NPFMC 279 Day 1 - June 4, 2026

Good morning, everyone.

Welcome to the 279th meeting of the Council. I'd like to begin the meeting with a land acknowledgment. We'd like to take this opportunity to respectfully acknowledge that this meeting held in Vancouver, Washington is within the traditional lands of the Chinookan College Tribes. The Council wants to honor the Indigenous peoples who have stewarded this land across generations and continue to do so. We're glad to be part of this community and to honor their culture, resilience, and tradition.

So thank you. We have two new members joining us this meeting, Bruce McIntosh and Barry Tom. I'd like to allow you to introduce yourself.

Well, good morning everyone. I'm Bruce McIntosh, the new representative for Oregon replacing Steve Williams. I've made that mistake several times in my career, so I can, I hope I can hold up my end of the bargain on this. Looking forward to working with all of you and representing the state of Oregon and our commercial fishing industry. It's definitely drinking from a fire hose right now, so Looking forward to taking advantage of all your knowledge.

Thanks.

And good morning, everyone. I'm Barry Thaum. I'm the Executive Director of the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission, and I'll be filling in the North Pacific Council seat. And we also have a couple other alternates, Karen Braby and Scott Rumsey, that will also be sitting in as well for various meetings. Thanks.

Good morning. Good morning. Thank you. We look forward to working with both of you. So we were saddened to hear of the passing of Grete Gudmundsson, one of our AP members.

He was a passionate and dedicated member in this process. I'd like to hand over the mic to Jamie, who'd like to say a couple words.

Thank you, Madam Chair, and if you'll bear with me, I'm going to read a statement.

There's someone missing from this meeting, and it's left a hole in many of our hearts and a noticeable empty seat on the council's advisory panel. Greter Gudmundsson, a crab fisherman on the advisory panel, passed away a month ago today. For those of you who knew him, Greter was a unique character, equal parts salty, tough fisherman and teddy bear. He could disagree and debate a fisheries issue and afterwards check in on you, asking how you and your family are, and he genuinely meant it. He was often frustrated with the politics and slowness of the council process, what he called the art of stock assessments and the layers of buffers added to harvest limits.

And we all heard about it. And yet he also valued and appreciated the participatory public process, and he kept engaging in it. He understood the importance of having a voice at the table, and what a voice it was. At one meeting, he signed up to testify, and his name appeared as Gregarius Goodmanson instead of Greter. A very fitting name for him, and I can still hear his deep belly laugh when he noticed it.

He had such a good laugh and was free with letting it out. This is a man who immigrated from Iceland and survived a fishing vessel sinking when he was just a teenager, not worried about living through the night floating on a buoy in cold waters without a survival suit, but instead worried his mom would be mad that he lost his retainer. That event that would traumatize most of us didn't deter him. He kept fishing. In fact, he survived multiple fishing vessels sinking.

He had so many good stories, whether about fishing or about raising his kids and grandkids with his partner in crime Heidi, whom he absolutely adored. His stories were larger than life, so much so that some of us, myself included, thought that he had many more years to live, more stories to tell, and more challenges to overcome. With his lighthearted laugh and his ability to move through tough circumstances, with a practical mindset. Greta, you are missed, and the council thanks you for what you brought to this process as an experienced fisherman with a wealth of knowledge, a willingness to engage, and as an all-around good and caring person. Fair winds and following seas, my friend.

Please join me in a moment of silence to hear Greta's laugh, to reflect on his love and compassion towards the people in his life, and send him off in peace.

Thank you.

Thank you, Miss Connie.

Mr. Ritchie. Thank you. I just wanted to say a little bit for Greta too. I spent a lot of time with Greta in these meetings, um, and in these spaces, and I appreciated the There's not a lot of people who you can meet in this process and you can go get— well, he drank white wine, but I drank root beer. And we would most nights go, you know, go— I drink my root beer, Greta would drink his white wine and just not talk about policy at all.

And there's a lot to be said when you can learn so much from someone in this space with that. And he's going to be missed. And I really appreciated working with Greta. Um, and I definitely appreciate, and I just wanted to note his tenacity for always bringing things back to, back to CRAB. He could be talking about anything and it would come back to CRAB.

And yeah, it's advocacy, and I, I'll definitely miss him.

Thank you, Mr. Ritchie and Ms. Cohen. He certainly will be missed. So our agenda for this meeting is available on the council's e-agenda site. As always, we intend to go through the agenda in order.

However, but agenda items may be taken up earlier or later than they're listed on the schedule, depending on how we progress. So are there any objections or additions to the agenda?

Seeing none, we're ready to move on to our next section, RB reports. We have 7 agency reports on this section, 5 of them oral, as well as cooperative and other reports under B9 and salmon vice chair Bycatch genetic reports under B10. As a reminder, the public will receive all the B reports and then we'll take up public testimony. So please sign up at the end of the agenda items before the conclusion of the final 10 B10 report if you'd like to testify. So I will hand it over to Ms. Evans to give us our ED report.

Good morning, members of the council. Diana Evans.

Um, I—. The— I don't have a PowerPoint, uh, for the majority of this. So if you want to follow along, I'm going to walk through the ED report that's posted, um, and cover a few different issues. So first, noting we do have a change in council membership. We already had introductions from our 2 new members at the table, but also noting that it is, uh, Mr. Rudy Sukata's last council meeting as a sitting member.

Rudy was appointed in 2023, and we're going to wish you all the best with your extra free time following this meeting and hope you have lots of opportunity to go fishing. Thank you. Also want to note that Mr. Kelly Susewind— I have the pronunciation correct— the director of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife will be attending the council meeting today, and I believe you might have an opportunity, Madam Chair, to give him a few minutes to speak after lunch when he arrives to address the Council.

Moving to the next topic, we have already recognized the sad loss of our Advisory Panel member, Gershwer Gudmundsson. Also want to note that a former Council member, Steve Marks, who was the representative for the Director of the Department of Fish and Wildlife for the State of Oregon, passed away recently as well. There's a funeral service being held for him actually this weekend in Bend, Oregon. He was on the council from 2017 to 2022, so had 5 years on the council in that position, following a variety of positions and a long career at the ODFW. So also saddened by his loss as well.

Moving on to the next topic in the ED report is commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Magnuson-Stevens Act that was signed on April 13th, 50 years ago, at the time of the Fishery Conservation Management Act, and a landmark act, as we all know, and we all work with every day, creating the 200-mile federal EEZ. And the framework for sustainable and science-based fishery management that we continue to use today. We have talked about some plans for commemorating that both nationally with the other councils as well as specifically in our region, and at the recent CCC meeting, the regional councils noted that they put together a webpage that's linked in the ED report that has a timeline of the last 50 years looking across all 8 councils, highlighting different events from each of the councils that show the progress of work and fishery management that has occurred in the last 50 years through the Magnuson Act. It also has a photo gallery from, from other regions and from our region, so I encourage you all to take a look at that. It's very well done.

Building off that, we're planning to do a similar North Pacific-focused event or timeline website page for just looking— expanding on the events that are pictured from the North Pacific. So we would be planning to pull that together by the end of the year. And we're also planning a small reception at our December council meeting where we would be able to commemorate the 50th., and that will take place at the Anchorage Museum on December 3rd. Speaking of the CCC meeting that happened recently, the CCC is the annual meeting where the regional leadership from the 8 Regional Fishery Management Councils and National Fishery Service leadership and the NIMS regional administrators get together to discuss issues of mutual relevance. So, uh, Ms. Dravnica, Ms. Baker, Mr. Kurland, and I participated in that meeting.

We hosted it. It took place in Homer, Alaska. Um, and so several other council members also, uh, were attending or, or part of the presentations, um, for various agenda items and staff as well. Um, the agenda is linked in the ED report if you want to take a look at that. Um, and the item 16, the final item of that agenda, shows some some of the outcomes, the motions that were— that the council took during that time.

I think it might be of interest to you, and this is also linked in the ED report, if you wanted to look at the overall— one of the agenda items was to highlight kind of a round robin of needs and priorities across all of the councils, all of the 8 councils at present, and then also a specific update on our North Pacific regional priorities. So if there's— if you're high grading items, that might be of interest to you. To take a look at those. Certainly ongoing concerns about stable and consistent funding were highlighted by all of the councils. But just a note on the budget, the council has received its full budget distribution for FY '26, which is— we are all grateful for and be able to continue to do our work here, particularly with respect to another agenda item that we talked about, which is implementing the executive order on 14276, which is restoring American seafood competitiveness.

Yes, um, there was discussion at the meeting about the executive order, uh, we have listed, uh, as an attachment on this agenda for us and status update on our own work plan, uh, for the items that the council approved in October 2025. There's about 25 items that are, um, on our executive order work plan. For implementing in our region, but the executive order itself is more broad, and that it also addresses various issues relating to fair trade and reducing regulatory burdens and ensuring the integrity of the seafood supply chain. So we received some updates on that, including a brief discussion about the recent USDA announcement creating the Office of Seafood, intending to provide some additional support to the fishing industry and seafood harvesters. Access to USDA programs.

And NMFS is also actively working on updating, working with agencies with respect to seafood import monitoring programs as well.

One of the things that we've talked about in this council the last couple of meetings, certainly last June and also in February, was an initiative that we heard about from the agency to develop a risk-value matrix, and that was intended to look at how can we— how can the agency overall manage, or that it is infeasible to continue managing the 500 species that are within the various FMPs across the nation in the same way with the capacity and the resources we have. And so some better alignment of resources and capacity. So we had talked about that, um, and how do we engage with that effort, uh, at various meetings, particularly last June and since then as well. Um, we heard from the agency that that specific avenue, i.e., that the risk-value matrix, which potentially could lead to, you know, consideration of removing some species from the FMP, is not being pushed forward as a, as a solution for all regions at this stage. Instead, we have reoriented efforts to look at regionally based discussions about what are the appropriate actions or priorities and needs on a regional basis to better align priorities and capacity between National Marine Fisheries Service and the councils going forward.

And so the intent is that over the summer, before the next CCC meeting, which is in October, we'll continue to have conversations in our region with the National Marine Fisheries Service to identify where there are opportunities to better align priorities and capacities going forward. So I would anticipate that we will be reporting back to the Council in October about how those conversations have gone and the direction that we think is appropriate based on that.

Uh, just trying to see if there's anything else important to highlight here. We did have a science update, um, and I just wanted to alert you that we have, um, the council did submit a letter on stock assessment priorities, um, which is linked on this, uh, ED report as well, and also on our, our letters page on our website. Still interested, continuing efforts to focus on modernizing surveys and using technology to maintain capability despite reduced resources. We might hear more about that when we have ongoing conversations with the Alaska Fishery Science Center, as we've had at the last several meetings with the director of the AFSC.

The other thing that I just wanted to highlight here is that the Council delegation at the CCC did highlight concerns coming from our region with the upcoming deadline with respect to the European Union Digital CAT certification requirements, and the CCC did make a motion encouraging NIMS to work urgently with the EU on work to extend that July 10th deadline. So I know that was an issue of concern in our region that is getting attention at the national level through the CCC as well as through efforts, direct efforts working with the administration.

Okay, if there's any questions on the CCC, or maybe, Madam Chair, if you have any, or Ms. Baker, if you have anything else you'd like to add. Thank you. Just briefly, I think that you did an excellent job recapping the meeting. I'd like to thank the community of Homer for their warm welcome, as well as all of the work that you and staff put into making sure that the meeting was successful. I— these, these meetings are really important to, you know, continue to engage with headquarters and our regional offices, making sure that we're aware of changing administrative priorities and we're able to provide feedback on the regional distinctions and conditions in our fisheries.

So it's really important coordination and back and forth that occurs during these meetings. So overall, I think there were a lot of productive conversations and it went really well thanks to you and your staff. So thank you. Ms. Baker.

Thank you, Madam Chair. And I would just— I also attended the CCC meeting. It was the very first time I've attended that type of meeting. So really I support and agree with the comments you just made, Madam Chair, and I did have 1 follow-up question, Ms. Evans, on your summary of the CCC meeting, going back to the discussion of the risk value matrix at that meeting. And I just, I think it's captured here in the written part of your ED report, but, uh, I have a question about the discussions that you anticipate having with Council— excuse me, with NMFS leadership over the summer.

I think you highlighted here the already significant amount of work in the North Pacific we've done along these lines in terms of, like you say, curating our FMP target and ecosystem species, prioritizing frequency of stock assessments, things like that. My question is, will the discussions this summer also include the management side of the house? Um, because I think there's also a lot of— yeah, there, um, there are some discussions to be had there, and I'm just keenly interested if you'll be able to discuss those as well. Through the chair, Ms. Baker, I, I think that that is, uh, definitely going to be a focus of our conversations. I'm looking to Mr. Kerland, who is nodding as well, um, for that.

One of the reasons that the risk value matrix didn't seem like the best, uh, path forward in Alaska is specifically, you know, as you cited here and as we've been talking about, that we have done a lot of work. Some of the Other councils, you know, opportunities to think about removing species from the FMP or using the ecosystem species component are more relevant topics that are useful in those regions, but are less useful here because we've already done a lot of work in that respect. I think we have had a lot of conversation and a lot of focus from this council and from our SSC on stock prioritization, and I think we will continue to have those conversations and use the work that— some of the preliminary work that went into developing what was intended to be part of this risk-value matrix. I think I do not see that that work will stop, that we will continue. But in terms of refocusing where, from a regional perspective, that our best opportunities for matching capacity and priorities, I think thinking strategically about how we address management concerns where we have, where the council's priorities and NMFS capacity align or how can we provide more opportunity to either support, to align the council's expectations with reasonable priorities for how to move those different actions forward.

That's, I see, a very fruitful area for conversation and hope to bring that back. And also just reflecting from a council process as well, I think we intend to think through, are there areas in our council process that, that we can be more, more focused and, and really be cognizant of resources because capacity constraints are across the board. So thank you.

Thank you. And Miss Kimball. Thank you, and thank you for that report. And following up on Miss Baker's question, I guess I would just encourage a very frank conversation if this is waiting until October on both You know, the survey capability and modernization side and on the management side. I mean, listening to that portion of the CCC meeting with report out— reports out from all councils was a pretty sobering view of people's budgets and staff capacity.

And I think we need a very realistic conversation about what we're able to do. I mean, the conversation went from some regions saying they may just need to do harvest specifications and nothing else. So I, I think your report is, is, is great. I feel it's a little optimistic based on what I heard at the meeting, and so I guess I'm just encouraging a very frank conversation in October about what we're working with and, and really heavily into Ms. Baker's question on the management side and the losses that we've had for staff in the RAM and the catch accounting system that we know are really impactful in our region. So that's just a comment, and I hope to have that conversation in October.

Thank you. And Ms. Evans, I think we're ready to move on. Thanks.

Thank you for all that input, and we'll definitely keep all of those, um, those thoughts in mind and, and try to bring you something back that is, uh, that is useful and helpful when we next meet.

Uh, the last couple items here, I've already talked about the Council's Executive Order 14276 work plan status update. I don't think I need to go through that in detail, but if, uh, but it does— we did update for each of those 25 items kind of where we think those stand currently in the process. And if we need to circle back to that, that staff tasking might also be an appropriate place to think about just how we manage the timing and status of our ongoing work.

Just an announcement that NPRB is seeking a new board member representing Alaska Natives. We, we wanted to get the word out about that. And there's information on in the ED report and then also on the NPRB page to provide more information if that's someone you know is might be a good candidate for that position. And then finally, the last item. Well, not the last item, one of the last items.

We have some changes on Council staff, and one of the big changes is that Ms. Maria Maria Davis, um, will be retiring from council staff this summer, um, and I just wanted to take a couple of moments, um, to recognize her. Um, Maria, would you mind coming up to the table? Find a spot.

I'd like to be able to see you instead of seeing you through the through the equipment. So I have a short PowerPoint here just to show some pictures. As I believe I said last time we talked about retirement, you can't let any— anyone on staff, particularly some of our long-term staff, retire without going through the photo archives. So you get to see some of the pictures over time of Maria. But Maria is someone— she's worked for us for 27 years, longer than I have, and she has had an incredible impact on the way we do business here in the Council.

And I think that for those of you who are perhaps more recent to the process, you will not recognize all of the— many of the things that we think are normal today are things that Maria pioneered, pioneered about how we do business. And if you could move to the next slide. So 27 years, she's had many different roles during that time, beginning of you know, the AP Secretary, Council Secretary. She became our IT specialist. She became our office manager.

She became the supervisor of our administrative team. This shows some various different places in Alaska or where the council has met in Alaska, but, and the Pacific Northwest. Obviously, Maria has also helped us organize meetings or been part of meetings throughout other areas in the country as well. If you can move to the next slide.

But I think the biggest legacy that Maria has brought to this process is her constant interest in being a digital pioneer and pushing us to understand the benefits of new technology, new processes, being more— using the new innovations that are happening in the world and applying them to the Council process and how we can do our work in a more efficient, more accessible more transparent way. And one of the big accomplishments you can see highlighted on here is the development of our Council E-Agenda. Maria actually first found a different program that allowed us to put our briefing materials online so that they were more easily accessible to the public and, and to members. And then once that didn't— that iLegislate system didn't seem to be exactly meeting our needs, went out and contacted contracted with Pacific States to develop an actual purposely designed system for us, which is the eAgenda that we rely on today. So a huge change in how, in how we engage with this process that was visionary.

It's also allowed us to archive and digitize all of our council meeting materials back to the first meeting in 1976. So now you, you can go online. We used to have people come do research in our council office. And while we still have those paper materials, at least for the moment, we— people don't need to do that anymore. You can find all of our access to all of our, our meeting materials back through the last 50 years online, which is, I think, very impressive.

She's also began broadcasting or getting us to the point where we could broadcast our council meetings and then obviously allow for remote participation well before, well before COVID well before that was any, anywhere normal among the council system. We began using broadcasting the council meeting on Adobe Connect in 2009 to allow stakeholders to listen in to council deliberations without incurring the expense of travel. And that, that foundation, which with continued innovation allowed us to to transition seamlessly to the remote participation model we have today, including streaming to YouTube and really easy access for people to, to track what's happening at meetings. And then a number of things that Maria has pioneered with communications newsletter. We were looking at some of the old files as she's transitioning her files, but even just getting to the point where we We used to have a wall calendar, and she was the person who got us to have a digital online calendar for staff to keep track of things.

You know, formatting templates, electronic filing systems, reorganizing our website, connecting our printers to the network. You know, these were all innovative things at the time. In the last 30 years, it seems funny to look back on how much our world has changed during the time that Maria has been here. But she was the one who pushed our office to become— to take advantage of all those innovations. We will very much miss Maria in this process.

I think, feel like the probably the biggest legacy is that you've come, you've brought us to paperless meetings. It took much longer than you wanted, but it's all of the innovations that you have put forward have really helped this process, helped fisheries management in the North Pacific, and we are very grateful for that., as well as your high energy, your, uh, uh, constant new ideas, um, innovative spirit, um, and we wish you all the best in your retirement. I, I realize there's a couple other photos here, so if you can pass this one. I think there's one more after this. Um, just a lot of, lot of pictures, a lot of time spent, um, with this Council, uh, family over time, and we wish you all the luck with your family going forward and all of your exciting retirement opportunities.

Thank you very much, Maria.

Thank you so much, Maria. We, we do wish you all the best in your retirement. Would you like to say— Couple words, or you don't have— um, my family's listening online, so, uh, say hi to them. Uh, when I first started in 1999, we had Y2K and we thought everything was going to crash, and that should have been an indicator of what I was going to be doing for the rest of my career. So, uh, I served under 4 executive directors.

In that time, I had 3 kids, 2 marriages, but one job. And I know that that's unusual. People don't keep the same job for so long, but this system is unusual. The MSA. So thanks, MSA, you know, for being so, so unusual that it allowed me to, to not get bored.

And I thought that mining and timber and other industries would have the same sort of process, but they don't. So it's a very unique situation that we are able to work in, and I am really appreciative of that. There have been a lot of changes and there's going to be more. So just keep your edge on that digital environment and all the new innovations that are coming, because I'm not going to. I'm going to be on a beach reading a book.

What hasn't changed though is that the people who work in this process and the women that I work with now, they care about The, the issues, they care about the organization, and they care about the resource, and they believe in the integrity of the process. And I am very honored to work with these women that are on the staff today.

Thank you.

Thank you very much, Maria.

Okay, so just the last couple of news items. With Maria's departure, we have been fortunate to be able to rehire Ms. Sarah Labelle, who worked for us from 2018 to 2024, and we have lured her back to us at the Council. So at least Maria is leaving us in competent hands.

Staff and council member activities are highlighted here. Various council and staff members participated in the Marine Resources Education Program, MREP, workshop in February. And this will highlight this under staff tasking because we just got the information in late, but we do— the dates are scheduled for 2027 MREP workshop. For those who might be interested, or if you know of those who are interested to apply, that flyer is posted under staff tasking now.

And then we already talked about the CCC. Just the other one that I wanted to pick out and highlight is that there is an article that was recently, just recently published that our staff Anita Kroska and also former Councilmember Bill Twait, both co-authors, as well as a number of other people that you will know from the process, Sethi et al. So just highlighting that. Fish and Fisheries article is linked in the ED report. A number of committee and planning meetings met prior to this meeting, and you'll hear about that during the course of our agenda.

The Executive Finance Committee also met yesterday, and so we'll have a brief update on that when we get to staff tasking. And then finally, for other activities this week, just wanted to highlight for council members that we do have catered lunches this week.

Week, and particularly today you are scheduled to have a joint lunch with the advisory panel. We try to do this periodically to provide an informal opportunity for council members to connect directly with your advisory panel members. So that will be during lunchtime today.

The council is planned— scheduled to meet in executive session tomorrow afternoon at 3 PM to discuss some issues about call for nominations for next year and other administrative matters.

And there's also a reception planned for this evening, sponsored by, largely organized for, by Pacific Seafood, other industry partners, and the council, in the hotel. It'll be on the second floor. And then just a final announcement for council members, we are hoping to take a group picture, for council members, uh, this week, uh, that will be either tomorrow or Saturday. We'll let you know specifically when that is planned, unless we know already. We'll, we'll get back to you.

Not today, but either tomorrow or the next day. I think that, Madam Chair, that concludes the information I wanted to highlight from the ED report. Okay, thank you, Ms. Evans. Are there any questions? Yes, Ms. Cohen.

Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you for the ED report. Um, no questions. I just wanted to elevate more. I appreciated that you flagged the new UST USDA Office of Seafood that opened recently. Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers and Trident had the opportunity to be there at the opening of the new Office of Seafood, which was an incredible opportunity.

And just want to flag what a historic moment this is, that fisheries and seafood are now within USDA. And if folks from the public haven't had a chance, go to their Office of Seafood website at USDA. It's got a lot of incredible information available. Also wanted to flag that myself and an SSC member, Chris Anderson, are part of a— in our second year of a 2-year grant in partnership with University of Washington, Oregon State University, and the Australian government, looking at risk management tools and fisheries, like a crop insurance type program. So lots of great information coming out.

We should have several papers coming out as a result of that work. I'm working closely with USDA, so if anyone has questions, please come find me or Chris Anderson. We'd be happy to share.

Thank you, Miss Cohen. Anyone else? Yes, Mr. Cicada. Yes, sir, thank you very much. Um, I just wanted to make one transparency statement given Ms. Evans's, uh, report.

I do want to announce that I did retire from Coastal Villages Region Fund last week, and so, uh, I'm not sure how that exactly matters, but from a reference point of view, I just wanted be transparent about that. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Sakata, and we also wish you the best in your retirement.

Okay, and anyone else?

Okay, seeing none, I think we're ready to move on to our B2 report. We'll have NIMS management report.

Ms. Harrington. Good morning, Madam Chair, members of the Council. I'm Gretchen Harrington, the Assistant Regional Administrator for Sustainable Fisheries for the Alaska Region. Good afternoon, and I'm presenting part of our B2 report. I will go over kind of the run of show after I announce our progress on rulemaking.

So since the February council meeting, we've published the harvest specs for the Bering Sea groundfish fisheries, the Gulf of Alaska groundfish fisheries, which includes the action that the— which included the actions that the council took in February on Pacific cod. We also published the annual halibut management measures. This allowed all of the fisheries to remain open and to open on schedule, and that was a huge achievement for the Alaska Region, and I'm very proud of folks that worked really hard to get those things published. We also published the— well, we approved Amendment 57 to the crab FMP, and that was the housekeeping FMP that, you know, it's a little sad because I started on crab with the original FMP, So, but now we have a new revised updated FMP, and that was approved on March 29th. We also published the proposed harvest specifications for the Cook Inlet salmon fishery.

We anticipate that the final harvest specifications will be published prior to the fishery opening date on June 22nd. However, as council members know, if we're not able to publish that, the fishery can't open on on that date, but we do anticipate that it'll be published. We also, on May 20th, renewed for 3 years the 2 prohibited species, prohibited species donation program permits to Seashare to distribute Pacific salmon and Pacific halibut to hunger relief agencies, food banks, and other distributors. So that was published, those permit renewals are published in the Federal Register. We also published our The remaining fee notices, we published the cost recovery fee notice for the Central Goa Rockfish Program and for PCTC.

And then on May 20th, we published the first fee notice for the trawl EM full coverage data review part. And that, so that was our, this is our first year publishing that fee notice. The fee percent was 0.12%, and our observer annual report, which will be presented in the next agenda item, has more information in it on, on that process. Um, we also have a number of other actions, as Diana mentioned in her B1 report, with the status of the actions on the council's work plan. We're making progress on implementing things that the council has recommended.

We did learn And this is part of our efforts to update the council on the status of actions that, um, all actions get reviewed by our Office of Management and Budget, Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, or OIRA, and they have determined that these actions are significant. I included in our B2 report the significance criteria that's in Executive Order 12866. Just, you know, in summary, rules that an action is likely to be significant if it has an annual effect on the economy of $100 million or more, creates serious inconsistencies with actions of other agencies, materially alters the budget impacts of entitlements, grants, user fees, loans, and other obligations, or raises novel legal and policy issues arising out of legal mandates, presidential priorities, or the principles set forth in this— in that executive order. So this, um, and part of the— this process of being significant under EO 12866 is that then that also brings in the other executive order 14-192, which is the— it's commonly called the deregulatory executive order. So there's also a determination by OIRA whether a given regulation is regulatory or deregulatory.

So that's all part of this review process. And so the actions that we've submitted, we start the process by submitting a form that informs agencies of the action that we're undertaking, and then from that OIRA makes this determination and then informs the agency. And so we've received this determination for other items on the council's work plan: the pelagic trawl gear definition regulations, removing the electronic— sorry, economic data reporting for 3 catch share programs, improving the maximum retainable amount regulations, and streamlining the crab rationalization program arbitration and crew share quota regulations. So those were actions that the council's taken that are in different stages of NIMS regulatory development.

Also, then I have a reminder, we are in the process of preparing The IFQ vessel use caps in Area 4, that will not be effective this year. It can't be implemented mid-year, so we're still anticipating that the new vessel use caps will be in place for the 2027 crab fishing year— I'm sorry, halibut and sablefish fishing year. So that concludes. We also have a Status of Actions report posted that provides more information. And with that, I'll see if there's any questions on the status of actions.

Thank you, Ms. Kimball. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Ms. Harrington. On the last piece of that report, it looks as if all of our proposed rules are now determined significant, unless I'm missing something. But is that the new approach that all proposed rules are determined significant despite the criteria that we have under EO 12866?

Madam Chair, um, Ms. Kimball, so currently, uh, every rule that we've gotten to the stage where we submit the form, um, we have received, um, notification that it is— has been determined significant. We have a couple rules where we're in earlier stages of development, we have not submitted that form yet. And so, of course, then we haven't heard back. But you are correct that for every rule where we've submitted that form, that has been determined significant, yes. And I just want to also— so the last Alaska Region significant action in our memory is the crab rationalization program.

However, we have worked with OIRA on other big issues like Amendment 91, the Chinook salmon PSC limit, halibut ABM, our QE fee program. We met with OIRA and discussed the— so it is a, it does happen periodically that we go through and talk about the impacts of our regulations, but this is Yeah, the fact that we have these significant is new for us right now.

Ms. Kimball. Thank you. And just so, just to follow up, that to me that says we are not using the criteria anymore. Some of these are extremely small things with almost no effect, particularly the final rule to assign a management program to each hall. So what is the actual effect on our process?

Is it just additional time to get rules finalized? Is that what we're looking at, or are there any additional analytical requirements based on this change? Through the chair, Ms. Kimball. Yeah, we don't make that determination, so, uh, yep, um, but it does result in additional time. OIRA has 90 days, so they review both the proposed and the final rule stages independently, and they have 90 days to review at each stage.

It could be less than that, or it could be more than that. There's also additional review in our headquarters for each action that is significant, and we do prepare additional— some additional analytical work to comply with the process for when an action is significant.

And Ms. Vanderhoeven. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Ms. Harrington. Um, I'm not very familiar with this process because we haven't dealt with it a lot. When, when they tell you that it's determined to be significant, do they tell you why?

I'm trying to think about What can we learn? So if there are ways to avoid that, to avoid those additional delays, or to incorporate additional analysis, if that's what we need to do, is there a way for us to learn from that? And from— do they tell us why it was determined to be significant?

Madam Chair, Ms. Vanderhoeven. We're not— at the Alaska Region level, no, we don't get that information. We're trying our hardest to learn how to, as always, navigate all the executive orders and comply with all the applicable laws and regulations, and a lot of that is making sure we're fully explaining everything, putting it in the right language, in the right spreadsheets, meets all of this process. So it's a continual learning process on our part. Um, and, and yeah, we're, we're also doing our best to learn, learn all these new steps so that we can be as adaptive and responsive as we can.

Um, you know, because these are things on the council's work plan under an additional, you know, executive order. So how do we make sure we're adequately explaining and documenting that? As well as all of these additional requirements.

Thank you, Ms. Harrington.

All right, moving on. So we have a couple other things on our— under the B2 report. Today, uh, we'll have a presentation from Dr. Annemarie Eich on our protected species annual update. We have posted written only, we have our AKR tribal engagement report. We also have a letter from John Curlin to the council chair regarding processing prohibited species catch into fishmeal.

We also have a letter from John Curlin to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service satisfying our annual reporting requirement on incidental take of endangered and threatened seabirds in the Gulf of Alaska groundfish fisheries and the Pacific halibut fishery off Alaska.

And no takes occurred in 2025. We— this is again our annual reporting. We have Alicia Miller will present our update on the actions that the Council recommended under EO-14276, which is the Seafood Competitiveness Executive Order. Those are actions that the Council specifically asked NMFS to look at to reduce regulatory burdens for monitoring, recordkeeping, and reporting. We have, as I said, a Status of the Actions report, and we also attached to the B2 report is our In-Season Management report.

That will also be just a written report. However, we do have folks in the audience and then online who can answer any questions on that. I think Krista Malani is online if there are questions on the In-Season Management report.

Okay, so I think that covers run of show for today. Then moving into our items, on June 2nd, NMFS approved a 1-year extension for the EFP to the North Pacific Research Fund— the North Pacific Fisheries Research Foundation. And this is the EFP that tests chum salmon excluders in the B season. And John Gavin will be here to present on that, on the EFP to the council. We have a couple reminders.

One is for the crab seashares.

Well, we published Amendment 54 in 2024. This is an action that revised and restarted the rolling 3- and 5-year active participation requirements for crab catcher vessel crew and crab and catcher processor crew quota shareholders or C-shareholders in order to retain, receive IFQ and retain quota share. So just as a reminder, beginning in the 2027-2028 crab fishing year, a C-shareholder must satisfy the active participation requirements during the preceding 3 years in order to receive IFQ Q. And then beginning in 2028-2029, a seashore holder must have satisfied the participation requirements during the preceding 4 crab fishing years in order to retain quota share. So we have a link in the B2 for more information on Amendment 54.

We also have another reminder for small vessels with, small vessels with a Catcher Processor LLP endorsement that use the following gear types: hook and line, jig, and The CP endorsement means that the vessel applied for a permit to retain and process groundfish while at sea in the GOA or the BSAI. And this is a reminder that the deadline for submitting an application for these vessels to be placed in the partial observer coverage category is July 1st.

Or vessels may wish to change their fishing permit to remove the CP endorsement for the 2027-2029. They're on a 3-year cycle.

Cycle fishing years can request that change in November of this year.

Well, you know, one of the things we do in our B2 reports is try to update the council on things that are going on, things that we've heard or actions that we want to highlight to the council. One is regarding our regulations at 50 CFR 679.20, and this has to do with Pollock roe and calculating the amount of pollock roe processed relative to total pollock harvest. We wanted to just clarify that for pollock catch, we use— so these regulations were put in place in the early '90s prior to the flow scales, increased observer coverage, electronic monitoring, cameras for compliance monitoring all of these monitoring measures that we've put in place since the '90s. And so for total catch to estimate the harvest of pollock in the pollock fisheries, we use the flow scales. So that's the information presented in in-season management reports, and that's the total catch that goes into the stock assessment and how NMFS determines catch relative to the TAC.

So we have some additional information in here on The history of using under the regulations— the regulations require a calculation of polychloro relative to poly in a product recovery rate. So we have a little more in the details. This is a very much detailed issue, so we have more in our B2 report. We're also looking at these, is this the best way to— you know, we have a number of issues like this where our regulations serve a purpose, but they were written a very long time ago and a lot has changed. Just as, uh, Ms. Evans was explaining the evolution of the council process from paper to, to what we have today, I feel like in a lot of ways we have regulations that are still in the paper world and how and where part of this process is moving those forward.

Um, uh, so, um, I have— there's other folks here that can help answer questions if the council has any specific questions on this issue.

Yes, Ms. Kimball. Thank you. I, I guess I just have a, a question about the process that NMFS is asking to move forward. I mean, this looks like a, a nuanced issue, but it's still a pretty critical one where regulations from a long time ago are being used to calculate catch when we've implemented flow scale requirements and all those other things that are the actual catch weight that's used in catch accounting. So this looks like an opportunity to do some cleanup on the regulations to ensure that we're very clear about what is used for catch accounting, and that seems warranted.

I was just wondering what you're looking for from the Council, if it's a nod that that does seem like a necessary use of NIMS time, if it's yes, we agree that that kind of cleanup is warranted. Or are you looking for something more substantial from the Council? Because these types of issues seem to be cropping up over and over and over again. This is one of 4 issues, and I do think it's important because one of the most important things we're trying to do is allow the public to know what is legal and what is prohibited, and, and all of these types of things cloud that issue. So I know it's work on, on your part, but if you could just provide a little more clarity on what you're looking for from the council, whether it's a nod or, or some other motion, that would be helpful.

Through the chair, Miss Kimball, I think those are very good points. We, we put this in here at this stage, um, because it's an emerging issue that's been in the news and we feel it was, uh, on folks' minds. We have not had the time to be able to dig in of what would be a better way to meet the Magnuson Act requirements given our, our modern monitoring, and I think we're very clear in the in-season management reports on the web how we calculate catch and, you know, what that— the— our catch estimation process, that's very well documented, and how we monitor catch. I think sometimes though, it's so complicated that someone might not know that that's how we do it when you look at like one paragraph of a regulation, you don't see the big picture. Um, we at this stage, honestly, I— we do not have a path forward yet because this is a new issue.

And like you said, we have a number of these things that we're trying to navigate through. Um, so any direction that the council provides at this meeting would be very helpful. Uh, we can also bring back more information in October after we've had the chance to deal with a number of other things that have, um, that we're working on. So I think, I think either way.

Thank you, Miss Harrington. Okay, all right. So, um, another issue that we've been, been working on navigating is, uh, we are in the process process of implementing a new landings code for a prohibited species catch delivered to a processor. So this is another area where, you know, in addition to the letter from Mr. Kurland, we're looking at how we've— how the interagency group has programmed our e-landings, and we realized that it would be more clear to have an additional species code that allows the processor to indicate any landings that the PSC was delivered and that the— let's see, I'm sorry, I'm going to find the words here.

Okay, the new code would be PSC not sold and discarded at the dock as meal. So that's a process that we're coordinating with ADFNG and part of our e-landings group to be able to implement, and we anticipate implementing that in July and provide additional instructions to processors.

We also, moving on, we have a new Amendment 80 vessel replacement report. So as I announced in February when we put together the AFA vessel replacement report, you know, replacing vessels as part of these programs, but we hadn't put together all the vessels and the vessel replacement history into one table. So we put together that table. It's now on our webpage. In addition, in response to inquiries from an Amendment 80 vessel owner, In March, NMFS determined that under our regulations, an existing Amendment 80 vessel can replace the fishing vessel Golden Fleece and assume the fishing vessel Golden Fleece's exemptions to the GOA halibut PSC sideboards.

And so then we received applications, and on May 26th, under the Amendment 80 vessel replacement regulations, NMFS approved the request to replace the Fishing Vessel Defender with the Enterprise, and then on May 28th, NMFS approved a request to replace the Golden Fleece with the Defender. So this is an issue that we've been working on for quite a while to make sure that we, we implement the provisions correctly as written and as intended. Ms. Harrington, can you provide a little bit of background for the reason for the exemption from the sideboard limit?

Yes, Madam Chair. So when the amendment— so I am not an expert on the Amendment 80 program, so I will give a high-level overview, but I will phone a friend if the council has more detailed questions. When NIMS implemented the Amendment 80 program, there was one vessel, the Golden Fleece, that had that qualified as an Amendment 80 vessel, but that had a distinctly different fishing pattern and was differently situated. So the council at the time decided to provide exemptions to allow that vessel to fish in the Gulf of Alaska without a halibut, an individual vessel's halibut sideboard. It also, part of the exemptions for the Golden Fleece was there was different monitoring requirements from the existing Amendment 80 vessels who had to keep the monitoring required to participate in the Amendment 80 in the Bering Sea.

They had to maintain those monitoring requirements when they fished in the Gulf, that those same requirements were not added for the Golden Fleece. So there's some distinctions there. It was because of the The Golden Fleece was a smaller vessel, I think, with less catch history in Amendment 80 program fisheries and more catch history in the Gulf. And so those were decisions that the council made in recommending the Amendment 80 program, including specific provisions for replacing the Golden Fleece.

Thank you for that, Ms. Harrington. Yes, thank you, Madam Chair. I apologize, I'd just like to go back to the, the PSC, uh, e-landing code briefly. Um, appreciate the work that, that NIMPS and ADFNG have done to examine a new code to address this issue, and just curious if in coordination on coming up with this solution, was, uh, NIMS Office of Law Enforcement also engaged, as well as Alaska State Troopers? Uh, and does this extinguish the issue, or is there still another regulation that needs to be modified?

Thank you. Um, through the chair, Mr. Pamplin, so I am joined with Josh Keeton. He's head of our monitoring branch and has worked more closely on this issue, so I will let him respond to your Sure. Gretchen already introduced me, Josh Keeton. Through the chair, Mr. Pamplin.

So the E-Landings code, this was part of that PSC investigation, was that there was a— why are processors reporting these PSC that are going to the meal plant as code 99, which is discard at dock? And the initial E-Landings implementation, this was well documented. And the reason was, was there was a determination made at that time that the plants were effectively discarding that fish along with all other unwanted fish and fish products. And so when they were investigating, there was some concerns by the Office of Law Enforcement, Alaska State Troopers, that there was misreporting going on. But that was how the processors were instructed.

In fact, processors were prevented from recording Code 41, which is the fishmeal code for those PSC species. Was a hard code to prevent, you know, misuse of data a lot, you know, increase our accuracy of data. So when this issue became apparent, this has always been a little bit on the back burner of one of the things that we might want to address in the future, but when we're in the monitoring, we strive to keep, you know, clear, consistent, you know, everybody understands. So we decided, well, this is now an issue, so the joint team created the new code, there was a need to try to tease out how much of that PSC is actually going to MEO, how much is going to the Prohibited Species Donation Program, how much is actually going back to DOC. We don't have that, you know, in the history we didn't have that.

So there, the Office of Law Enforcement was included. I think the troopers were included through the state. I defer to the state on that, but we can, you know, We all got together, came up with a solution, and we're now in the process of communicating that solution to the processors to make that change, expecting a little bit of transition period where we work with them to ensure that they're reporting accurately. But it is not really, you know, fixing the PSC to meal issue as stated in John Kerlin's issue or letter. It's a separate issue.

This just allows us to collect a little bit more data.

Great, thank you. And Mr. Kerlin. Thanks, Madam Chair. If I may just add a little bit more in response to the latter part of Mr. Pamplin's question about whether this definitively resolves the issue. So as I indicated in my March 13th letter, we've been taking a look at this and recognizing that probably the best approach would be to look at this holistically across regulations and across programs.

And so in that regard, I think it could be very helpful to, to look at both the fish meal issue and the prohibited species donation program, and the best course for that would be Council action to recommend regulatory changes specifically under Section 303 of the Magnuson-Stevens Act. So rather than a, a 305 secretarial rulemaking, but to actually initiate a regulatory amendment to comprehensively review this issue and put it to rest. Thank you.

Thank you. Ms. Kimball. Thank you. On that note, and I don't disagree, and I saw in the March 13th letter the the request or suggestion to the Council to clarify regulations, but is the path forward on not using secretarial authority to, to what our understanding has been to clarify the historical interpretation of those regulations, is that, is that not a path that the Council could take to, to deal with this in a maybe quicker manner, given that we've had trouble telling people what is legally available to them, what options are available to them for the disposition of PSC? Thanks, Madam Chair.

Ms. Kimball, as I said, I think just given the nature of this and the fact that it touches different pieces of our regulations, it's best to treat it as a regulatory amendment, something through the normal council process. So a council motion to request that would initiate that process.

Thank you. And Mr. Ritchie. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you for the report so far. My question is regarding the Amendment 80 vessel replacement report.

Um, I guess just a point of clarification. So the Defender would be inheriting the exemption that the Golden Fleece had from halibut sideboards, does that mean that they would be, they would basically be fishing to that with an overall cap that the rest of the non-pelagic sector has there?

Through the Chair, Mr. Ritchie, that is correct. So they would, they're still, they would still be under the halibut PSC limit, they just don't have an individual vessel sideboard.

Thank you. That, that clarifies. And then, um, just want to signal that I'd like to, um, follow up later with— I, I'd like to know more about the, um, different monitoring requirements on that vessel. So hopefully we can catch up. Thank you.

Okay, thank you, Miss Harrington. All right, um, Madam Chair, members of the council, we also have a written EFH annual consultation report. We provide this report every year under the council's EFH consultation policy. And I'm going to just— it's here in writing.

And before I turn it over to Dr. Eick for the prohibited species— I mean, yeah, prohibited species annual update, I want to make one announcement that we have information here that the Alaska Region is hiring. And so our Information Services Division, so That's our IT and programming shop. They're hiring both an IT specialist and a supervisory IT specialist, and there are links here. So if you know anyone who you think would be interested, we are on a tight time frame. I think these are— these close June 10th, and then one closes June 10th, one closes June 8th.

So we are on a tight time frame, but if anyone has, uh, any suggestions. Um, we do— it's very nice to be able to hire. We, we do need, um, additional support. So, uh, it's exciting news. And with that, I will turn it over to, um, Dr. Ike.

Ms. Harrington, I think we have another question for you. Yeah, Ms. Baker.

Thank you, Madam Chair. And I, I'm sorry I'm a little slow. I wanted to follow up on Mr. Richie's question about the vessel replacement for the Golden Fleece. I I just want to clarify the current exemption for the Golden Fleece. And can you just repeat that for me?

And I'm, I'm particularly— can you explain the difference between a sideboard and a PSC limit and what the distinction is in terms of the exemption for the Golden Fleece? I think some of us are confused about that.

Through the Chair, Ms. Baker. The— I will let Josh explain that because this is— yeah, go ahead, Josh. So through the Chair, Ms. Baker, the PSC limit is the overall cap for the Gulf. The sideboard limit is a subcap and below that. So what this essentially removes is any restriction on the golden fleece from fishing all year.

It's very typical for sideboarded M80 vessels to reach their sideboard cap and leave the Gulf before the— we have to close the PSC limit where catcher vessels, so all trawl vessels under the trawl PSC limit, fish off the same overall limit. When you remove the sideboard, you essentially remove that sublimit underneath that.

