recollection.

Any other questions?

Miss Gorn. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you, Miss Mann, for the AP report on this. My question is back under the Alternative 2, Element 1, the different closure areas. And I, if my recollection is correct, from the discussion paper to this initial review analysis, at the discussion paper stage, we had larger areas, ADF&G stat areas, multiple ADF&G stat areas, and then it got narrowed down for this initial review analysis to one ADF&G stat area, and then that custom area that's supposed to cover more of where that gully is. So this next— this AP motion is adding all these additional ones that just narrow that down even more.

Am I understanding that correctly?

Um, through the chair, Miss Gohan, I'm not an expert on, um, net zero and all of that, but I think— well, I know what, what we were attempting to do was be more precise instead of large areas, in order, as I responded to Miss Kimball, to be able to try to carve out important areas for pot cod and/or trawling, but still protecting. Um, Option 7, I think, is actually a little bit larger in some cases, and I think you'll hear about that one in public comment. But yes, the idea was, and we had heard that there was interest from the state and from the council on more precise surgical closures while still protecting crab but leaving, um, areas open, and that's responsive to the purpose and need. It's been a really interesting education learning how to identify these areas and be able to put the waypoints and all of that. So yeah.

I don't see any other questions. Thank you very much for the AP report. Thank you. So we have closed public testimony sign-up. We will come back tomorrow morning at 8:00 AM.

And begin public testimony on C5. Thank you. Have a good evening.