Thank you. And so just to try and circle back, so maybe that's why I heard the earlier reference to sort of an individual vessel level limit and with respect to the Golden Fleece. So that, that's consistent with what you just explained, I think, but please verify that for me. Yeah, through the Chair, that is correct, uh, Ms. Baker, that the sideboard limit was an individual vessel limit associated from vessel history or participation in the Gulf prior to that, because the Golden Fleece was exempt from that limit, they did not have that sideboard limit. So when the Defender replaced the Golden Fleece, they do not have that individual limit.

So they're basically fishing as a catcher vessel or any other under the open access. I mean, it's, it's a PSC limit, so I don't like to say it's a race for fish, but that's essentially what it is.

Yes, Ms. Kimball. Thank you. So if the— those were regulations, the replacement regulations, and thanks for linking to that in the report. That was determined over 20 years ago, the Amendment 80 program, to determine what vessels might be exempt. So if there is any change, the Council would need to initiate a regulatory amendment to make a change.

This is not a judgment call by the agency. This is just complying with the regulations that were set out a long time ago.

Yeah, um, through the chair, Ms. Kimball, that is correct. We— and we did do a very careful review of the regulations and, um, uh, council action and in making this determination. Um, and that is correct. If there's something that the council would like to do differently to change the regulations, um, That would be a separate regulatory amendment.

Yes, Ms. Cohen.

Thank you, Madam Chair. My question's on a different subject if others have questions on this.

Thanks. Yeah, I noticed we had a public comment letter on the small sablefish release that the Council took action on last April 2025, but I didn't see it in your report here. Can you give a status update?

Yeah, through the chair, Ms. Cohen. Yes, we are, um, we're in the process of implementing that, um, as was explained in the analysis when the council took final action. There's a lot of behind-the-scenes things that need to happen in order for us to be able to do the rulemaking. For that. And so we anticipate being able to publish the final rule and doing the behind-the-scenes catch accounting system adjustments and providing the information necessary for the SSC to select the discard mortality rate, all, all of these issues by fall of 2027 so that the council can then set the sablefish discard allowance in the harvest specs through that process starting in October 2027.

So it would be implemented with the 2028 fishing season.

Thank you for that update. And so if I understand correctly, the delay in implementation is because of what has to happen behind the scenes, not necessarily a prioritization of other rulemakings within the agency. Is that right? Through the Chair, Ms. Cohen, as the Council knows, I mean, we have a lot going on, so it's hard to tease out the exact cause and effect of everything. I think we have been clear that this is a very complicated action, and it would take Yeah, a lot of resources, plus a lot has gone on since the council took final action.

So I think it's, um, I, I feel confident that we'll implement it probably in the same schedule, even though we have had a lot going on, because this is an important action for the council and the public. Um, but, um, yeah, it's, it's hard to say exactly. You know, we have, as the council knows, staffing changes and things that have happened in the last year. So, uh, then that does impact our timing on all of our projects.

Okay. Yes, Miss Vanderhoeven.

Sorry, I didn't realize that was on. Um, thank you, Miss Harrington. Looking at the, um, the status of rulemaking, MRAs look like they're kind of next in the batter's box then? Is, is that how I should read that table? So that should be happening fairly soon, and we should maybe see some progress in October when we get the update.

Um, again, through the chair, Ms. Vanderhoeven, yes, that is a high priority project, um, and we are working hard on that. I, I, um, we probably won't Well, sorry, yes, we are making progress on that. I think that, you know, those are very complicated regulations, and I'm very proud of staff working through all the issues with everyone involved, and I feel like we're in a very good place on that rule, and hopefully we'll be able to provide update in October.

Okay, I'm not seeing any other hands. Thanks, Miss Harrington.

Good morning. For the record, Annemarie Eyck with National Marine Fisheries Service Protected Resources Division. I'm hoping that Dr. Nancy Friday might also be online this morning to assist with questions. The Alaska Fisheries Science Center Marine Mammal Laboratory and the Alaska Regional Office Protected Resources Division jointly put together this presentation for you this morning.

So the first thing I'll hit is the ESA consultation with— for the Bering Sea Aleutian Islands Fishery Management Plan. This is in the written report. We've been discussing this for quite a while, and happy to say that the drafted biological opinion is complete and has been provided to the Council Executive Director and, and Chair for review, as discussed at the October 2025 council meeting. Um, and so after that review, um, it will come back to the Protected Resources Division and to the region for finalization, and then that will be posted on our website.

And then the other topic that's in the written report, um, the Gulf of Alaska Chinook listing, um, uh, decision and it will be covered within this presentation. So I'll move to the presentation now, if that's all right. Okay, so, um, as a reminder, marine mammals are primarily managed under the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act. And under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, management units are stocks, and under the ESA, the management are usually referred to as distinct population segments or evolutionarily significant units if you're talking about Pacific salmon. In this presentation, I'll be presenting information both on both Marine Mammal Protection Act stocks and Endangered Species Act distinct population segments, so it's important just to know that sometimes these two things do not always align, and so just realize that if we're talking about stock, maybe the location where that stock is found, the range, is not necessarily equivalent to the DPS.

For this presentation, I'll first touch on a few topics, and then I'll provide slides on 8 ESA-listed marine mammal species, but I'm not planning to go through them this morning. They're going to be provided for your reference, and I'll just hit on a couple highlights There's a fair amount of information on some of these slides, and my intention is not to review every line, but I did want them to be available as a reference if needed in the future, and I hope that this information will be useful to you.

So this overview table includes a breakdown of all the marine mammal species and stocks in the Alaska Marine Mammal Stock Assessment Reports, or SARS. As well as 6 stocks of 4 species in the Pacific Stock Assessment Reports that also occur in Alaska. As you can see, there are 27 total species that are split into 55 separate stocks. Roughly half of the stocks are harvested and important for food security in our Alaska Native communities. 23 Stocks interact with commercial fisheries and result in serious injury and/or death.

The Marine Mammal Protection Act requires that all commercial fisheries be classified by the level of marine mammal death and serious injury that they cause incidentally. Most of the Alaska fisheries are Category 3, which means that those fisheries have a remote likelihood or no known deaths or serious injuries to marine mammals. There are 4 stocks with U.S. commercial fishery mortality and serious injury that results in a list of fisheries Category 2 displacement, and that designates fisheries with occasional deaths and serious injuries, and there are no federal Category 1 fisheries in Alaska.

So NMFS was petitioned to list Gulf of Alaska Chinook salmon under the Endangered Species Act. We put out our final determination that no Endangered Species Act listing was warranted for any of the 3 groups of Chinook that were examined. These 3 groups, as I said before, evolutionarily significant units.

And so for the Gulf of Alaska Chinook salmon, the— a lot of the details of how we came to the conclusions that we came to are found in the Alaska Fishery Science Center Technical Memorandum, which is a product, work product of the Status Review Team.

In brief, environmental variability is the most significant threat to all three ESUs. Many of the Gulf of Alaska stocks remain within the scope of historical variability or are showing signs of stabilization. Despite some declines in abundance and productivity, the ESUs exhibit large overall population sizes spread across multiple stocks viable levels of productivity, broad spatial distributions, and high energetic— high genetic and ecological diversity. And so after conducting both a demographic risk analysis and an analysis of threats, all three Gulf of Alaska Chinook salmon ESUs were determined to be at a low risk of extinction now and in the foreseeable future, which again gets us to the bottom line of no ESA listing is warranted at this time.

Okay, moving into hot topics and back to marine mammals. Next, this is an update on northern fur seal work being led by the Alaska Fisheries Science Center. We've been— we've presented on northern fur seal conservation plan before, and we continue to work with our co-management partners partners to further high-priority actions from that plan. We're also looking to better understand northern fur seal movements and diet as it relates to the fisheries.

The next topic is gray whales. Added them this year. They've had population declines in recent years, and, and we've seen increase in strandings. There was a what's called an unusual mortality event, or UME, from late 2018, basically 2019 through 2023, and then it was determined that the majority of those gray whales were stranding due to malnutrition.. And you can see the, the UME in the graph outlined in the black box.

On the graph, you can also see the number of gray whales strandings from each of the regions along their migratory route: Mexico, United States, and Canada. You can see that the numbers of strandings was decreasing at the end of the UME, but that there's been an increase again 2025 saw the second most gray whale strandings in the past 10 years, and elevated strandings continue through 2026 due to Arctic ecosystem changes, prey depletion, and subsequent ship strikes or entanglements that may occur. There's no new unusual mortality event that's been declared.

Yes, Miss Vanderhoeven. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Dr. Ike. Um, what makes it a UME? And I guess I'm not clear why then 2023 was the end of the UME, and then we've got the spike starting again that's continuing this year, what would then define that as a new UME, or do we look and at some point say this was just an extension of the other UME, and, and what does that imply then for any management response that we might want to be aware of?

Through the Chair, thanks for the question. Um, the The unusual mortality events, I don't have the criteria right off the top of my head, I apologize, but what I do recall when I came into this position, they were discussing, this was in 2022-2023, trying to determine when to call the end of the unusual mortality event, and it was quite a conversation to try to figure out when are we just realizing that this is the state of gray whales. And so I think that, you know, whether we're going to determine another unusual mortality event, I'm not convinced that we're going that direction right now. I think that it's— we're evaluating the state of gray whales, and that work is really being led out of our Southwest Fisheries Science Center.

Thanks. And the second part then was any potential management response that we might want to be aware of that could be coming? Thanks, through the Chair. So management response, I think at this time just being aware what the council can be aware that any of these animals that are in a depleted state can, are at higher risk for interacting with vessels whales, you know, they can float on the top. And so I think that's something to be aware of.

Otherwise, from a management perspective, our stranding program is expecting to have high reports, reporting of gray whales in Alaska that have stranded. We've already seen a few. We've already received a few reports this year. We've been monitoring as the reports have moved up the coast of California. Thank you.

Ms. Kimball. Thank you for the presentation. With the, the unusual mortality event, then that would, that would encapsulate any injuries from ship strikes or things like that? I mean, I heard stranding and the most likely cause being lack of food, but does that encapsulate all kinds of injuries or mortality? I'm trying to determine like what would be fishing-related for whales in a depleted state that might be an issue for us, or this is just an ecosystem interaction that you're making sure we're aware of?

Thanks for the question. Through the Chair, the— I believe that the unusual mortality event encompasses all forms of mortality that are encountered, so it would include any of the secondary causes, but, but they do necropsies as many times as possible to determine the cause of death for any of these animals. So it would always be attributed in any of the stock assessment reports to the original cause of mortality.

Yes, Mr. Kerland. Thanks, Madam Chair. I might just add a bit, a bit more to try to clarify. So The declaration of an unusual mortality event doesn't trigger management measures per se to conserve the species at issue, but what it does do is provides additional resources to be able to enable the agency together with partners to collect additional data and try to understand what's going on with the particular species or, or stock or population at issue. Um, so that was the case, um, during this period in the previous UME, and as Dr. Eick indicated, we're, we're looking at the situation now, but currently are not on the path towards declaring a UME again, but we are paying attention to the issue to try to understand what's going on in this population.

Thanks.

So the next topic, the council's very familiar with this next issue, so I won't spend much time here, but the annual average of killer whale bycatch has been increasing for many years, but in 2023, there was an unprecedented spike, and the council's heard from industry regarding efforts to deter further interactions What I did want to mention is the Alaska Fisheries Science Center has been working to update the Gulf of Alaska abundance estimates in 2026 and survey killer whales in the Bering Sea in 2027. The center is also revisiting the, the stock structure for killer whales.

And then the final topic is to provide a summary of some of the concerns heard from our co-managers, and these are co-managers under the Marine Mammal Protection Act. So as you know, hunting marine mammals for subsistence and handicraft— hunting marine mammals for use as subsistence or handicrafts plays a crucial role in our Alaska Native history, culture, and also for food security. So first, there's an interest in increasing the use and compensation for indigenous knowledge. Second, vessel traffic impact concerns, and these are primarily heard from the Bering Strait and the North Slope. And obviously, we have no fishing in the Arctic, but we're hearing from our co-managers that they're seeing a noticeable increase in vessels of different types, so like research vessels, cruise ships, or cruise— sorry, cruises.

And so there are concerns just with the potential impacts of those vessels, that increased number of vessels, on marine mammals and also on our subsistence hunters. And so there are also concerns in the Bering Strait region resulting from harmful algal blooms. The last two summers, and finally concern regarding the amount of marine debris.

And so at this point, um, I was, I was going to, um, pause the presentation here and hit on a few high points, but, but maybe not scroll through all of the slides. Um, the, the The next few, the remaining slides highlight 8 different marine mammals, and I want to touch on the, the new information, and it's predominantly related to some of the abundance estimate surveys and what we are expecting to see soon. So for 2025, or in 2025, NOAA and the Alaska North Slope Borough successfully completed an international multi-agency, multi-species survey to count belugas and bowhead whales, and this was in the U.S. and Canadian Beaufort Seas, as well as the, um, Amundsen Gulf, and results are still being processed and analyzed for that. For stellar sea lions, I'll note that that we saw impacts from the last marine heat wave and just flagging that the, the next heat wave may produce similar declines. The center is leading some surveys for the Western DPS.

I believe those are expected next summer.

Um, sperm whales. I did add sperm whales this year, uh, which is the only new species that was added. Added to the presentation this year as opposed to April last year. They have a wide distribution and their stock structure is being examined. They are known, as you know, they're known to depredate fish from longline gear.

I know the council's discussed that issue in the past.

On ice seals, the Alaska Fishery Science Center is finishing up analyses from 2012 through 2001 for abundance estimates. Aerial surveys were conducted in 2025, and those are expected to provide new updated estimates for U.S. waters and will, for the first time, allow for estimates of trend.

And so that was going to be the end of my presentation. Thanks for the opportunity to present., and on this, and if there's any different level of information that we would appreciate as a council, um, please let me know. Um, if there are any other questions on this, um, I can pause here, but I also was going to, um, run through the personnel updates that are in the written B2 report, um, prior to handing it back over to, um, Miss Miller to to finish up the B2.

Thank you. And Ms. Baker has a question.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Dr. Ick, and appreciate the presentation. And I, I do have a question going back to the killer whale slide, and I just, I very much appreciate the update. That was an important issue in recent years for the council. Really two questions, and In terms of the planned killer whale survey in the Bering Sea, can you remind me if and when that has ever occurred before and kind of the extent of that?

I'm just not— or is that better left for another presentation? And then also, this might be in the same category, Dr. Ike, how can we best as a council stay updated on the revisitation of the stock structure? I think they're both both. Sorry, Dr. Foy, but they're here on the slide, so— Yes, thank you for the question through the chair. Um, I, I think that, um, Dr. Nancy Friday may also be online too, um, but we do have Dr. Foy in the room, so either way we go— Yeah, I'm here, Annemarie.

Thanks. Nancy, are you able to answer that question? Did you hear it? As far as when we've done killer whales in the Bering before, it's been a number of years. I'm trying to remember.

We had a number of surveys along the Aleutian Islands and a little bit into the Bering, but as far as a comprehensive Bering survey, I don't know that that's ever been done.

As far as the stock structure question, we're working through the DIP process, the demographically independent population process, and then we would present our results to AKR and OPR, and I believe they would take up the stocks question.

So we can— Ann Marie and I can figure out how to keep the council apprised of how that's progressing.

That answer the question? OPR, did you say OPR? Is that Office of Protected Resources? I'm just trying to keep up with the— yeah, sorry, I'm slipping into acronyms. Yes, the, um, this, once we come up with whether or not we think they're demographically independent populations, then the Office of Protected Resources and the region would then take up the question of whether or not they're different stocks.

Dr. Foye. Yeah, thank you, Dr. Friday. Thank you, Madam Chair. Uh, for the record, Bob Foye, Alaska Fishery Science Center Director, and thank you for the question, Ms. Baker. Uh, just for some added clarity, we're recognizing the interactions that we have between killer whales and the fishing industry.

The industry has already done a bunch of work to better to understand the behavioral shifts and the interactions to assess, you know, whether or not this is a continuing issue. It does look like it is a continuing problem that we need to address. So this is us stepping back in. We have not had resources to do the killer whale work in the last handful of years. So this is us stepping back in to make sure that we're providing the best science available here.

So that may include information on stock structure that may include information on abundance estimates. We're still trying to put the pieces together on, um, on resources for a survey, again, to make sure that we have a handle on whether or not there are other changes to the stock structure, etc., that may be causing, you know, could be implied in, in some of the increased interactions that are being observed.

Okay, thank you both.

I think we're ready to move on. Thanks. Thank you. Um, I will continue our B2 report, written report, with, uh, personnel updates. Um, so the Alaska Region, um, continues to calibrate or recalibrate positions and align staff to ensure mission-critical activities are accomplished.

We have two, two familiar names to you that have recently switched positions. So first, Brian Brown has been reassigned as the Assistant Regional Administrator for our Information Services Division. Brian rejoined NOAA in 2019. He has had positions in the Information Services Division as well as Restricted Access Management, or RAM, Um, his, his career began in the Coast Guard and has included roles as the IT manager for Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, Chief Information Security Officer for the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development, as well as Information Architect with a private software company in Austin, Texas. His new role began in April.

And then Kathy Kuhn has assumed the ARA role for Operations and Management Division after acting in this capacity since last July. She also was— she had many hats. She was also acting as the ARA for Information Services Division for, for that time period until April. Kathy has served as our Habitat Conservation Division ARA since 2023. She has a robust background in marine resource management, including overseeing Alaska Environmental Studies Program and Arctic Policy for BOEM.

She also notably worked as an analyst for the North Pacific Fishery Management Council. And then we've also had some departures. The first couple are from our Protected Resources Division. So Barbara Mahoney has been an institution in the Protected Resources Division for over 40 years, and we're happy that she was able to retire. She has devoted her, her career and her life to marine mammal conservation co-management, and she had a very special way with relationships and, and also did a little bit of everything in Protected Resources, and she could tell you in, you know, on a particular day 20 years ago which way the wind was blowing when she went out to respond to a stranded animal.

So she will definitely be missed. Bonnie Easley-Appleyard has also— she's departed federal service. She's been a great asset to the Protected Resources Division for the last 8 years. She really shined with our Section 7 under the Endangered Species Act. She also worked in co-management and on listing actions.

And we will, we will definitely miss Bonnie as well.

Next is Bethany Ordway. She's provided key administrative support in our Anchorage office, and she has been able— she was able to to do all sorts of things. She was the lone admin person in our Anchorage office, so she held down the fort in many different ways. And she recently transitioned from federal service to a position outside the government.

And then last is Sean Bob Kelly. He has had a long career with the Alaska Region and most recently had been in the Habitat Conservation Division.

He started in, in sustainable fisheries and habitat conservation division, as I mentioned, but he also recently was detailed to our protected resources division. He's had a lot of expertise with essential fish habitat consultations, harbor and dredging projects, FAST-41 projects on large mines, as well as oil spill preparedness and response. Response. And throughout his career, Shawn Bobb's been known for his thoughtful collaboration, technical excellence, and commitment to balancing sustainable fisheries with responsible coastal development in Alaska. And so he and his family are moving to Germany, where his wife accepted a position at a research hospital continuing her work with human genetic conditions, and we wish them and their that family well.

And so that's the end of my portion. I can pass it over to Ms. Alicia Miller. Ms. Miller, before we go into your presentation, I think this might be a good time for our mid-morning break. So let's come back at 10:10 and we'll begin with the presentation on the EO update. Thank you.

And thank you, Dr. Ike.

Welcome back, everyone. So we'll continue on with our B2 report. I think we have a separate presentation on our executive order updates.

Madam Chair, members of the Council, we'll continue with— Alicia Miller will provide an update on the Council-recommended EO 14276 actions, and then we will have a discussion on the EFP after that. So I will turn it over to Alicia.

Good morning, members of the Council. For the record, my name is Alicia Miller, Sustainable Fisheries Division, and as Grenchen says, I'm here to talk with you today about one of the items in the Council's Council's EO 14276 work plan. As you heard earlier from Ms. Evans, there's a long list of actions in that work plan, and the topics that we're going to talk to you today are one of those items, so they're all bundled together. It's a lot of different topics bundled together.

I can make this work. There we go. OK, so actions for the council at this meeting. So you're receiving this update from us. This is the actions that the Council recommended NIMS look at and review under 305 rulemaking authority.

So at this meeting, we're looking for you to consider if there are any new actions that need to be added to this list. Look, if any of the new actions that we have added— there's a couple of new topics that, that we've put into this paper that you haven't seen before, and I'll highlight those for you and where to find that in the paper. Um, consider whether those are consistent with the executive order and whether or not those should be wrapped into this bundle that's part of the work plan. Um, you may want to defer to staff tasking to consider if any of the new actions that we've identified in this paper should be council-initiated actions. And if so, you may want to take that up at staff tasking to initiate new actions under the Council rulemaking authority or request additional information as needed.

Okay, um, before I get into the meat of the paper, I just want to acknowledge all of the contributors. This paper took a lot of work from a lot of people, including compiling ideas from everyone in Sustainable Fisheries Division, and special thanks to Maggie Chan, Amy Hadfield, Joel Kraski, Scott Miller, Allison Olds, Melanie Rickett-Henry, Kathy Tide, Josh Keeton, and Krista Malani, as well as the team of reviewers that provided input and review to, to get this document to where it is today. It took a lot of work, especially from our monitoring and operations side of the house, and those folks all have additional tasks tasks that they're working on in addition to contributing to Council analytical work products.

So just a brief recap of the past Council consideration of these topics. In April of 2025 last year, that is when the Executive Order 14276 was signed. NIMS prepared a brief discussion paper and presented that in June of 2024. 2025. That was our initial regulatory review, providing ideas and input for the council to facilitate that conversation of the council responding to Executive Order 14276.

After that June council meeting, we prepared an expanded discussion paper, taking that feedback that we received from you in June and incorporating that into October expanded discussion paper. At that meeting, you also prioritized all of the actions in your work plan and submitted that to NIMS. And part of that was recommending the actions for NIMS to implement under 305. And so those are the particular topics that we're going to talk about today in this presentation. Also at that meeting, you initiated new Council actions, including the FMP omnibus, and that is a topic that I'm not going to get into in this presentation.

So first, I want to— this was, this was information that was provided in the October discussion draft, but we weren't present at that meeting to provide an in-depth overview. So I just want to remind you of the considerations of when we use NIMS 305 rulemaking authority. 305 Is a special rulemaking authority under the Magnuson Act, and it is separate and distinct from the Council's rulemaking authority to recommend, and that NMFS implement rules and regulations necessary to implement the Council's fishery management plans or fishery management plan amendments. That Council authority is under Section 303, and NMFS's authority to implement those recommendations is 304. So Section 305 authorizes NIMS to promulgate regulations that are necessary to implement secretarial FMP amendments.

So when the, the Secretary independently takes action to amend or implement an FMP, or to carry out other provisions of the Magnuson Act, there are no special procedural or timing requirements that are specified in the Magnuson Act under 305. And it can be a versatile tool for facilitating preplanned efficiencies or responding to unforeseen events. However, Section 305 should not be used as the statutory authority for rulemaking when it is more appropriate to use the Council's rulemaking authority under 303 or 304.

As well as 304. So specific situations in which 305 may be appropriate— this includes frameworks, frameworks that are established in the FMP or regulations, technical changes to the regulations, correcting the regulations, administrative actions that deal specifically with interactions with NIMS or other administrative procedures, actions developed developed outside of the counsel process, or actions taken pursuant to other special authorities of the Magnuson-Stevens Act, and specific other situations as appropriate. So it is wide-ranging and versatile. However, there are guidelines on when to use it.

Okay, so getting into the topics, I'm going to provide a brief overview, but I wasn't going to get into the details. What we have done is taken the the topics that were in Section 5.1 of the October 2025 expanded discussion paper, and we've continued to look into those. We've continued to analyze each topic, identifying the potential solutions, identifying the, the specific regulatory changes, and provided that information in the paper. It's pretty dense, and I'm just planning to provide a high-level overview, but if you have specific questions I can try to answer them. I also have Josh Keaton and Gretchen Harrington here to help me out as my phone-a-friend if I need assistance on the details.

We have 10 monitoring topics, 5 recordkeeping and reporting topics, and then 5 types of housekeeping changes. And the housekeeping changes are really detailed technical things, so we've lumped those together and categorized them by the type of change, and there's an appendix that provides you with the, the specifics.

Um, these topics are all summarized on page 5. There's Table 1, and this allows you to crosswalk and cross-reference the specific issues with the information that was provided in the October 2025 paper, because we've grouped and organized this paper differently, and we want you to be able to track those specific issues from one paper to the next.

So there are a couple of topics that aren't included in this paper. They're the topic to remove, or the action to remove, the specific time for groundfish seasons closures, opening and closures, and— ooh, sorry, I'm going to start that over because I bungled it.

The action to remove the specific time for closing the groundfish seasons and opening and closing the sablefish IFQ season, this is a combination of two actions, the sablefish season times and the groundfish season closure times. We're bundling that into one action and considering that separately from these, and so that's not covered in the paper.. And we have 3 actions that we're recommending we remove from further consideration at this time, and those are further explained in the document in Section 5 of the document. And those 3 topics are to remove the logbook active/inactive periods for catch processors, the topic to remove initial allocation regulations, and the topic of consolidating references to e-landings.

There are 4 new topics that we've added to this paper, and you can see where to find that information in Table 1 on page 6. So the first new topic— well, the first new topic is to allow prohibited species catch delivered under the trawl electronic monitoring category to be processed into fishmeal. That's described in Section 2.1. This is distinct and a narrower version of the, the conversation you had earlier with Ms. Kimball about processing PSE into fishmeal and the exchange with Mr. Kurland recommending that that broader holistic look be a council action. This, the topic that's described in this paper would only address the PSE that is required to be delivered to a shoreside processor under the trawl electronic monitoring category.

So just highlighting that there's a distinction between the scope of those two topics. The next new topic is an action to modify the minimum observer qualification requirements. That's in Section 2.7. Another observer-centric action would modify observer provider reporting requirements. That's in Section 2.8 of the document.

And then finally, the next new topic is to update the vessel monitoring system type approval process. So this is the process whereby NIMS approves vessel monitoring systems, and that change is described in Section 2.10. Okay.

So going through, I want to just talk a little bit about the monitoring topic. So I'm going to walk you through the summary tables, but I'm not going to get into the detail of the information, information presented in each section of the document. This is information provided in Table 3 on page 12. 12, And I just want to acknowledge that there's an error in the document and these summary tables. The sections are incorrect.

There was a little document reorganization and, and I didn't update those, so sorry about that error. But Table 3 refers— is covering information that's in Chapter 2, Sections 2.1 through 2.10, and you can see those on the slide here.

And so, like I mentioned, this new topic to allow PSE delivered under the trawl EM category to be processed into fishmeal, we expect the potential impact of, of this modification would increase efficiency by processing plants to allow them to dispose of PSE that is required to be retained, and we would expect that that would reduce waste and increase utilization of harvested fish.

The next action would modify the trawl EM category recording requirements when transiting, and the potential impact of this would be to increase flexibility and efficiency of the trawl EM program while reducing the burden on fishery participants.

The next action would modify the Rockfish Program notification of landing This would clarify who receives that notification since we no longer have a person in our Kodiak position as our catch monitoring and control plan specialist. The expected impact would be to decrease the burden on fishery participants by clarifying who gets this.

The next action is to remove Kodiak as an inspection location. We currently have listed in our regulations the locations where NIMS staff will inspect scale requirements and get— do those vessel inspections as required in various parts of our regulations. By removing Kodiak as an inspection location, it's rarely used, it would reduce agency costs billable to cost recovery by removing this infrequently used inspection location. And now that we no longer have staff there, we would have to travel to participate in those inspections.

The next topic on this slide would allow shoreside processors and stationary floating processors that are required to supply observer scales to supply scales that have not been approved by the State of Alaska. This is really a clarification in the regulations that would increase the flexibility for fishery participants to allow more options for valid observer scales. There are other requirements that are already in place that would ensure that those scales are valid, they weigh correctly, and so we would maintain that data quality, just reducing a little bit of regulatory friction that currently exists in the regs.

All right, continuing on with Table 3, the next topic would remove requirements to track serial numbers for those observer scales that are supplied by shoreside processors and stationary floating processors. Currently, that serial number for the scale that is provided to the observer is required to be reported in their catch monitoring catch monitoring and control plan. And that means anytime that there's one of those observer scales that breaks or needs to be replaced, then there needs to also be a subsequent modification of the catch monitoring and control plan. So the expected impact of this would reduce the regulatory burden on fishery participants and reduce the, the need to update those, that paperwork associated.

The two new observer topics that are added, the next two that I'm going to cover. Modifying the minimum observer qualification requirements. This change has to do with the use of dichotomous keys and the experience that new observer candidates have to have when applying to— for observer training. And it would allow— the expected impact of this change would be to increase flexibility for the observer providers to be able to hire hire qualified candidates that have use of or have experience using dichotomous keys outside of a college course. Right now the regulations are specific to use of dichotomous keys in a college course.

The next change would be to modify observer provider reporting requirements. This would— this change is expected to reduce the regulatory burden on observer providers by modifying the information that is submitted to NMFS during observer training and prior to their deployment. So it's about that communication with the Observer Program and what is necessary to prepare those observers to deploy.

The next topic would remove the regulations in Section 679.6 that are specific to exempted fishing permit application processes. That apply specifically to the North Pacific. There are also nationally applicable regulations at 50 CFR Part 600.745, and removing the regulations that are specifically applicable to Alaska could streamline what are currently duplicative and more restrictive EFP regulations, and it could increase opportunity and flexibility for fishery participants that are seeking exempted fishing permits.

The next topic is updating our vessel monitoring system type approval process. Similarly to EFPs, there is also a nationally applicable type approval process for vessel monitoring systems, and those regulations are found at 50 CFR Part 600.1501, and This change would update regulations at 679.28 just to cross-reference that process that's in the national regulations.

So with that, that covers all of the monitoring topics, and I'm going to move on to recordkeeping and reporting topics that are covered in the paper. Um, this information is summarized in Table 8 on page 44 of the document. And there are 5 topics that I'm going to cover. Um, I didn't bookmark the right page, so I'm going to find it.

Okay. Um, also, uh, again, just highlighting the sections in the table in the document are incorrect. Um, they're all in Chapter 3. 3. The first topic would remove shoreside processor check-in/check-out reports.

We expect the potential change to streamline reporting requirements for industry participants by removing this requirement that is no longer used in our fishery management process, and we also receive this information by other electronic reporting means. And so this specific to removing check-in/check-out reports, or the requirement to submit those reports for shoreside processors.

The next topic is looking at a variety of regulatory changes to increase our flexibility to meet the requirements to print documents. So if Maria, her legacy is updating the council process, I hope one day that my legacy will be updating our regulations to move out of the paper era and into the electronic era. Um, and so that's really what this, uh, this topic is getting at, is modernizing the regulations, um, so that we can allow, um, and accept digital methods, uh, of documentation, um, to fulfill those record— the variety of recordkeeping and reporting requirements. Um, so that is just providing that digital option in addition to the paper options.

This next topic, daily cumulative production logbook adjustments for motherships. Similarly, this would, would remove duplicative regulations for reporting that have been subsumed into e-landings. And so this would replace the requirement to have that DCPL, or daily cumulative production logbook, logbook with those other electronic reporting means.

This next topic, to modernize the electronic logbook regulations, this would modify our regulations that govern how we approve new electronic logbooks. So currently we have regulations that specify the approval process for submitting Proposed e-logbooks to NIMS for approval, and this would update those regulations to accommodate the new technological requirements. Things have changed a lot in how technology is developed and implemented. For example, we're not— we don't need to require submission of a USB data to us anymore. And this would make it easier for industry to understand the requirements for how to interact with NMFS on developing these new software options.

And then finally, the last topic under recordkeeping and reporting would rename species code 167. This is an administrative change to our list of species codes that are currently specified in Table 2A to Part 679, and this would change what is currently blue rockfish with deacon rockfish. This is a change that the State of Alaska has already made in state regulations, and this would update federal regulations to match that species identification.

Okay, moving into the home stretch of our presentation with our housekeeping topics. These are included in and summarized in Table 11 on page 61, and we have 5 different types of housekeeping actions.

Continuing on the theme of updating out of the, the old-school way to the new school, we're removing references to fax machines. Fax would still be an accepted method of communicating with NIMS. However, we would be replacing those references to facsimile or faxed communications with either references to electronic transmission, or this is, this is trying to future-proof our regulations for when we have secure electronic communication and data transmission portals that we can use so that we can receive information and applications electronically. Um, also, uh, so the next topic would be updating all of the variety of URLs that currently exist in our Alaska Region website. Um, currently our regulations read like an archive of all the different times we have changed our website address, um, and this would modernize, uh, all of the references to the Alaska Region website.

For a full list of those changes are all included in Appendix 1 if you want to look at the details.

Um, the next topic would look at updating and all of the cross-references to our initial administrative determinations process. So when there is an agency determination and a decision that is appealable, we have regulations that specify those processes. Processes. And those processes have changed over time, and similar to previous topics we talked about, we also have nationally applicable appeals processes now, and those are found at 15 CFR Part 906. And so this— these types of housekeeping changes are expected to, to be a technical change that would consolidate all of the IAD regulations and reduce duplication.

There's a little bit of variation in those processes, and it would cross-reference the 15 CFR Part 906 regs instead of our 679.43 regulations. Those are all also listed in Table 3 in the appendix.

Um, the next two topics are a little bit more variable in the specific subject matter, but we've grouped them together. Over time, we've had a lot of provisions that have been implemented that have a specific time frame in which they apply, and that's what this next topic of removing expired regulations would do, is just kind of go in and clean up and remove all of the expired provisions that had a sunset date and have since passed. And so the specific topics that we would look at revising are identified in the appendix.

And then the last one is other technical corrections. So from time to time, there is a mistake that we identify in the regulations, and so this, this would— this action would update and correct the regulatory text, fixing cross-references, citations, directions, and updating management measures consistent with previous rulemaking actions. And so this is non-substantive changes that would clean up our regulations throughout Part 679 680. And again, more specifics are listed in the appendix.

Um, so to recap and just remind you of what we're looking for in terms of potential feedback, um, we're looking for any feedback on the new topics that we've provided in this paper. Um, we're looking for the Council to confirm support for our ongoing work on these regulatory changes., and consider if, uh, any of the topics included that in this paper should be considered as separate council actions, um, and whether or not you want to initiate a purpose and need and alternatives for those.

Uh, with that, that concludes my presentation. Thank you very much, Ms. Miller. I'll open up the floor and see if there's any input. Yes, Ms. Speaker:COMMISSIONER ARKOOSH] Thank you, Madam Chair. And I apologize if this is a repeat of an earlier discussion, but on your next step slide— thank you, Ms. Miller, for the presentation, and Ms. Harrington.

On the last bullet there, I, I just want to be sure I understand. As I understood the issues in this paper, they were currently included as being implemented through NIMS 305D authority. Are there specific recommendations of topics included in this paper that NIMS is suggesting to us cannot be moved forward through NIMS authority at Section 305D and should be initiated as a Council action?

Through the chair, Ms. Baker.

So at this stage, no, at this stage we're moving forward. You know, this is an evolving iterative process, especially working with NIMS headquarters on what's most appropriate. So we're not saying anything in this paper, as we've explained, will definitely be implemented under 305. We're just moving forward with identifying what the issues are, why we're taking them, what the expected impacts are. Um, you know, as, uh, Ms. Miller identified, there were a couple issues that we thought maybe were simple, and when we dug into them more, they were complex.

And those are the ones we're recommending removing. Um, I think this just gives the council opportunity with more information on each specific action to decide if there are ones that council would like to take. Otherwise, we will continue this iterative process of, um, as time allows and as staff have the capacity to build on these, um, actions with the hope and intent at this stage that they would be one, uh, well, three rulemaking actions, right? Monitoring, recordkeeping and reporting, and housekeeping. Or maybe monitoring and recordkeeping reporting might go together.

We're hoping to be able to do— and Alicia has done a lot of work on how to best do a housekeeping action, but how we package these is still a work in progress. But the, the main point of what we're doing, why, and what are the potential impacts, what are the potential regs that will change, so folks can see what we're contemplating, I think that helps us move forward with trying to find the most expeditious way to, to implement these actions.

Thank you. Any other questions? Yes, Ms. Kimball. Thank you. I just had a question related to the previous B2 report.

So if an issue comes up like the, maybe miss the product recovery rates and the decision about trying to clarify in regulations that that is not how we we do catch accounting these days, we use flow scales. Is that something that even though the agency hasn't recommended a path forward on how to clarify those regulations appropriately, is that something that could be considered and maybe folded into something like this? It still seems like it's in the guise of let's clarify, get rid of archaic regulations and make sure that there's not inconsistencies in current regulations. I'm just wondering if— I'm not— I'm wondering if that's something that can be picked up as NIMS gave it additional thought about what that would look like.

Through the Chair, Ms. Kimball, you know, we— I, you know, as I explained, I can't say anything definitively about the path forward for any individual action, but I feel like if the council is interested in pursuing that, then yes, recommend it. We will look into it more, and we'll try to identify potential, like we do with everything, potential paths forward to achieve the Council's objectives for that very old regulation.

Thank you.

Thank you. Any other input or questions at this point?

Thank you. Thank you for all of the work that you put into this document. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks.

All right, next up we'll have, oh yeah, John Gahman and Andrea Kaikela presenting the Chum Salmon Excluder EFP.

Good morning, Madam Chair and members of the Council. My name is Andrea Kaikela. I'm the president of the North Pacific Fisheries Research Foundation, and with me today is John Gavin, principal investigator on this project before you. On behalf of NPRF, NPFRF. Uh, thank you for the opportunity to provide a brief update on our chum salmon excluder experimental fishing permit.

I also want to thank NPS Alaska Region and the many pollock fishermen, vessel operators, owners, and gear experts who have contributed their time and expertise to this effort. NPFRF remains committed to practical, science-based research that can help reduce chum salmon bycatch while maintaining safe and efficient walleye fishing operations. With that, I'll turn it over to our principal investigator, John Gavin, to provide an update on the 2025 fieldwork and our plans for 2026.

Thank you very much, Andrea. Thanks, Council. Uh, first I want to thank the Council for their interest in this and give you a a, a synopsis of what we learned last year and what we didn't get a chance to learn and what we're going to do in 2026. Um, so with that, uh, I guess I control this here.

Okay, how do I control this?

Yeah, okay, thanks. So recall you reviewed, you took a presentation to understand the CFP. I think it was last April, we were getting ready to gearing up to do this work. And just so you'll recall, the purpose of this CFP application was to explore new concepts for improving chum salmon escapement with salmonid excluders.

And the focus was on B-season fishing, which is different. It has a lower, generally a lower pollock catch rate, longer tows, and more ambient light, things that might affect how you design a salmon excluder. In addition to the behavioral differences that we presume chum have relative to Chinook, but we really don't have any real science behind that, 'cause most of those studies have been done in river systems or in estuary, or it's not in the ocean. But we wanted to also sort of focus on learning pollock and salmon behavior because we're focusing on a different part of the net, larger mesh section, and that provides opportunities. But at the same time, very little is known about how fish behave there, and I'll explain why.

So we're focusing on these larger mesh sections for a couple reasons. As you've heard over the years, most of the salmon excluders that are in use, in fact all of them, are really back in the 4-inch sections of the net. It's a smaller area, it's more efficient to design gear there, so it doesn't— what you're doing doesn't have to be very large scale. But at the same time, what we've seen is that with, uh, the congestion of the Pollock with the catch coming through that area and salmon trying to escape, it limits the ability of salmon to access the escapement portals, even if they, if you will, respond to the incentive of the change of current that we've created for them to recognize as they move through the net. And so another problem with working in that area, we don't really know why, but we do see both Chinook and chum salmon hovering at the escapement portal.

And it may be because they're fatigued, or it could just be a preference for a lee. And a lee is really, in fluid dynamics, it's, it's an area where, like, if you think about a rock in a stream, it creates a slower current. But at the same time, that is a looped or a circular eddy. And so we see salmon hesitating in that for hours sometimes and not escaping. So that may be because of the types of excluders we're using, all kind of work off an eddy.

So we're looking at ideas that don't work off those kind of slowing down water. So new ideas, that's what the purpose of the EFP was to do, focusing on chum.

So what the idea that we wanted to test came out of a workshop last, actually 2024 November, which was for a very large diamond-shaped escapement holes in the top panel of these large mesh sections. And what we were hoping is to create an updraft in water flow so that would incentivize salmon to follow that current out of the top of the net. But we recognize we may have to do more— for instance, adding flotation or lead lines and flotation to create some sort of a pathway out that they would respond to without creating these circular eddies that we've found to be problematic. So, but the big question we had was, seeing as we've never really been able to look at fish behavior in these large mesh sections, is first of all, what do— how fast do the fish move through here? Are they close to the top of net.

Um, no one's ever looked at this because no one's been able to put equipment in these parts of the net, and that was one of the biggest challenges, how to do that. And we got a lot of technical help from NOAA scientists at the, uh, Alaska Fisheries Science Center that have worked with these type of problems to figure out how to do that. I showed you this last year, just to give you an idea. We were looking at, from this workshop, cutting out these diamond shape, either one large one in the large mesh sections or several of them. And what we wanted to look at these locations in different parts of these large mesh sections, much larger diameter than we've currently worked at.

The figure on the right shows you where we have been working in the past, back in the net, where it's a much smaller diameter, sometimes as little as 2 or 3 meters. And now we're talking about something 10 to 12 meter in bigger areas, a lot more room.

So as explained last year, we were going to go to the flume tank, which we did, and the purpose of that was to kind of just have this discussion of what the— where to put these, what fishermen think about, uh, ways to entice fish out the tops of these nets, and mostly about scaling, like how whole— how large would this hole in the top have to be to be significant area without losing the integrity of the net? It sounds like an easy question, but you don't really know mesh openings, so you need a flow of water to really understand different assumptions about mesh openings to get the size scaled. So that's why we went to a technical facility to do that. In addition to just scaling these holes, we also came up with ideas for ways to create that updraft. This one, somewhat unaffectionately, was called the blowhole because it used flotation and lead line to create an updraft.

We'll come up with better names of these ideas if they actually work.

So next stage was the field work, and prior to that, the, the vessel selected for the EFP through a NIMS review of applications. Um, the one selected, uh, actually had these areas marked off on their net so we wouldn't have to do that at sea. Uh, so when it was time to cut these holes in different sections, uh, these were marked by, uh, twine and you could cut them out. This gives you a pretty good idea of the scale of these large holes. A lot of captains were very worried about cutting these large holes in their net.

The fieldwork in 2025 started in, uh, beginning of July, went through the, uh, first couple weeks in August. There were two phases. We wanted to, uh, use this equipment, uh, that I'll give you a little bit— a little bit of background on— a wireless echo sounder to look at fish behavior in these large sections where cameras just can't see the entire area. In fact, can't see much of the diameter of the trawl. So if you want to understand fish behavior, you need to use an echo sounder.

We also used video cameras to take a look at what fish were near the cameras just to understand the the species, because you can't tell pollock from salmon with an echo sounder. So phase 1 was just a set of tows by each EFP vessel without— with just the areas marked but not cut out these holes. And so we just wanted to look at unmodified net fish behavior. Main question is, how close does the catch come to these? Because if fish just pour out of this, it's— no one's going to use it.

So let's just start there. The second phase cut out the holes, and looked essentially if there was a change in the fish behavior and what that meant. We also used captains' assessments of how the hole affected the fishing, as it's always prudent to understand how captains think it's going to affect the catch rates.

Just to give you an idea, this was the device that was recommended by NOAA scientists, this MarPort Trident, which is an echo sounder that both can echo sounder, uh, allow you to identify where fish are in the net through echo, uh, and, and recover that sound. This gave a live update as we were towing of where the fish were. It also recorded so we could do an analysis, both looking down and looking to the sides.

Here's just a picture of that device in real life going overboard in the net.

We used our recording cameras, uh, and the trick to this was we're working in these large mesh sections. This equipment have never been put on the nets, and there was a lot of concern about whether the net would fish right, whether the net would collapse, etc., because you just don't have have that structure and water flow, tight meshes that you have in the smaller mesh sections. So, there was a great deal of consternation of whether this would work at all.

As I mentioned, the testing through July and into— I guess we finished up the end of the first week in August. And this just details what each vessel did. I will note here in And the first vessel was the low-horsepower vessel, the Traveler, and we did have problems with getting this equipment to work in their net. It essentially shut down the flow of water. It collapsed the net and shunted everything out at times.

So we don't want to test under unrealistic circumstances. So a lot of what was done on that vessel was just trying to make adjustments adjustments to get the equipment not to negatively affect fishing. So we never got there with the boat. We had to curtail our operations there. We don't fully understand why, but the next two vessels were able to get the equipment to work and able to do the tests with and without both— or actually in all three sections of the 8, 16, and 32-inch mesh.

And one of them, uh, vessels not only tested the diamond-shaped hole, but it tested blowhole, uh, shaped to, uh, create an updraft, a strong updraft.

I'm not going to bore you with the details, but this is, uh, the groundfish we caught, the number of toes. But I want to point out here that, um, we only caught 205 chum for the whole experiment. Last year was an anomaly. Um, the chum normally— and we timed the CFP to be at the peak of the interaction normally, the, uh, chum and the fishing grounds that we test on. But for whatever reason, last year the chum weren't out there during the normal peak.

And then actually there were chum encounters after this, after we finished our experiment, but we didn't know how that timing would change, so we, we were done by then. Um, but actually they weren't in the normal areas, they were off the shelf. So it was a strange year up there. Um, I will also point out in here that the Pollock CPU is relatively low even for B season last year, which just, uh, when I give you the other parts of the results, keep that in mind. Um, so what did we learn?

The first thing was the equipment, the Marport's Trident Echo Sounder and our cameras in large mesh. We, we were able to successfully monitor fish behavior, um, and, uh, with the exception of the first boat that we couldn't get it to work, but we really didn't do much once we got to the point where we couldn't get the equipment to work. So we— most of the EFP, we were able to get good data, over 300 hours of, of data we collected active fishing.

The big result from— I've already told you we didn't, that we didn't get any results for what chum do in the presence of these large holes, but what we learned was the Pollock stay more than 2 meters below the top panel of the net. This is what we were hoping, and there was a significant debate on whether this would be the case, given that no one's ever looked at the— what the fish are doing. But I will point out here that with an average of 8 tons per hour, we didn't test this under heavy schools going through the net, so we can't reject the possibility that pollock would go out the top of the net if you had higher catch rates, but I will say that within our results, we did have some tows that had higher catch rates and periods where a lot of fish were moving through the net, where we can look at individually with our equipment, and we— what we saw there was they remained 2 meters below the top of the net even under those conditions. That's very promising for locating excluders in this part of the net.

These results were stable over day and night and throughout the 3 horsepower categories to the degree we could make any judgments, though, with the lower horsepower is low— lower horsepower vessel is lower.

We actually didn't see any salmon in our videos. Our videos could only cover the first, from the top of the net, 3 or so meters from the top. We only had 208 chum salmon the whole time. This is the classic Where's Waldo? I mean, we know we caught them, but we didn't see them with our cameras.

We can't cover these large areas. As I explained to you, the results from this need to be tested under significant numbers of chum to be able to see what they're doing, because you're not going to see everyone. What we did see was herring. There was in several of the testing areas significant amounts of herring, and they showed up in our cameras, and they were often seen escaping through this large holes. That's a promising result from my perspective, if chum salmon behave like herring.

Um, and I don't know if they do or not, but I suspect they do based on having looked at hours and hours of video of, of chum salmon and other excluder experiments and herring. They, they seem to take advantage of, uh, escapement opportunities. Maybe herring are better at it, we don't know. Um, but in any case, um, one of the other results was that not only did we not detect salmon— sorry, pollock escaping in these large holes, but the captains concurred with that. Their catch rates didn't change negatively.

So if our equipment didn't pick up, you know, certain times or areas, it didn't seem to matter. The captains are on board with this idea that this is a good place to work. We just got to get the testing done where there's some chum salmon to see if this works. What I wanted to show you what this looked like. This is the echo sounder, uh, looking down.

And if you look to the, uh, the upper kind of band of yellow, yellow, uh, that's actually the bottom of the net. And what you're looking at is a cross-section of what's coming through the net, from left part being what came earliest and the right part being was at the end of this period that's taken a snapshot at the fish moving backwards. And so with that first upper yellow band, that's the bottom of the net. That white line at the top is a 2-meter line, so the fish stayed at the lower part of the— pollock stayed at the lower part of the net. This isn't just an instantaneous result.

We reviewed all 300 hours, and this was the consistent result no matter how much fish was moving through the net under the conditions we tested.

If you have questions, I'd be happy to take them, you know. Okay, or we can do it at the end. It looks like they—. Yeah, okay. Yeah, thank you.

I really appreciate these pictures, and it's really promising research, so appreciate that. Can you, can you explain again a little more what this picture is. Are all those like scattered green dots at the top herring leaving the top? Are the yellow dots fish? Is that what the question means?

Oh, there— no, there— the top is that top line. See, there's nothing in that from the white band up. Um, that's just the, the, the surface noise above that. That's not— I don't There are times when you see herring leaving the net. I don't have— that's not in this slide though, and it's not that dramatic.

This is what comprises a large aggregation relative to our fishing of fish moving through the, the net. And, uh, again, they stayed below that 2-meter line. This is our ability to look to the sides to document this, because again, when you're looking at a cone, you don't see well onto the side. So the, the side views can tell you a lot more about the sort of density of the fish moving through. And this, this is reasonably good Pollack fishing relative to the other ones that I have images of.

And what you'll see again is the fish stayed low in the that. So where do we go from here? We've obviously, you know, we've applied, uh, to, to the region to see if we can repeat our experiment. And, um, I want to tell you about kind of what the plan is for that. Um, so, uh, first of all, I want to point out that we worked with the region to not only get the permit, which we now, I think yesterday, received, um, but they made some modifications so that I think will help help us to time the experiment to when the chums are.

So it was fairly flexible by other, by EFP standards last year, but they've increased our flexibility so that we can switch boats if a boat's timing, because we want to really start this when the chum show up. And then we couldn't really work that way last year because we had a delay. We had to switch boats out. When we schedule something, if that boat would have to wait until the chums, then they would have basically had to sit on the shore. So now we can work with the boat that's ready and start with that boat.

I don't know if that explains it well, but, um, we've also worked with our, uh, field project manager, um, uh, basically she's agreed to wait in Alaska until the chums show up when we had to schedule it last time. So that'll be really really helpful. So she'll be basically on notice to start. So we get the signal that the fishery's encountering chums and we start, rather than trying to plan using past data, because we've learned in recent years that past data doesn't always describe what's going to happen anymore. It's not even very reliable.

So this should help to get us the experiment when the chums are interacting with the fishery.

As you know, the, the design of this work was to focus on the most promising ideas for chum bycatch. So we had a workshop in April with the captains and others interested, explaining the results, showing them a lot more detail on the, uh, the echo sounder, um, and getting their ideas for what they would prioritize of what we do and not do given that we did a number of experiments. And so that was really helpful feedback. And the summary of that is they still think the diamond-shaped holes have a lot of promise for chum escapement. And so two of the vessels will do the similar, very similar experiment.

But instead of testing with and without the hole, The fish— the fishermen thought the first test should be with the hole, uh, like our phase 2, and the second test they do would be with light, uh, supplemental light that's aimed up out of the hole to illuminate outside the hole, because they think that's going to attract the chums to swim out the hole. Um, so instead of with and without hole, it's hole and with added light. Um, and, uh, let's see, I wanted to give you a visual of the light. Um, so there's a crew member on the deck there with the, uh, the light that they're going to use, the supplemental light. It's not real bright, and that's— it's not to, uh, illuminate the whole net.

We want to focus this light light up out of the net. So if the salmon are attracted to the light, they will be incentivized to leave without illuminating the whole net, which could just create— you just— it's hard to work with light underwater, I've learned over the years. So I think this setup is going to do a good job doing what we want to create that light outside of the net.

Back to the workshop. Shop. One of the captains from the EFP last year came up with an idea that everybody listened to and thought we should also test this idea. So we've added this for one of the vessels to test. Um, it— he brought a model of it, and it's essentially a fish diverter.

It's a panel that he can remotely trigger just by tensioning his third wire so that It's diverting fish out of the net until he loosens up the tension on that. It allows fish to go through, and then he can divert fish out. Why do we want to test this? In the intervening time, there's been some research done on tagging chums with satellite tags that have looked at the vertical movement, the deal movement of the chum comes in day and night light and conditions.

And so what that research suggests, and this was done actually on tagged fish, on the fish that passed over the Bering Sea grounds that we're talking about, the middle of the Bering Sea, not in an estuary area. So this is very relevant behavior data. And what the researchers saw from this was is that chum spend a lot more time in the water column above where the pollock are going to be than we thought. A lot of, uh, questions over the years: are we catching them while we're setting the net, retrieving the net, or are we catching them when we're in the pollock? And we don't know that for sure, but if they spend more time in the water column, this device would allow, for instance— and we can test this— uh, divert everything out of the net on setting net, get to the depth of where the pollock are, trigger it to allow fish to go that don't get shunted out the top.

So it's not, it's, it's not closing the net, it's just creating a pathway for everything have to go up. So when it's blocking access, it's just shunting all the fish out the top. When you get to the pollock, you can open it up. When you come back through the water column, you can close it off again and divert the fish out. We don't know if the mechanics of this work, but this fisherman made a model of this.

He's worked on the concepts. He actually towed a version of this behind his sister's boat in Lake Washington. So he's actually worked on the mechanics. Um, he's going to start, you know, trying to work on the mechanics before the EFP. He'll— he promises to have it get it working.

But this allows us actually for the first time to actually look at the question of how many of these fish were— chums are we encountering in the water column? Because we'll pick them up with our equipment as they're leaving. And this will allow observations at an escapement hole where we can track what they are. So our cameras will work. We'll get data on that.

We'll also see if the concept works. I'm pretty excited about this.

The fishermen at the workshop are equally excited about the large diamond holes because they're just, you know, a very cost-effective way to potentially exclude salmon. But they really thought one of the boats should try this. So we've added that to the test, and I think it's a promising idea. We'll see if it works. At least it worked work, that, you know, the mechanics work.

And then we'll get this data on where we're encountering these salmon for the first time, which I think will start to really open up a lot of thinking about how to move forward. So, or the roadmap from here is we'll do the test July, August, we'll even go into September if we need to. Um, uh, we'll do an analysis of the data We've already analyzed most of the data from last year. We'll have a workshop with captains and interested others following the test this summer, and we'll draft the final report based on the results from both this season and next season, or, you know, this summer. So both, both fieldwork, and that report will be drafted this fall.

Fall, submit it to the region in draft form, and the Science Center will give us some feedback, and then it'll become, with that feedback, a final report. We'd be happy to present the results to the council if you're interested. I would think they'd be ready by spring 2027. Um, and depending on what we see, we might want to work with these concepts more. We're not going to be able to enumerate the escapement rate down to anything like you've seen with the smaller devices.

But if we see something that's worth— it's promising, we'll know enough about escapement that it will really want to focus on, um, that, that direction. I think it's— it'll be more than a promising, it'll be a demonstrated idea. We just won't be able to look exactly down to a, uh, you know, a confidence interval that's really narrow around the escapement rate.

So, uh, thank you for your attention. And, uh, Andrea, do you have anything to add? Just, uh, thank you to John. And again, on behalf of the North Pacific Fisheries Research Foundation, I want to thank everyone involved in the EFP. This project has been an important investment in improving bycatch reduction tools and advancing science-based fisheries management in the North Pacific.

As an inventor and a longtime head of at General Motors, Charles Kettering, once said, "Research means that you don't know, but you are willing to find out." And that's exactly what this EFP represents. It's an investment in research and development that enhances our understanding of fish behavior, evaluates how gear modifications perform under real-world conditions, and creates a pathway for innovation by generating valuable ideas, brainstorming, and engagement among captains, crew, scientists, and managers working to improve selective fishing practices over time. Research and development requires persistence and a willingness to learn from imperfect outcomes. Not every field season produces definitive answers, but every test, every observation, and every unexpected result contributes to the body of knowledge needed to make meaningful progress. While the 2025 field season did not answer every question we hoped it would, largely, as you heard, because the chum encounters were unusually low, during the test window, it did provide valuable new information about pollock behavior around these large mesh sections and the feasibility of escapement concepts.

That knowledge represents meaningful progress and helps inform the next phase of this work. NPFRF remains committed to supporting collaborative science-based research alongside fishermen, scientists, NMFS, and the Council. Thank you for your time to provide this update, and we're happy to take questions. Thank you both for your leadership on this project. Um, I just had one more thing I wanted to— another potentially hopeful, um, uh, serendipitous perhaps, but I've been doing a little work with the British Columbia trawl fleet that fishes hake, and they're struggling with salmon bycatch as well.

Um, and one of the things that they're interested in is, is collaborating the Alaska Pollock Fleet. And so we're hoping to put together a workshop this fall where they're included because they have a lot of new ideas. And I just think it's the more people that are working on this, the more ideas, more potential for success. We don't— so they're starting from a little bit behind us, but they have really interesting situation where some— most of the Chinook are really small and we don't encounter a lot of those, but at times we might. And so they might— we might be able get some tips on, you know, things that work for those as well.

So anyway, I wanted to mention that because it's hopeful. Thank you. Just, you may have said this, but the, the diverter panel idea, really, really fascinating. And, you know, also interesting how that came about in just discussions with with captains, is that going to be tested with and without a light as well, or is that just going to be tested on its own this coming season?

Yeah, thanks. Sorry, it's—. I need to translate it. I'll be better without these microphones. I don't know these days.

Thanks for the question. No, the, the diverter panel works just by really shunting everything out of— with water flow. So you don't need an attractant with that one. There will be some light there from our cameras, but we're not trying to use an incentive light like we are with a passive excluder, like a hole in the net. Diamond shape.

Yeah. And it was hard to get a scale of the size of that relative to the diamond holes. Um, what is— is it larger? Is it same size? Yeah, thanks.

Um, yeah, I— you can't tell from that model, can you? Um, it's a larger hole than, uh, current salmon excluders, but it's not as large as these diamond ones because again, you— the panel that would work. This has to be in the 8-inch because it can't work in the 16. The panel that would divert everything out of the 16 would be bigger than that, much bigger than that screen up there. So, yep.

Miss Kimball, thank you, thank you for your work on this. I'm on the diverter idea as well. Can you discern chums between Pollock in the live feed? Is that, or only under certain circumstances? Like, I'm trying to think about the idea for active exclusion and whether that's practicable.

Thank you for the question, if I understood it. So this touches on like something close to active exclusion, and, uh, yes, it could be used that way if the mechanics work as the captain thinks. What's different about this when everybody in the room and the captains really took a hard look at this. This is just a simple mechanical tensioning of the third wire and not, uh, uh, electronically operated hub kind of idea. So yeah, the advantages of this is you— if you have a live camera, you could operate it as active.

I don't know how far that concept's gotten out there, but, um, uh, the mechanics on this are just really simple. So whether it would be working in time to work actively, we can take a look at that. Um, the captain does actually have a live camera, so we might even try it that way. But it's basically at this stage, do the mechanics work and can we use it in the sort of passive way? We will take a little bit of a look at whether it works actively too, but again, that's not our focus.

Thank you. Mr. Thum? Yeah, thanks, Madam Chair. Mr. Gavin, I— and maybe I don't get this, I wanted to ask for the presentation. So in the presentation, I recognize the chum salmon density was pretty low, but I didn't see a table in there that shows chum salmon bycatch by tow for the different tows, and I didn't know if that was available.

Like, did you actually catch chum in the toes where you had the bycatch, the panels taken out? And is there a question of it would've potentially been higher, you just don't know because of the low salmon density? Yeah, we couldn't say any meaningful result with that, but I mean, the rate is, we detect them in the caught end, we know which toes they happened in, and they did occur toes where we had the excluder in place. And we— the problem with trying to say anything about that is we very well could have had some chum leave that we didn't account for. So we don't really have a way of calculating escapement rate.

The only way we're going to with this type of experiment, trying to monitor such a large hole, is if we have a lot of chum and we'll be able to say it was 18%, that kind of thing, which in the past we have been able to because we're monitoring a small— so one of the costs of moving to this large area is is it's very promising for behaviorally for work, but we're not gonna have results like down to a set percentage, but we will observe enough to say this is promising. And then the way you would test this in the real world, if you will, the fishery would be lots of trials with and without on the same boat trying to hold things. Awesome. I think that's kind of where your question was going. Yeah.

Yeah. And then a second question related to the end part there with the panel shifting. Can you discern anything based on where chum salmon occur in the cod end when the net's retrieved as to where they're caught in the system, or can you not discern that based on the swimming speed and how they hang out in the fishery? Yeah, thanks. Thanks.

Those are great questions.

We used to think that if a salmon was in the back of the cod end, it must have come in early and things like that, until Dr. Rose at the Alaska Fishery Science Center put cameras in the cod end, and we realized that salmon don't just go back like Pollock. They will spend a lot of time in that section until they're fatigued. So you can't really look at the layering in there and make any attempt to infer the order they came in and when.

Thank you, Mr. Pamplin. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Really appreciate this update, but even more importantly, just how much appreciation for investing in this work. This is not an inexpensive endeavor. The time to pursue the permit, modify the nets, develop the sampling design, and then actually implement it is, is very laborious process. And this is probably one of the most promising things we, we could do to address an issue that's taking a ton of our time and attention. So just a huge thank you for pursuing this.

Thanks. If I, if I may, I mean, the foundation that Andrew is president of now has taken a long-term view and put up seed money for this. And then since then, you know, donations have allowed us to continue. And it's— it is a long-term process and it does take a lot. But I got to say, it's also for the agency to review these things.

It's not part of their normal work. There's a lot of other work that happens there that we appreciate.

Thank you. And Ms. Gowan. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you again for the presentation. I really want to echo Mr. Pamplin's thanks for the work that you're doing here. It's very promising.

Also want to appreciate that you're looking at this diverter panel, listening to your captains. I know in crab we found really promising changes to our gear based on listening to our captains on how to refine it. So that's really great to hear that you're moving forward with that. I would love to catch up with you on a break. To explain more of what I'm seeing in the camera and the, um, echo sounders, that would be helpful, um, just to make sure I'm understanding it correctly.

But my question for you is, um, I'm curious if the captains had feedback on, you know, having an echo sounder and a camera and buoys in the net, if there were issues with that as they're bringing it up on deck and reeling it up. Were there operational issues with having that in there for the Yeah, yeah, thanks. That's, um, we have a lot of experience with putting cameras in the net, and we have, uh, operational procedures that the boats, uh, you know, learn about how to get them on board and how to set so you don't damage the equipment. And we've got pretty robust cameras. This Marport device comes from a company that makes regularly used equipment like this.

So they, they put it out in a suitcase, if you will, that is pretty resilient and was pretty streamlined. The only question really we had was something that weighs about 12 kilos, putting it— how to keep it from affecting these large mesh sections given how they just don't have the mesh tension that you have to hold it open. So that was really the questions around it. We were pretty sure that the Marport is— they make good equipment for research as well as fishing applications. So, but handling with that was pretty easy.

But, you know, we, we go through a lot of this because we can't afford more than one of these. So, you know, we just do what we can. But our project managers had some experience with working on with fishermen who know everything, and, you know, and we're really careful when we first set it.

Yeah. A quick follow-up, so did you have to take it on and off with each deployment? Yeah. Thanks.

Thank you. And Mr. Muller.

Yeah, thank you, Madam Chair. Uh, thank you, Mr. Galvin, for the work you, uh, do. I always appreciate appreciated all your reports and some of the work you've been doing. Question on— you mentioned the lower horsepower vessel that you try to apply this work on didn't work. Are there any plans in the future to have a better understanding in terms of why it doesn't work?

And the reason I ask that is if this is a modification that we can make and apply more broadly and whatnot, You know, certainly there'd be interest in the lower horsepower vessels as well. So I'm curious in terms of whether or not there's any work going to be done in terms of figuring out what the problem was with the— with that smaller horsepower vessel. Yeah. Okay. Thanks.

So we will have another low horsepower, not the same vessel. So we'll get a look at kind of whether it's specific to that vessel or whether it's just specific to the lower horsepower.. But yeah, I guess I don't think the excluder itself is going to be problematic at different horsepowers. We might have different rates of loss. It's really our equipment that drove not being able to get a result.

So I don't know if that addresses your question, but this approach for salmon exclusion with these large holes would necessarily be a problem for the lower horsepower vessel, but it's the equipment that we're trying to measure the effect of that created the problems. Does that make sense? Yeah. Thank you, Mr. Galvin. Yeah, no, I understand that you're early in the process in terms of, of some of this work and whatnot.

But again, thank you. This is probably as good an answer you can give me.

Thank you. Any other questions?

Thank you again for the presentation. Thank you for your work on this. Appreciate it.

So, Ms. Harrington, that— does that conclude our B reports? Okay, thank you. Would just really want to acknowledge and appreciate the agency for all of its work and just recognize the tremendous workload with reduced staff over the last year, um, and really understand our role in, um, in adding to that workload. I think we, uh, we recognize we need to be cognizant of, uh, of resource constraints as we work through this meeting and continue to prioritize accordingly. So we'll continue to look forward to working with the agency on that process.

Thanks.

So we are— we have about 15 minutes until we're supposed to meet with AP for lunch. I think we can work through our— we'll see if there are any questions on the B3, NOAA GC report. Yes, Molly. Through the chair, thank you. I know I said we had a written report only, but if, um, the council would indulge me, I just wanted to provide a quick update.

Uh, I, I know you guys have a lot of materials, uh, on the agenda. NOAA GC submitted two litigation updates earlier this week, uh, so I wanted to highlight, uh, something in both of those. Um, we submitted them this week because we just found out that the hearings for the Ninth Circuit had been scheduled. So as we've reported previously, we had plaintiffs who challenged the omnibus EFH amendments, and then we also had a separate set of plaintiffs who challenged Amendment 16 to the Salmon FMP. NMFS prevailed in both of those cases before the district court.

Those plaintiffs appealed to the Ninth Circuit, Ninth Circuit has scheduled oral argument on the same day, both of those cases to be held in Anchorage. So that'll be Monday, August 10th. It's kind of a cool opportunity for council members, industry, who's ever interested to go and see those oral arguments in person. So that'll be at the court, the federal courthouse in Anchorage, starting at 9:00 AM on Monday, August 10th. If you can't make it in person, the Ninth Circuit Ninth Circuit does stream its oral arguments live.

For anyone who's, who's tried to listen to district court hearings, I know the audio has been terrible. The Ninth Circuit's video stream should be a little better if you want to listen in, and then all of their oral arguments are also available in their archive. So just wanted to highlight that in case folks are interested. It's a kind of a first to get to go see both of them on the same day. Thank you, Ms. Watson.

And see if there are any questions on the written report. This may be a question for Gretch or Ms. Harrington. I'm just curious on these appeals, you know, just to the acknowledging the workload of staff, these appeals as well as other ongoing litigation, does it consume a lot of Sustainable Fisheries staff time?

Madam Chair, so when we— when the agency is sued, yes, we spend a lot of staff time preparing the administrative record, working very close with NOAA General Counsel. We also provide input through the briefing, and so appeals are less— take less staff time because we've already done the record part, but we still do have— we provide input on the briefing materials, working with General Counsel and responding to questions where things are in the record or making sure that the briefing materials accurately reflect the action. Thank you. And when this happens, is it considered a priority over any other ongoing activities. Madam Chair, yes, it's in our hierarchy.

Responding to litigation is job one when we have it, and responding to requests for information from NOAA General Counsel. Thank you for that clarification. Appreciate that.

Yeah, I think we're in a good place to break for lunch at this point. Uh, let's come back at 1:00 PM, and we'll resume our discussion with our B4 report. Thank you.

Just for everyone's awareness, these doors are going to be locked over lunch, so please take your personal items with you if you need them.

Welcome back from lunch, everyone. Thank you, everyone. So we are ready to begin on our B3 Science Center report, and Dr. Foye is with us.

Welcome.

Thank you. Good morning, Madam Chair, members of the council. For the record, Bob Foye, Director of the Alaska Fishery Science Center.

So this is my, uh, annual State of the Center report, which means I'm going to cover about 15 topics in 20 slides. Um, but the intent here is just to give you a general update on what is happening with the center in terms of budget, staffing, priority in our science. I'll touch on some topics that I know are important to you and give you an opportunity to ask some questions on some of these topics.

That's great. Oh, there. Perfect. Thank you. So you've seen this before, just in— and just a reminder on process and where we're at in that process.

So a lot of these things are obvious. We are informed by the President's budget, Congressional budgets, and then the priorities within the National Marine Fisheries Service, and then we have our developed strategic plans that are internal as well in order to meet those goals, and obviously funding drives all of our, our priorities. So where are we at in this process. For 2026, we are here at the allocate and inform part of the process. We just received our funds, so we are moving forward, scrambling to get the resources spent for 2026, make sure that we got all our core work done for the remainder of 2026, and, and plan towards 2027.

On the 2027 2027 planning, we are currently developing out our activity plans. What does this mean? This means that we are meeting the guidelines that we have from National Marine Fisheries Service and NOAA on what our priorities should be moving forward. We're estimating the resources that we might see in '27 and then building out different scenarios in terms of what our priorities are. As you can imagine, Most of these don't change.

Most of our priorities are pretty consistent, but I'll highlight a couple of directions that we're taking now, both regionally and nationally, that will help augment some of those, those final decisions. Those plans are developed, they're organized nationally, and then they inform the budgeting process as resources are made available sometime between, next fall and next winter.

So as always, we build this on our strategic planning. This document right now is not up to date, so our previous 2023 to 2027 document is being informed by changes in the current administration right now. So we will be revising this document in the coming year, but in general, our goals do not change. And the reason I put this up every year is because I, I want to make it clear that with all of the extra work that you're hearing, the focus in different directions, our core work really does remain the same. That is to monitor and assess our fish, crab, and marine mammal populations as they affect fisheries and marine ecosystems.

So that is our number one goal. We provide the data to this process, and we take the scientific integrity of, of the information that we're extremely seriously, and that's the piece that doesn't change. We're monitoring and predicting climate impacts on living marine resources. So specific to this region, we know that we have had heat waves, we know that there are environmental conditions that change, and they've had dramatic impacts on the stocks that you manage. We can't ignore that, and that has to be part of what we incorporate into our data collection so that you can best manage these stocks moving forward.

And then lastly, advances and new initiatives. So there's a— you're going to see in this presentation, you've heard before, a lot of new opportunity for either how we think about the ecosystem and what fisheries can be produced within that ecosystem, what it means when, from our— with our fisheries catches, how we can do it more sustainably, and how, for instance, I can use tools to to better assess those things more efficiently. So that all fits into that third goal of the Science Center.

So I'll go through this somewhat quickly. Each year I produce an annual guidance memo, and this is intended to take those core issues, those core goals, and then add things that, that come faster. They might be something that the Council interested in seeing us move forward. It might be because we have a heat wave or we're seeing a bycatch issue, you know, the, the topics are endless. There's always an emergency, as you know.

So the goal this year is to continue to be aware of environmental climate forcing of the ecosystems to address critical uncertainties for management. For instance, let's say the, um, uh, the El Niño that's expecting to be very large this year turns into something larger than, than just a general El Niño, we want to be responsive to that. So this is my communication out to our science team saying that this is going to be a priority for us should it come to fruition, should we start seeing this, we're paying attention to it. So that's the environmental forcing piece. Next is building out supporting transition from some of our traditional from national fishery independent index tools to new survey designs, rethinking the gear.

This is survey modernization, and I'm going to talk about that. But we have, we initiated this a number of years ago. This is now a national priority across the National Marine Fisheries Service, and we're in lockstep in terms of making sure that what we do is the most efficient in using the, the best gear possible in order to do that, and analyses. Looking at fisheries-dependent data, analyzing and using fisheries-dependent data through some of the tools that we already have, obviously making sure that the Observer Program is sound, working through the ecosystem socioeconomic profiles as early warning tools. These are all tools that we have that regardless of shifts in surveys, we are going to be working with your fisheries we are going to have observations from your fisheries, and that's the constant here.

So making sure that we're being more consistent and thinking outside the box on how we use those data is the goal behind that bullet. And then lastly, addressing any gaps in our fishery data collection. Are there different things that we could be collecting better in order to inform us about what we're seeing, either in terms of fishing behavior, the environment, catches, bycatch, etc.

So the next two slides are intended to address the, the risk-value matrix, without saying the risk-value matrix, although I just said the risk-value matrix. So the point here is that we established a process, this body established a process decades ago, and this last year we at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center, as you know, brought forward a number of different presentations to consider how we could evolve the prioritization process, how we could think outside the box on how we prioritize and bring other ideas to the table on prioritization. So it was always much more than the process that is now tabled at the national level. And as Ms. Evans said in her presentation, the goal is to make sure that we are always prioritizing, that we're always working together to, to know what those priorities are, think about how we can do things better. So I have two slides here just to remind you of what we're doing.

There isn't going to be a lot of progress this summer except to bring together with council staff potentially, but definitely back to you in the fall, what we've been doing within the Alaska Science Center in the last year. I've already given these presentations a few times now, but we stopped short of the final product, which is that final list of, well, what would we use to prioritize our stocks different from what we do now? How would we better assess which ecosystem data tools we should be bringing forward? As you know, we bring a lot of ecosystem data forward. Could we refine that and have a smaller set of information to bring forward that is most applicable to our stocks and create some efficiencies in, in, in my budgets and my surveys, et cetera.

So, Answer is yes, and, and we'll work on that. So the ultimate goal there, and again, this was— you've seen this a year ago, the vision is to support sustainability in the fisheries, to build a dynamic framework that addresses, and it's scalable to the resources that we have, addresses our— your priorities in the surveys and stock assessments, and serves MSA. We're prioritizing an ecosystem-based fisheries management approach. That's something that we have always prided ourselves in, and that is the balance. We don't want to just count fish, we want to know why this is how many fish we have so that we can expect things in the future.

So that's part of it, is to make sure we, we do that balance. And then just the last slide on this particular topic is just reminding you that this focuses on our survey and our assessments. It's on ecosystem sciences, on marine mammals, and I show this, this pie chart chart every year just to remind you that the goal here is to balance this pie chart. It's not to see the wedges necessarily shift. It's not to see some of these wedges go away, but to acknowledge that we need everything on this pie chart in order to adequately manage fish stocks.

So trying to maintain this balance is what we're striving for in that process. So that's all I'm going to say about that process, and more will come back. I just wanted to acknowledge what was said about the, the future of that prioritization process.

So moving on to specifically to 2026, this is an update on our budget status. This is hot off the presses as resources have been made available. This goes back from 2022 to 2026. The 2026 numbers are, are still moving a little bit, but for the most part, this is accurate. What you see here in the dark blue is those are our base those are the funds that come to Alaska Fisheries Science Center, and as we have noted in years past, are fairly flat from year to year.

The lighter blue are NIMS temporary funds. These are the funds that fluctuate. These are the funds that we work with the national processes to make sure that national priorities are being met and that Alaska priorities are part of that mix. And then we have other resources that come from other parts of the agency and/or, for instance, the yellow bars were the IRA investment that you're well aware of from the last handful of years. So overall, what you can see is that the base funding is, is relatively flat for 2026.

We continue to get the support that we need from at the headquarters level among the priorities nationally and Again, we balance this with our costs, but overall we're working from the flat resources that are available. So at the end of the day, our goal is to support our highest priority science. NOAA and NIMS priorities continue to support survey modernization, UXS and omics, for instance. So there are national priorities that fit into this, and you see some of that in that lighter blue are, and I'll talk through where Alaska's equities are in those, those priorities in the, in the upcoming slides. One thing that we're all aware of is that are the FY25 staffing reductions, which were not minor, substantial staffing reductions that affected our overall capacity to complete the science that we do.

We continue to focus, we continue to move people where they need to be, and the reductions, um, did increase the resources that we had available to us, the funds that we had available, and we're able to move those into our operational priorities, which, as you know, are mostly our surveys, and we continue to prioritize those. So, um, that's where resources there have gone. For 2027, as always, it's a multi-scenario process. We're planning for a flat funding similar to what we have seen in years past. We continue to interact and prioritize at the national level to make known what needs we have in the Alaska region.

We continue to, at the same time, plan for the President's budget request as well as potential congressional markups. We have to live in three places at once as we consider how to efficiently move forward in this process, communicate what is possible on both ends, and this year is no different.

Yes, we have a question, Dr. Foye. Ms. Kimball. Thank you, Dr. Foye. On the, on the fourth bullet, I mean, it seems like a rosy characterization, but we were able to use more funding for operational priorities like surveys, but that's at the expense of over 50 staff members maybe losing their jobs at the Science Center. Some of those were actually people that we needed to staff those surveys.

So what's the, what's the balance there in terms— and maybe you're getting to that in some new hires, but some of those staffing reductions are, are an integral part of being able to complete those surveys. So could you comment on where we are on that piece? Certainly. Through the Chair, Ms. Kimball, um, it's, it's exactly the point, is that those resources are available to us to use for science because we don't have them for our, um, our labor. The—.

What we do know is what our priorities are. They have not changed. So we have maneuvered our labor resources that we were left with, which are still substantial, in the center to make sure we're doing our priority work. That includes surveys. We've moved people to focus on surveys and make sure that we have survey coverage.

You'll see in the next slide that we have a couple of hires that we have been able to move on in recent weeks. But overall, we still, from a capacity perspective, we needed to shift. There was a moment where we needed to reconsider how we do that. And as I've mentioned before, the priorities have not changed: surveys, stock assessments, and balance the portfolio. It does mean that there's a loss of capacity in certain areas of the Science Center.

There's some of the lower priority work that we had to move capacity away from, again, to, and to focus on those highest priorities. The resources that become available there, again, for this year are then also available for us to make sure that we can meet our survey portfolio. As you know, that has been a constant concern, is meeting the increased cost demands of our survey portfolio and the cost of doing science. We'll talk about that here in a little bit. So that certainly helped us, if you will.

Thank you for that. Then if we're— if the plan is to do your scenario planning on flat funding for FY '27, I mean, we've got to then accommodate those staffing reductions with the additional survey time we were able to do because of those staffing reductions, that won't last into the future. We are still gonna continue to see a reduction in seat time if we don't bolster that budget. Is that—. Through the Chair, Ms. Kimball, that, that's correct.

Our capacity remains the same. I won't be able to increase that without the resources to do it or taking the resources from somewhere else. And, and again, inflation isn't part of this. So the increasing costs, uh, have to be accounted for as well. So when we plan for that FY27, 7 flat or President's budget or potential congressional markups scenarios.

We're taking all that into consideration. What I, I guess something that might help is what we are planning for in the long run is that our staffing, our labor levels are consistent with what they are right now. So if we are not, if we do not see additional resources, we still have our priorities that are very clear and we will continue to keep that staffing focus in the direction that it is right now. And even if that means moving program and people.

Thank you. And Ms. Gone. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you, Dr. Foy, for the presentation. And kind of building off that concept, but looking back to your Science Center priority planning, and you mentioned in the pie chart that you're not envisioning changing the shape of those wedges or the size of those wedges, but I think I just heard in response response to the question, the previous question, that we, if funding remains flat, there may need to be a shift from maybe you don't do annual stock assessments, but you want to keep the annual survey. Are you talking through those types of scenarios?

Through the chair, Ms. Gowan, yes, absolutely. And thank you for pointing that out. So the point is our druthers are to keep the balance of that portfolio and see that the pie, the size of the pie chart shift. However, we will not risk our highest core priorities. And if— and, and so the lowest core priorities wedges will change if they have to.

Our goal is not to get rid of any of them. There's also some subtlety in how our budgets work. Resources come to us with flavor, so some of our resources go towards certain pieces of that pie that can't be changed for pieces of that pie. So it's, it's a little bit complex, but my message is that we're attempting to keep the balance of that, um, that pie chart consistent. Otherwise, we'd just be out there counting fish, and again, not understanding the extreme changes that we experience in this region.

And, and really, the bottom line in terms of how, uh, fisheries sustainability is affected by those changes here in Alaska.

Thank you. And that ties into my next question, which is on your vision here under the priority planning to create stability in a variable environment. And I know we'll hear more about this when you come back, but can you give us an example of what you're envisioning there on stability? Sure. Through the chair, Ms. Gowan, you know, it's a, it's a pithy statement, if you will.

It's one sentence on, on guiding our team to an end goal, right? So what is it that we are trying to provide in our science? A lot. But if I had to capture that in that vision statement, is to provide stability in your fisheries, to make sure that we're maximizing, optimizing yield, that we are aware of changes that are going to occur, that we're representing all of the stakeholders. So, you know, we've been doing that for decades.

So considering how to provide stability in terms of data provision to that process, given all the other changes that are occurring, is what we're talking about here. It doesn't mean that we're not increasing our focus on those environmental changes. It doesn't mean that we're not being responsive should there be other needs, depending on what's happening with the behavior of fisheries. It just means that that we can't afford to see a reduction in science and data availability in this process. So how do we rethink how we collect it, where our priorities are in there to make sure that that information is stable?

Thank you, Madam Chair. Uh, so I'm moving on here Okay, uh, so pardon me, just making— that's why I thought there was a slide here.

Okay, apologies. So with that, um, a couple of staffing updates. This is a positive. I have some new staff for key positions. As you know, we have had numerous numerous acting staff in acting positions and addressing the loss of the staff that we had this past year.

And some of our core and key positions in leadership and other places had to have people step up. And the Science Center has really done stellar, stellar work and stepping up to our priorities, making sure that we didn't drop any of the core balls in terms of what we have for responsibilities for you. And I'm happy to say that, you know, nationally we, we have been able to loosen up the strings a little bit and hire some of our key positions. So with that, I'd like to introduce Dr. Shawn Lucy. For those of you who not have not met him, I believe he was in the AP.

He will be sitting here in a little bit. Shawn can give a wave if he's still sitting where he was. Shawn is going to be the new director of our Fishery Monitoring and Analysis Division. That's that's our Observer Program. He brings an extensive experience in fishery science policy and leadership to this role, much of which he has gained during nearly 20 years at the Northeast Fishery Science Center.

We're happy that he came to his senses and moved to the Alaska region. Um, he has got a long career focused on ecosystem-based fisheries management, which is exceptionally exciting to have him in this space, and his understanding of processes that are important to the Alaska region. He's authored numerous peer-reviewed publications. He has a PhD in marine science and technology from the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. He has an MS in wildlife fisheries conservation and a BS in biology.

So you'll have an opportunity later to welcome him, but I just wanted to acknowledge that we have hired that position and very much look forward to bringing him in into that program as the current acting director, Lisa, and the rest of the team have really filled that gap and done a fabulous job making sure, again, that the Observer Program, that you didn't notice change in the Observer Program. And that says a lot for the amount of work that they've been doing. Next, a couple of additional hires. So Dr. Jessica, or Jessie, Beck is rejoining the Alaska Fisheries Science Center. So she'll be back in mid-June, June.

She'll be coming in as a fisheries biologist to build up our fisheries survey and ecosystem research. Her focus is on groundfish surveys, ecology, and population dynamics. So welcome back to Jesse, we're happy to have experienced staff members come back. We are also soon have a number of hires. We have an additional fishery biologist for groundfish surveys.

When this slide was created, we we did not have the details, but we now know that Dr. Rebecca Howard will also be rejoining Alaska Fisheries Science Center. So once again, someone that we have trained and that we're happy to have come back into the fold at AFSC. She will be combining field data collection, advanced modeling techniques to look at some of the design-based estimators that we use and are critical to the survey modernization process for, for stock Investments. So we're excited to have Rebecca back as well. We will also be hiring a supervisory industrial economist.

This will be someone to lead our economics and social science research program. I'll talk a little bit about that program later, but this has been an important gap in our, in our leadership for that program. Supervisory research fishery biologist to lead our age and growth program. And lastly, a bioinformatics specialist to support our genetics program. So what you'll note is these are all positions that are not only key leadership positions within the center, but they are on topics that are in those core priorities.

And in some ways, sometimes this is where you'll see that focus because that's where we're rehiring, that's where we're putting these efforts.

So 2026 research plans based on that understanding of our budgets, our planning and completing of our mission-critical surveys is moving forward.

I'll show the figure here in a bit. We continue our survey modernization efforts. In fact, we're doubling down in terms of the resources that have been made available to the Science Center to move forward there. I would say headquarters has heard loud and clear the value of that to this region and sees the importance of it. So that's, that is an exciting plus-up this year.

And there are a number of different mission-critical research related to advanced tech technology. So we continue to move on our UX work, or drones I'll talk about here in a moment, omics, integrating technology into our operational assessment. So for instance, you have heard about FT-MIRS. There are a number of other types of tools that we're using to improve aging, for instance, the kind of information that we bring into our stock assessments. We don't bring all those details to you, I'd be here for days, but, but suffice it to say, the goal is to make sure we're using cutting-edge technology in terms of how we collect the data and how we produce as much appropriate sample sizes as needed along the way.

We're using optical tools, for instance, in areas of helping us understand net dynamics bycatch and areas where fishing is difficult. We're looking at active acoustics to make sure that the acoustic that work for our pelagic species, pollock in particular, are using cutting-edge technology. There's also a huge focus on expanding cloud and AI within NOAA and NOAA Fisheries. The goal there is to make sure that we are using the cloud in a way that not only provides efficiencies, but provides access to data, public engagement, more tools that can be shared, and with respect to AI, making sure that we are up to date on what is possible in that space and where we can provide efficiencies using those types of tools. And just to be clear, before the question, we are always only going to do that in parallel to our current methodologies until we believe that the integrity of the new data process is such that it can be used directly.

So there's a lot of that side-by-side work going on. The reason to make sure that that's clear clear is that's extra effort. When we talk about staffing capacity and capacity within the center, it's important to acknowledge that some of what we do has to be research and development for us to move forward, and that's a, that's a hard balance. You let go of that, you stay stagnant. If you do too much of it, you lose some of our core work.

And I always have to put up the picture with all our large marine ecosystems just to remind everybody that our responsibilities are great, and, um, the complexity of what we deal with in the Alaska region encompasses multiple ecosystems. So this very pretty graph that's getting bigger— I'm going to probably have to take off some early years— shows all of our surveys in prioritized order. The color is focused on the large marine ecosystem: Bering Sea, Gulf of Alaska, or Aleutian Islands. I've got some information on whether it's a charter or a NOAA ship, and then here's all the surveys. Green means that the survey was planned and completed.

Yellow means that it was planned but only partially completed. Red means we did not complete it, but we wanted to. And white means there was never a plan. X means it is no longer being planned moving forward. So, um, you can skip right to the right-hand side column here.

I will walk you through our planning. You saw this graph, I believe, in my December presentation. There's only one change since that presentation, so you're not looking for anything major here. Most things are green. We will conduct— we are currently, it is beginning of June, there's boats actively running the Eastern Bering Sea bottom trawl survey right now.

This is the Aleutian Islands bottom trawl survey. Survey time. That's an every other year survey. The acoustic surveys in Shelikof already occurred. The Eastern Bering Sea survey will occur this year.

The longline summer survey is not happening this year. You'll remember that that is a cost recovery survey. Two years ago, as the, the cost of sablefish, or the value of sablefish, sablefish decreased, we needed to rethink that model. Much appreciate industry support there. We have worked with them to come up with a sampling design that allows us to accomplish most of what we're able to before, but it changes how often we're able to get into the different ecosystems.

We still believe this is an excellent time series for assessing the abundance, biomass, biology of the sablefish talks. And, um, again, I think that in, in the situation that we're in right now is— has been successful. So that's moving ahead. Uh, we have, um, summer longline, and the, um, the focus is this year is on the Eastern Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands.

The, um, Northern Bering Sea bottom trawl survey I have here in a green, but actually that should be just a blank cell. Um, you'll remember in order for us to do the survey modernization work in the Eastern Bering Sea, that's where we're going to be out there with side-by-side vessels testing new gear, new doors, new equipment, new sampling design. We needed the staff from somewhere, right? So we agreed, and you're aware that we decided every other year for now we would take them off of the Northern Bering Sea and we would focus on this modernization. So we will actually not be in the Northern Bering Sea bottom trawl this year as planned.

And then we've got our ecosystem surface trawl survey, which provides a number of salmon indices, and then our acoustics work in the Chumagans, which again has already occurred. Moving to the lower half of our priority list here, you can see the, the Boguslav survey. This is mostly a survey to guide our international decision-making in the, in international waters., and we have moved that to an every 4-year survey. And I believe we've got full agreement on that from our international partners. We are expecting to move forward with our juvenile survey, but due to staff, or to ship time limitations, the Eastern Bering Sea Ichthyoplankton Survey will not happen this year.

This will mean a slight degradation in the time series of the ichthyoplankton work that we do, this informs ESRs in particular, and some of the ecosystem models that do ultimately inform management, but are not one of the core products in, in the stock assessments. We continue to work with our partners on mooring surveys. This is collecting oceanographic information, and that we link into the production of our fishery stocks, and we do that in the Eastern Bering Sea. We also have our Southeastern Alaska Coastal Monitoring. That's a cooperative survey with the state of Alaska, mostly focused on ecosystem and salmon work.

And then again, some of our work that's externally funded in Prince William Sound here. The rest of this work is, as you know, for years, these are topics where we have prioritized away from them to address our highest priorities and our resources that are available. So that's our plan for this year.

Question, Dr. Foye. Miss Kimball. Thank you, Dr. Foye, and thank you for continuing to provide these tables in the way that you do, including the not planned or no longer planned. I think that's really helpful to try track. My question was on one of the comments, which I know that we tacitly agreed to on not doing the Northern Bering Sea trawl survey every year, but doing every other year where we go through survey modernization.

And because survey modernization is a bit of an amorphous thing at this point, with— maybe you'll go into whether it does have an endpoint or not— is, is the commitment there, at least I recall being like 3 years, we'd go through 3 cycles where we did it every other year, is that still kind of what you're thinking in terms of getting survey modernization on track where then we could continue to get annual data from the Northern Bering Sea, or should we be shifting our expectations there? Through the chair, Ms. Kimball, you're right. The goal is 3 cycles, that's 6 years, and we're hopeful that if everyone keeps— everything keeps going on schedule, that that's when we will be back on an annual cycle with the Northern Bering Sea. Bering Sea. The, um, you'll recall that the modernization process is so that these aren't separate areas with separate surveys and separate considerations.

It's going to be one survey that incorporates the Eastern Bering Sea, the deeper waters that we had to let go of on the slope, you know, in previous years, and then the Northern Bering Sea. So yes, the intention is still to move forward with that. I'll touch on where we're at here in a moment, but in essence, we continue to have the resources to move that process forward. And I'm sure we will be pushing faster. If we had our druthers, we would do side-by-side work for years and years to make sure it's 100%.

But I think the point is we need the information in the Northern Bering Sea. It's changing dramatically. We have no choice but to modernize. So we will be pushing the envelope on that. And it's going to require some strong communication between you and us.

And just to be clear on what those changes are and, you know, what the impacts will be as we implement. But I would say a year from now, we should have a better understanding of milestones, expectations.

My second question, and I may have just missed it, is I can't remember the reasoning for the Gulf of Alaska longline survey. Survey to be not planned? I—. How are we encompassing collecting that, those data, or what did I miss there?

Yep, through the chair, Ms. Kimball. So the intent will be for that to be every other year. So the, um, right now, and, you know, I say the intent, it's based on current prices, their current ability to do that cost recovery survey. But if everything were to remain static, that would then just become an every other year survey. And what that allows us to do is focus on the most important areas, spread our effort, and in essence, just slow down how often the information is available.

So we will continue that. I see no reason that that would change, unless of course the cost recovery component of this changes. Right now, that is being partially funded from NOAA Fisheries, so that is a large contribution that was never made before, because it was always cost recovery. So we have both become more aware of what that cost recovery piece is for the industry so that they are not negatively impacted by this survey. And we have also taken resources and prioritized this survey as one of our top 5 surveys and moved resources to this survey from the National Marine Fisheries Service so that we should be maintaining that as, as long as needed.

But obviously we're hopeful that we go back to a model where we can do more. Follow-up, thank you, that and that explanation makes a lot of sense. I, I think just that you're cognizant of the value of those fisheries seem to be increasing, and so it might be a good signal to start considering when we bring that back to an annual survey since it's really important to the Gulf, but it sounds like you're keeping track of that already. Thank you.

Okay, so moving on to some more specifics. So here's the survey modernization effort during 2026. So you might remember that we had some decisions to make with the shutdown last fall. It slowed us down a little bit, but the team rallied and got out and completed some of the flume tank work on the East Coast., and what that allowed us to do, and we brought fishermen with us, we brought scientists with us, this was a pretty impressive effort to make sure that we're using the best tools. And I can't think of a better team to go out, both on the science and on the fishery side, to make sure that the type of gear that we're using is appropriate for our needs.

So a couple of designs have come out of that, field testing will occur this year based on that information, We have replaced all of our sensors, so, um, uh, the, the sensors, for instance, that Mr. Galvin was speaking to earlier today, we have similar sensors on our survey so that we know everywhere that server or that net is. And so we were able to update and replace all of those this last year, modernize all of our computers and our, our software. This is all really important because the, the information on area swept of that net is at the core of everything we do, and sometimes we forget that that initial data collection is required for all this modeling, and AI needs data, etc. So we're making sure that we're staying on the fore of that. And so this is, this is really exciting.

We've also identified some resources to bring in additional staffing to help with that survey, those survey design options. And back to the question about timing, all of this is what's letting us stay on track. So we're real happy that we're able to get additional resources for that this year and keep moving forward. As part of the survey modernization effort, we're incorporating the idea of bringing in these, uh, UVS, these surface vehicles, if you will, for acoustics. You might remember that during COVID we were able to bring a sail drone up.

We continue to work with other technologies in this space. Um, you know, right now the idea is that it's a tandem survey, that what it what it does is it's a force multiplier. It allows you to take what we currently do on the Oscar Dyson or next year the Shimada and allows us to expand that. As we see expanding fish stocks in the Bering Sea, that's critical. As we see, as potentially we have fluctuating ship time, that would allow us to address that should it be needed.

So we're coordinating that work right now. And we have already worked previously on how you might combine those, those data streams into abundance estimates. So we're still considering that. The benefits are to be able to do a number of different surveys at the same time. We increase our efficiency with less ship time, more area, and potentially additional sampling.

So these efforts continue. We're working with a much larger a fuel-powered drone right now called a DriX, and we've got some testing going on there. We're working with partners at OAR, at other science centers, and with really partners across the globe right now to identify the most appropriate vehicles. What we have are our requirements. We need a drone to be able to go fast.

It's got to be able to keep up with the Dyson. It's got to be able to cover hard ground in Alaska with no sunlight and lots of seas. And so we're the unique case for these companies, but we're working with them to help produce instruments that we can then use to, to do the acoustic work. The ultimate goal is to broaden that so that we're considering the oceanographic data collection, so that we're considering being able to put things down in the water column, so they're really expanding the use of these vehicles. Right now there's a lot of effort on advanced technologies, and we're fully taking advantage of it and participating as much as we can to bring that to fisheries and the Alaska region.

A number of other technologies I'm highlighting here, a lot of these are things that we've been doing for years, but we're really working with our colleagues nationally to identify which tools are the best, which the tools are the most appropriate for our need. On the left-hand side, for instance, we've got an autonomous plankton danger. So what if I could reduce my footprint on a large vessel? What if I could become less dependent on the, the high-cost surveys and run a vehicle to let us understand what's happening to the lower trophic levels that feed all the fish that we care about? That's a win.

So we're putting a lot of effort into developing those kinds of technologies. We use AI after the data come back to identify what comes in the camera so that I So we don't have poor graduate students thinking, sitting and going through camera work for days and days. You'd be amazed at how much time we can save right now. And that technology is really coming to fruition. And thankfully, the National Marine Fisheries Service has increased our focus on what we're calling strategic initiatives, advanced technology grow-out, and thinking about, you know, what tools are really worth putting forward.

That's one of them. Our team put out different kinds of echo sounders this year, moorings, for instance, that sit on the bottom of the ocean look up. You might remember we did this a few years ago to understand how the pollock was moving across the EEZ in the Bering Sea. This is being done in other areas now to determine whether or not this is a tool we could use. Could we see fish coming in and out of Shelikhov?

Can we do biomass estimate indices that are independent of surveys of survey vessels? Um, and then cam, the CatCam here, these are stereo cameras that allow us to look in areas that are, um, that nets can't go.

And anyone in the Gulf of Alaska and a couple of other fisheries that are dependent on fish that like rocks know that survey estimates have a lot of error associated with them. So expanding on that, considering how we can use these other tools is quite important.

Yes, Ms. Gordon. Thank you, Madam Chair. I'm curious on this CatCam, is it towed behind the vessel then? It says semi-autonomous.

Yeah, through the chair, Miss Cohen, we have versions of it that are towed in some cases around the country that are being used autonomously, and then sometimes in a net, sometimes with the cod end open. So there's a lot of different uses for this. The key is putting something there that can capture the species of interest, and then a ton of work on the can we identify it in a camera. Um, can't count spines for, for Northern rock sole with camera very well, but there's other tools that we can use. So, and again, what this acknowledges is that our staff have the skill set, our staff have the interest, and, you know, we've needed the R&D resources to do this.

So seeing a focus on research and development is really important for moving the needle on this.

You'll hear more from our Observer Program in terms of updates, but I just wanted to put this slide into— you know what the EM program is and, and how important it is to our fisheries, to our efficiencies. We also know the importance of understanding the effects of EM on our ability to assess catch, bycatch, et cetera, both negative and positive. So how do we do it right? So we've scheduled, we've got a CIE review in June. It is June, so it must be soon.

Let's take a look at the Partial Coverage Observer deployment model and relative to EM. So this is an important way for us to look external to the Alaska Fisheries Science Center and get feedback to make sure that we are on track for the use of EM them, and that we are considering what that means in the partial coverage portion of what's important to us in Alaska.

Computer has a mind of its own. Question, Dr. Foye. Miss Campbell. Dr. Foye, my understanding, and this is just from my experience with the Fishery Monitoring Advisory Committee, was that the CIE review is on the partial coverage deployment deployment scheme in total and the changes that were made recently by your staff that includes both observers and EM. So it's the complementary work of both the human observers and then the EM and for both fixed gear and trawl.

Is that— is it covering all of those things or is it more focused on the EM piece? Through the chair, Ms. Kimball, you're right in your original explanation, and that's always going to be our goal, right, is to make sure that we are not working in a vacuum on either of those topics. But introducing EM to that process, does it provide solutions to the concerns, the issues, the changes that we've had to make in the partial coverage fishery.

Okay, the next handful of slides, I'm highlighting presentations or work that we've done within the center that have— some of which have been brought forward here, mostly to the SSC. You'll hear pieces of some of this, but I did want to highlight highlight this one in particular. Pete Hulsen provided an update to you at the February meeting, I believe it was, when we talked specifically about Gulf cod. And you'll recall, in 2025, we had a different survey design for, for our bottom trawl survey, and there were some changes in our survey where we saw some stocks go up and some stocks go down, it was noted that some of that might be based on gild, and there was concern that the changes that we made in our survey design were driving the changes in the abundance estimates. Um, and there's a moment to take a step back and say, okay, are we happy and certain that the design, the statistics of what we're using are consistent for the time series?

So, um, you saw that for cod. Pete brought this forward in front of the SSC. You'll get a report out on the response, but I just wanted to highlight that the center is being as responsive as we can. And when we heard there may be a concern about our survey, we doubled down. This is quite an extensive analysis that was done in essence showing that there was no influence of the restratification on the, on the final results, showing that there's consistency in what we would have expected with those results.

Results. But again, taking that step back at a very busy time of the year, staff saying, okay, we're gonna rethink this, we're going to make sure that the council, that our stakeholders are all comfortable in the, the time series that we're using. So an important effort that staff need to be congratulated for, and also just again making sure it's clear that we're being responsive when these kinds of moments occur. In my mind, if our survey integrity is ever called into question at any level, we need to respond at a pretty high level. So staff did that, so I'm appreciative.

You'll see some of those results later. In addition, so this is a focus on our economic and social science research program. You'll recall that in— there has been a number of stops and starts for for better understanding how economic data, social science data come into this process. We've attempted a few workshops in the last handful of years. I've had a lot of staffing turnover, a lot of staffing changes.

You have changed your expectations for economic data throughout this process. So again, this is us trying to be responsible and bring forward an overview, and this came to the SSC, an overview of the kinds of data that we're producing, the tools where they're available. Most of these are online and how we're trying to continually trying to streamline the information we provide so that it's as effective for you as possible. In this process, we ignore— we ignore— we acknowledge that we have lots of stakeholders, that what we provide to the general public and to the council and to specific entities that need economic and social science information all might be a little bit different. What we've tried to do in our presentation is highlight, for instance, um, the reporting cycles, what tools we have available, what their purpose is, who the audience is, specific use cases, many of which are the Council but not all, um, and be more clear about what we're providing in terms of economic information in the SAFES, both of groundfish and crab, and then in Aseppo for our community indices, community profiles.

So I'm hoping with this, and at some point in the future we'll give you a more dedicated presentation on this topic, but the— I'm hoping what you see is an opportunity to have information at your disposal for your decision-making process. And we're continuing to move. I mentioned before, we have a new supervisor position that's opening, so our goal is to continue to build this program, work with council staff, work with the regional office staff, and get to a point where we're all clear on what the need and what the products available are. So again, appreciative of that, and just wanted to highlight for, for your understanding of what's been done.

Last 2 slides here, Madam Chair. I just wanted to highlight what some of you know about. It's called PEACE. It's a Preview of Ecosystem and Economic Conditions. This is a meeting that has now been held every year.

It started out as an opportunity for science— scientists to share what they were seeing in the data flow prior to the ESRs and ESPs becoming available to in the October and December timeframe. It's a spring meeting to say, hey, what do we expect? What do we see is coming? What input are we getting? That's now ballooned over 100 attendees, 51 presenters from NOAA, state, industry, Sea Grant, universities, all coming together to talk about what's going on in the ecosystem.

It's really an excite— I wish I had more time to pick apart all all the different presentations, but, um, some of the things that are presented at this meeting: groundfish projections, in-season management, industry observations, thinking about what's going on with economics, climate, oceanography, primary, secondary production, upper trophic level dynamics— what are we seeing in the system, what are the state numbers on salmon— community observations. So it really just provides an opportunity to make that we are prepped to bring you what you need in the fall timeframe. If anyone is interested in this further, you know, it is often, it is not completely vetted, it is not completely final or analyzed information. The goal is for this to be a sharing, and the trust building here is incredible. We've got everybody participating in this from industry to agency, not hiding information because it's not completely done, but being aware that this information's valuable And, and again, it helps inform the process.

So some of the things that were noted this year, ecosystems in the Eastern Bering Sea, we know high sea ice in March and April, but the ice was thin, it retreated quickly. There were issues associated with vessels, and we know that fish biology is impacted by that sea ice. There was a greater than average 2-degree cold pool, so that the edges of the coldest part of the cold pool was greater than our average. The coldest piece of it was less than average. And in terms of what we saw in 2025 and expectations for 2026, we have all heard in the newspaper about the great El Niño on its way.

So we're very aware of that. That's real. How it will affect Alaska remains to be seen. We're monitoring for for it. There isn't a correlation necessarily between what we see in sea ice and what we see in El Niño, but because of that complexity, it means we're extra observant right now in what might be coming our way.

But we'll continue to track that. In the Aleutian Islands, largely the Aleutian Islands have been warm since 2014. MHW is marine heatwave. That warming is influenced but not necessarily driven by El Niño events. So the point being, we're not expecting an El Niño to double down on that heat we're seeing in the Aleutians, but it could.

There's a lot of complexity to El Niño impacts and what ends up causing a heat wave. In the Gulf of Alaska, we had a cooler and productive winter spring season of 2026. It was a nice reprieve from the warmth in 2025. However, the El Niño warming is expected and given its strength is likely to impact the coastal Gulf of Alaska. In terms of economic conditions, the big concern right now are fuel prices.

We know industry knows that, we're tracking that and thinking about what it means in terms of A, what that means for fisheries behavior, what that means for overall operational costs. But as you may remember in the, The snapshot report that we did a couple of years ago that highlighted for Congress and for others the impacts the commercial fishing industry was experiencing economically in Alaska. We're working on the next version of that, but this is the kind of information that we think is important to make sure is available. Obviously fishermen know about fuel prices, but does everybody understand the impact of fuel prices going to what they are in Alaska? On the, the national economy, on the, the products that are out in the markets, et cetera.

So our goal is to stay in front of that and again, provide some of that information in a report later this year. Obviously there's been some focus on, on market prices and then uncertainty in regulations associated with the EU. And then the last piece is just about fuel prices. So this is the kind of information that's at this peak meeting. Meeting and just trying to bring awareness.

It helps guide some of our presentations later in the year. It helps guide some of our analyses. And so if there is any interest, please reach out. We'd be happy to have you participate. That's all I have, Madam Chair.

Thank you very much for the presentation, Dr. Foy. I'll see if there are any final questions. Yes, Miss Kimball. Thank you. I just said I had two final questions on that last slide.

I just didn't understand the last bullet on the El Niño events and strength of ALPS— I don't know what ALPS is— do not correlate with sea ice extent. Is that meant to say we shouldn't have expected it to correlate with sea ice extent, or that we were surprised that it did not? Yeah, it— through the chair, Ms. Kimball, thank you for the question. ALPS is the Aleutian Low Pressure System, so it's the, the guiding atmospheric conditions in the North Pacific that usually tell us whether we're in a warm or a cold decade. What all this means is that just because we had a large sea ice extent in 2025 and we have expectations in 2026, they're not always directly tied to El Niño and the Aleutian low pressure system.

So just because we have an El Niño coming doesn't necessarily mean we are going to make predictions on what's going to happen with sea ice in the Bering Sea next year. Much more likely to affect the Gulf Of course, if you go back to 2019, it affected everything. But we just wanted to make it clear that we're not trying to make a sweeping assessment that everything is, because of what we heard about El Niño, is going to impact the temperature across all of our regions. Still remains uncertain.

And my second question was on the last statement you made on increased fuel prices across community participants. Did, did you mean to infer that, that the agency or that the center is doing a snapshot report on the impact of increased fuel prices? Through the chair, Ms. Kimball, the center is working on a snapshot report. If we are including this spring, fuel prices will obviously be a part of it. So whether or not we're able to complete that in time for this next version or not, I'm not completely aware, but we are not planning specifically to address this year's fuel prices.

That'll take some time to suss out and probably longer timeframe than we're thinking for the next snapshot. But we are working on the next snapshot. If that is something that industry or the council would see as value in the long run, seeing the center address that, then we'd be happy to hear that and happy to use that as a jump-off point. As you know, economic data takes time to bring together and really understand the downstream effects of any economic economic, you know, changes that happen in the system sometimes takes over a year. But with that, we'd be happy to try and address your needs.

Thanks, I appreciate that. I think we should just think about that and give it some thought. I think it's great to be having brought out in the, in the peak meeting. I'd emphasize in any, if you bring it out in any kind of report, to ensure that including information not just from vessels, but from shoreside processors that are dependent on diesel fuel, from support sectors and communities. We are almost all in remote communities where you're trying to— you are not on the grid and you are using a lot of diesel.

And so these fuel prices affect more than just vessels, but especially for vessels that are on very thin margins or nonexistent margins, I think this is having a significant impact on people's ability to operate. So I'm just putting it out there for other council members to start thinking about whether this is something we would want to make the focus of a snapshot report, and if that's helpful in any kind of policy forum. I know it's a little bit outside our box, but I thank you for thinking about it. Thank you for that, Ms. Kimball. Um, I think those statements are very helpful and help guide us and what information might be useful.

So thank you.

And to that, Dr. Foy, can you remind me— I can't, I can't remember the first snapshot report, what time series it covered, if it was like a 5-year, 10-year look back, or if we're just looking at immediate years, and if this one is intended to, you know, start where the last one left off. Madam Chair, the, uh, the last one left off in 2024, so the goal would be to pick up from there, again understanding the lag in, in economic information. What you'll remember from the last one is that there's information that is clear and vetted after a year plus of gathering the information. But then there are models that we have that provided a more recent understanding of what's going on in markets and economics across our fleet. So the goal would be to pick up from the last one.

How far we take it into the future, I'm not aware. I'd leave that to the subject matter experts. But the goal is— the reason I bring it up is acknowledging how important it was, what we heard from you, what we heard from Congressional and the value of that kind of information for our fisheries. So we want to make sure that that's part of our regular process. Yeah, I think, yeah, I think we all agree it was an incredibly valuable report.

So thank you so much for your efforts on that. We'll look forward to the next one. Okay, I'm not seeing any other questions. Thank you so much. So that brings us to our B5 enforcement report.

I'll let Council Member um, pull that up and give you a minute. This is a written report, but Ben Cheeseman and Alex Perry are here for any questions.

Mr. Cheeseman, Mr. Perry, are you in the room? Okay, maybe you can come up.

Thanks. I just noted something. I'll just— I know people are still reviewing. We're just transitioning here, um, on the top top of page 2 of your report, um, the boarding of the MV POA, a Panamanian-flagged refrigerated cargo ship. Um, and was that just an acknowledgment of a routine boarding, or were there any citations or violations associated with that boarding?

Uh, thank you, Chair. For the record, Alex Office of Law Enforcement. Uh, so that— there were findings from that, and the investigation is ongoing, so I can't comment on specifics.

Okay, thank you.

Any other questions? Yes, Mr. Ritchie. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you. Um, it's not in the report, but there's been some confusion, um, amongst stakeholders about on the legality of leasing of non-transferable charter halibut permits, and I just wondered if you could clarify for me on that, if it's— if that's something that's legal or not to lease.

Thank you. For the record, Ben Cheeseman, Assistant Director for Alaska. Through the Chair, Mr. Ricci, yes, there was a little bit of confusion. So for the leasing of the non-transferable permits CHPs, you are allowed to lease them. Um, you're allowed to lease them until the person or business that the non-transferable, uh, permit was issued to either passes away or the business dissolves.

At that point, it cannot. All right, thank you. That was very clear.

Any other questions from council members?

Seeing none, thank you very much.

Okay, we also have a, um, on B6, uh, report from ADFNG. It's a written report, but I think Ms. Carla Bush is here to answer any questions.

Yes, Shannon. Okay, I'll give council members a moment to pull up that report.

Ms. Bush, I may have a question for you.

Yeah. Thank you very much. On page 11, there's a graph of the Dutch Harbor staitewater pecan fishery Looks like there was, at least to date, some underutilization of that GHL under harvest. And you're referencing sea ice conditions potentially as a reason why. Was there— are we— are you hearing from the fleet that there was a— I guess the conditions prohibited fishing in the setting of, of pots in the areas, or, and/or was there a combination of CPEs involved, and maybe there's some relationship between the two as well.

Yeah, my name's Carla Bush for the record. Thank you for the question, Madam Chair. Yeah, that sort of struck me too, that it looked like progress on the JHL was lacking or lagging behind other previous years, and so I asked our regional manager about that, and she stated that participation is similar to past years, so it's not a drop in effort. Prices are really good this year, and the best— or the— she did mention that catch per unit effort is down comparable to previous years. There was a lot of ice, as we all know, that covered much of the grounds.

You know, it was all the way down to False Pass this year and state water participation. The vessels were just having— the cod were less available in state water. She said there was one participant who dropped out of the fishery to go do his CDQ in federal waters and he had no problems catching the CDQ, but it's just been sluggish inside 3. There are vessels because price is higher that are fishing a little bit later this year than they typically would. Around this time, a lot of vessels start shifting towards salmon or other fisheries, but we still have, I guess, more participation than we typically have at this point in the fishery because the prices are good.

So yeah, I think they're at 76%, 77% now and would need to get at least to 90% in order to achieve a year when, when the GHL could increase. They have to attain at least 90% of the GHL in 2 years in order for the proportion of the ABC to increase or decrease if it's not achieved in a number of years. But we don't know exactly why, just theoretically it could be the ice and just for whatever reason lower availability of the cod in, in Site 3. Okay, thank you. Can you remind me when the season closing date is on that?

December 31st. Okay. And has there been a liberalization of pot limits? That— does that happen in some years? Typically that happens later in the season, um, so towards the end of the summer, fall.

Yeah. Thank you, appreciate that. Yes, Miss Vanderhoeven. Um, thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Miss Bush.

My question is on the letter regarding the crab hatchery permit application. And sorry, I'm trying to do this on the fly a little bit because I, I didn't notice the letter earlier in the week. So my understanding is that you're not looking for us to do anything in particular at this meeting except to say, crab plan team, look at this in the fall, it looks like, and then that's when you would be soliciting the council feedback that you're asking for. Am I reading that correctly? Through the chair, Mr.— Ms. Vanderhoeven, thank you for the question.

It's primarily informational, you know, understanding that the council's FMP sets up a joint state-federal management of crab.

The St. Paul King Crab Hatchery has been an ongoing project, and the state has developed crab hatchery regulations that were somewhat mirrored after our salmon hatchery regulations. It's a— we're all sort of in the learning phase when it comes to contemplating crab hatcheries. Following or mirroring that salmon hatchery permit process, there, there is a, a point in the application process where outside federal and technical expertise is solicited that the department can consider when we decide whether or not to approve a hatchery permit. So this is the first, or largely informational, but the request, understanding that the crab plan team is the council's advisory body, we would like to present, um, to give the crab planning plan short presentation, if, if, if possible, um, at their fall meeting, solicit some feedback, um, that the department would consider when, um, considering whether or not to approve the hatchery application.

Thank you. And Mr. Muller.

Yeah, thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Miss Bush, for, uh, the report here. My question goes to the recently created Lucian Islands golden king crab fishery. I think it's from the Dutch Harbor area there, but so relatively small fishery and new, one year, one year of data on that? Through the chair, Mr. Muller, yes, this is the first year.

So here's my question. Um, there was limited participation and one boat was limited in harvest. What happens to that crab if it's not harvested? Does it roll back or what happens to the crab that is not harvested? Uh, through the chair, Mr. Moler, yeah, that crab just stays in the water.

So it doesn't get added to a future year's GHL. The area that's open is really just the area sort of around Dutch Harbor and is outside the traditional fishing grounds of where the federal fishery participates. It has, as you mentioned, a very low GHL. I believe it was 50,000 pounds. I don't have the report in front of me.

And we had 2 vessels register. One actually made some landings, so harvest is confidential, potential, but if the full GHL is not attained, nothing happens. We just— those crabs stay in the water and we set a new GHL next year.

Thank you. And Ms. Gone. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you for the presentation. My question is also on the hatchery permit. I'm just wondering if you can give us a quick update because my understanding is the hatchery is being used this year, but the permit would be for moving forward.

Forward with the hatchery. Can you explain a little more about that timing? And just because we're already moving forward with the hatchery this year, there's crab there now. Thank you, through the chair, Mrs. Gowan. This is new to me too, so I might have to get back to you on some of the details, but this specific hatchery application is focused on taking 30 females with crab.

So the department would be permitting that specific take of that number of female crab for this purpose. And so that's really the, the question that, that we're focused on in this hatchery permit is, is to approve taking of X number of females for the purpose of this investigation and, and sort of a pilot level, if you will. If, if in the future things ramp up, then we would have to reconsider another application for a larger amount. But as you mentioned, this is all new, and so things aren't quite lining up exactly maybe the way we would like, but, but that is what this specific hatchery permit application is for, for 30 females. And I believe they had some issues trying to get them this year when they wanted to because of ice.

So, yeah.

Okay, thank you. I'm not seeing any other questions. Appreciate it. So that brings us to our B7 Coast Guard report, and Lieutenant Commander Rasky has a PowerPoint for us.

Okay, good afternoon, Madam Chair and council members. My name is Lieutenant Commander Jed Rasky. I'm the enforcement, um, domestic fisheries enforcement chief for the Arctic District, which is all of Alaska. Alaska, and today I'll be providing a short brief on the Operation Compliant Export, which is our tramper enforcement inside of Alaska. This brief was requested by a few council members, so I'll hopefully be able to answer any questions.

I will say that I am not the expert on tramper operations. There's probably about 50 people in this room that know more about the actual operations between the catcher processors and the trampers, so I'll do my best to to capture that. This brief is from the enforcement perspective. So the overview is that the Coast Guard Arctic District and NOAA's Office of Law Enforcement had partnered on an operation to ensure the landing of processed Alaskan groundfish to foreign-flagged tramp— tramper vessels, refrigerated cargo vessels, occurs in accordance with all applicable federal laws and regulations. And overall, together, we routinely monitor the refrigerated cargo tramper vessels and the U.S. vessels that offload product to them, and our monitoring and enforcement operations have not found any evidence of trampers illegally operating in Alaska's waters.

So what is a tramper? Typically, it's going to be a foreign flag. It's, it's definitely a refrigerated cargo vessel because they're freezing, they're taking frozen product and continuing to store it and move it as frozen product. They're receiving processed U.S. groundfish or products. It's typically in a box or a bag, and they're transporting the seafood overseas.

I have looked at the tramper, the global tramper activity. There's trampers that operate in Alaska's waters that literally operate around the globe, and this is kind of just one stop on the conveyor belt going from Europe through South America, Asia, all over the place. So it's a very well understood from a global perspective industry of the movement, international movement of seafood products as they go throughout the world for further processing and consumption. And where is it allowed? So specifically in Alaska's waters, it is allowed in a few places.

Internal waters, which I realize on this, on the screen, it's not very visible, but up in the Dutch Harbor area, there's some red lines. If you look at the presentation on your computer, you could probably see the red lines a little better, but these are what are called internal waters, and that is definitely allowed with no permit required. And then there's something called ports and roadsteads, and these are areas that NOAA has identified, and it's kind of a work in progress. There's been a couple different changes to these ports and roadsteads over time based on litigation and, and the industry's request of certain areas, but basically it's these historic areas where people could do the transfer activity where it's within a certain distance or visible site where the federal government and various other stakeholders can have oversight of it. So, you essentially, you can't do this kind of transfer without a permit beyond 3 nautical miles within our EEZ.

So, it is allowed in state waters with a permit, and it is allowed in the EEZ with a permit. Permit, but 100% of the time since I've been in this job since 2020, all of the tramper offloads have been within either internal waters or ports and roadsteads. And we have GIS shapefiles for this that we provide to our enforcement units so they know exactly where it's allowed. Even, even this morning I got a, a request from a unit that, hey, I think there's going to be a tramper operating in this area, and I gave them the shapefile and they were able to make sure that the tramper's operating legally.

And then what does it look like? So on the left-hand side, there's an AIS track, and this is completely open-source information on Sea Vision. So the green track line is the anchored tramper vessel, which is, uh, the larger vessel in the picture here, and then the red track line is the US-flagged catcher processor temporarily, uh, essentially mooring up to that vessel, the tramper vessel, and then doing the offload. The offloads can take usually at least 10 hours, sometimes up to days. So sometimes they just— the tracks basically look like they're just next to each other for days at a time.

This is what it typically looks like, and then on the right-hand side is where they're actually moored up to each other. So you can see that they're literally taking these cranes on the vessels and transporting the pallets of product over to the refrigerated cargo vessel where it's stacked within their, uh, vessel cargo holds. And, and we have, um, di— they have diagrams that show where all the different products are. There's other sources of information we could use. So I used to work for the Maritime Intelligence Fusion Center, and, and there are classified systems that we could use to determine if foreign-flagged, uh, tramper vessels are potentially operating in Alaska's waters.

We have no indication that they are, but the Maritime Intelligence Fusion Mission Center, or MIFIC, down in Alameda routinely every day pulls the information for all of Alaska to see if there's any dark vessels operating, and there's no indication of that. And then we can also use VMS obviously on the domestic fishing boats to make sure that if they don't have their AIS on, which they are required to do within, within 12 nautical miles if they're over 65 feet, if for some reason they didn't have their AIS on and they're required to transmit VMS then we could see that as well.

There is a large signal of the seasonal activity, and I've done this over multiple years, this graph. So on the top black bar is the total trampers, and then the red bar, the red line is the active trampers. And as you can see, there's, there's actually a pretty big difference in there. There are a lot of trampers that just sit at anchor for weeks at a time, and I have I have Excel spreadsheets where I look at this and say, wow, that tramper's just been sitting there for a long period of time, or maybe they'll go over to a cold storage facility and pick up some product at a pier and then go back and sit at anchor. But there are multiple trampers just at any given time sitting in Alaska's ports, waterways, and our ports, roadsteads, and internal waters that are not active.

They're not actually taking transfers from US vessels. Trampers. The signal very well aligns with the groundfish, so this, I pulled the 2024 groundfish in-season management report because I couldn't find the graph from 2025, but basically it looks the same, and you can see that basically from about the second week of January through the second week of December, there are trampers in Alaska waters. The only time there's not is basically the last two weeks in December and the first two weeks in January, and there's really no processed fish for them to take.

There are multiple governing laws, sir. Uh, sorry, excuse me. Thank you. Sorry, Lieutenant Commander, while you're on the slide, so I'm reading the, um, y-axis as anywhere from 0 to 10 operating at any one time, correct? Okay, thank you.

Yeah, up to 10 trampers. That's the highest we've ever seen is 10 total trampers in the Alaska The governing laws for the activity are obviously the Magnuson-Stevens Act, the Lacey Act for mostly labeling and product transfers, and then the Port State Measures Act. The Port State Measures Agreement, which was then written into an act for the U.S., is primarily for fish that's coming into the U.S. So we do have trampers that on the conveyor belt of seafood moving around the world will take primarily baitfish and squid and then land it in, or land it, offload it in places like Dutch Harbor for use as bait. So we have trampers that will be coming from Asia to Dutch Harbor.

They have to do a notice of arrival 96 hours prior to, so we get notification of that. We work with NOAA, we work with the CBP, their support director in Dutch Harbor, and we basically set up a boarding if there is one, or, or some type of check to make sure that the bait that's being transferred to the U.S. is legal and hasn't been caught illegally somewhere else and then landed into the U.S. So that's the Port State Measures Act part of it. And then the next few slides, I'm not going to read through all this, it's a lot of text, but these are the types of things that we're looking for for enforcement. So I do want to state, because this has come up a few times on some of the boardings that we've done, that the Coast Guard and NOAA are both authorized officers.

And then the other question we get are— so we're able to do these boardings and these are the authorities we have, but the other question we get routinely is, how can you board this vessel? And the reason is because it's a fishing vessel. And so I'll read a little bit here. It says the term fishing vessel means any vessel, boat, ship, other craft which is used for equip blah blah blah for fishing to include the activity of preparation, supply, storage, refrigeration, transportation. So that makes these tramper vessels a fishing vessel which we're authorized to board in accordance with the Magnuson-Stevens Act.

Those are questions we get quite often. And then I'll just quickly flip through these slides. These are the prohibitions. So basically you can't do— it says transshipment, but really there's a difference between transshipment, which would happen on in the EEZ out at sea, versus a landing or a product transfer that happens inside those areas, the ports, roadsteads, and internal waters. So the transshipment would happen out on the EEZ potentially, and that would have to be a permitted activity.

So that's the difference here. And then there's also within state waters, it would have to be permitted.

And then if there were products of, let's say, IFQ halibut, CDQ halibut, sablefish, or crab that somebody wanted to give to a tramper or land to a tramper, that would have to be authorized in advance, and there would have to be a local clearing officer to monitor that. That doesn't happen, I can tell you, but that is in crimes. And then for the labeling, so what, you know, what do we actually look at when we're on board? And I'll show some pictures of some of the cargo hold inspections. We're really looking at whether the products are mislabeled.

So if a product says that it's yellowfin sole, we need to open up a few sample products to make sure that it's not something that is prohibited to be transshipped and make sure that it is correctly labeled. And then, so, so we're looking for fish that are not what it says on the label, and then any other product information to make sure that it actually lines up with what the label says.

And like it says here, it has to be plainly marked, labeled, or tagged. And then there would be a prohibition— again, there is a prohibition against false labeling. So that's really what we're looking at when we get on board. And then on the greater accountability piece, so we look at a lot of different aspects aspects, you know, not just looking at the individual packages and the labeling, but looking at the big picture. On the U.S. vessels, we're looking at the electronic logbook information.

The Coast Guard doesn't have active access to that, but NOAA does. So NOAA, if they see something that doesn't match up throughout these systems, they'll let us know. Or if we requested the electronic logbook or catch information, we could get that. But the U.S., between the Coast Guard and NOAA, are looking at ELBs, vessel production reports and product transfer reports. The product transfer report is the landing.

So, when that piece of paper— and it has to be submitted weekly to NOAA— when that piece of paper goes into the record, then we have a basis for knowing what was transshipped. And then that way we can look on the tramper vessel itself, we can pull the mate's receipts, the ship's log manifest diagram, rams and, and throughout the inspection, we can compare the landing to what actually came across the, the, uh, to the tramper. And then the middle piece here is the AIS, uh, vessel track. So our Maritime Intelligence Fusion Center again does a weekly product for us, and they identify, uh, transshipment or potential transshipment, or, uh, sorry, landing activity transfers between the U.S. fishing vessel processors and the, uh, tramper vessels. And anything that looks like a transfer of any kind will get investigated.

And I can tell you, we had an incident where a crabber kind of floated by an anchored tramper vessel very slowly, and I looked at it on Sea Vision and did some like playback and stuff like that, and I was like, I don't know, that looks a little, a little weird. So we boarded the crabbing vessel and they said, nope, we didn't transfer any crab. We broke down, we actually drifted across, uh, pretty close this tramper vessel and just kind of made sure we didn't hit them. And then we boarded the tramper vessel and we actually were able to view their video monitoring system where we saw that the crabber was just disabled and, and, you know, drifting by. So we're, we're at that level of detail, detail where if we see something that looks nefarious, we will absolutely investigate it.

And then on the tramper vessel itself, like I said, the mates receipts, which, uh, before I'd come into this job I'd never even heard of, but basically the The MACE receipt should reflect exactly what the product transfer report says. So if they say we're going to transfer, let's say, 10,000 pounds or metric tons of something, and that's what's declared as landed to NOAA, then that should be exactly what's on the tramper vessel. I will say that the tramper vessels, you know, foreign crews, they don't necessarily have 100% accountability. They're not, they're not like counting the boxes. They, a lot of times they just take the word of the domestic fishing vessels.

So we know that the foreign flag cruise are— vessels and crews are not trying to act illegally. Like, we have no indication that they're trying to be nefarious. They want to buy product, they want to move it, and the US vessel does the transfer. They say, this is what we're transferring, and that's how the transfer happens. The mate signs off on it.

They try to verify as much as possible, but there could be a little bit of catch, and we have actually found some instances where there's small discrepancies there, but in general, the tramper vessels are acting very legally. They are very transparent. When there was an issue, we did a small seizure from the tramper vessel, and they said, yep, we don't want to take any product illegally outside the U.S. So, you know, if there is a small discrepancy, it's pretty easily rectified by the tramper vessel. And then we also inspect the fish holds themselves.

I'll just show a couple of pictures of that. It's a lot of fish. So basically we get their cargo loading diagram and we see where some of the products are that we're, we're more interested in. If there is a discrepancy or some type of derogatory information identified by OLE, that's what we'll look for. So we're not going to get on board and count every box of fish, but if we see a potential discrepancy in the paperwork, then we're definitely going to go on board and verify that.

That. We're also verifying that the products on board and the mates receipts line up with the transshipment— or sorry, the landing activity that we saw from our Maritime Intelligence Fusion Center. So if we see on AIS a transfer and NOAA's got a product transfer report and we get on board and we see boxes or bags of fish that line up, everything checks out, we're good to go. And we, we make sure that all of the network matches. I'll highlight here, we've got, you know, interagency partnerships with NOAA.

On the left-hand side is the CBP Port Director George Dominguez from Dutch Harbor. So, he does a lot of these boardings with us. He's getting on board to check the crew to make sure that they don't have any illegal people that aren't allowed to be in the U.S. or any other issues, especially if they're making a landing. If a tramper vessel vessel just, just moors up or sorry, just anchors offshore and they're not actually entering the U.S., not as big of a deal. But if the tramper vessel is going to moor up to a pier, then, you know, there could be some issues with people who aren't allowed to be in the United States.

So CBP is usually a part of this and we all go through the cargo holds and count boxes of fish and look at labels and everything like that. So it's definitely an interagency coordination, mostly with OLE, but definitely with CBP. BPP as well. And yeah, I would say this is one of the most highly regulated and highly scrutinized industries because of the amount of groundfish that's using— leaving the U.S. So we want to make sure that, you know, nobody is acting nefariously and everybody's above board.

That concludes my presentation, and I'll be standing by for any questions. Thank you very much for the presentation. See if there are any Yes, Mr. Thum. Thanks, Madam Chair. Thanks, Lieutenant Commander, for the presentation.

Um, I was curious about— and you started to get this at the very end with CBP involved— of, given this has the potential to be a pipeline for products coming into the US illegally and those kinds of things, do you ever find other contraband or things like that and have that as part of your investigation, or is it very strictly fisheries-focused, and how do you deal with that? From the Coast Guard's perspective, we're looking at to enforce all U.S. laws and regulations, which is why we love it when NOAA's on board and CBP's on board. That way, if we do have an issue, we can bring it up to the correct agency pretty quickly. We haven't found anything like drugs or weapons or anything that's not allowed to be coming into the U.S., and from the boardings that we've done where the tramp was bringing in bait and baiter squid, we know exactly what we're looking for is potentially illegal, and we haven't found that. We haven't found any baiter squid that was caught illegally in another country or international waters and then landed in the U.S.

So everything's been above board on the import side for sure. Does that answer your question? Yeah, that's good to hear.

Ms. Kimball. Thank you, Lieutenant Commander. I just wanted I just want to say thank you for the overview. I think it's a piece of the rules and permitting that we don't usually get a report on, so it's really good to understand the Coast Guard's very comprehensive routine monitoring of tramper vessels and all the permitting that goes into those specific locations. So I just wanted to say thanks for laying that out in a very clear way.

Thank you. Through the Chair, thank you, Ms. Kim.

Thank you, Lieutenant Commander. And I shall say we also provided a written report. It doesn't, uh, have anything to do with the Tramper's Chair, but, um, if anybody has any questions on the written report, I'm available as well. Great, thank you. Let's see if there are any questions on the written report.

Okay, see none. Thank you. Thank you.

So I'd like to now I'm going to ask Mr. Kelly Susewind to join us, the Director of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Welcome. Thank you for joining us this afternoon. Just wanted to provide a couple moments for you to share any remarks. Thank you, Madam Chair. Pleased to be here, and I appreciate you squeezing me into a packed agenda.

I know how these council meetings go, and I appreciate the opportunity.

My primary purpose here is to introduce myself and the agency a little bit, but also to welcome you to Washington. Glad to have you here in our beautiful state. For the record, my name is Kelly Susewin. I'm the director of the Washington State Department of Ecology— excuse me, Department of Fish and Fish and Wildlife. Last time I was in this room was a long time ago, ecology meeting.

So the Department of Fish and Wildlife, as opposed to that other lesser agency I mentioned, we have about a little over 2,000 employees, and we operate on an $800 million biennial budget, so $400 million a year. We manage hunting, fishing, recreational, commercial fishing, permit hydraulic projects. We're responsible for managing 254 wildlife Species of great conservation need. We also own as an agency a little over 1 million acres, and we have about 450 water access sites. Integral— I see Captain Wickersham there— integral to our department is our enforcement division, where we have about 140 law enforcement officers.

They not only manage and enforce our fish and wildlife regulations, but they're the ones that keep a key enforcement presence on marine freshwaters, roads, trails, paths, everything from our arid shrub steppe environment to the mountains to our rainforest on the Pacific Coast. We also have staff engaged on the Columbia River. You're here on the border, on the edge of the Columbia River, obviously engaged in the Columbia River Hydro Project, which serves to be the nursery for a lot of these fish that end up in the Pacific and North Pacific fishery. Fisheries. We manage major construction projects through our CAMP group, and we also have folks working in the critical areas ordinances with our local governments to make sure that we're doing what we can to preserve the habitat we have that ultimately, again, provides the basis for these fisheries.

Along with that, we manage one of the world's largest hatchery systems with over 80 hatcheries statewide that we manage in collaboration with our tribal partners.. So as you can see, imagine, there's no such thing as a boring day at the Department of Fish and Wildlife. Much like Alaska, we have many diverse ecoregions, and the lifestyle, the outdoor lifestyle, is really what Washington's about. It's not just something we do, it really is our critical identity, and so we really put a huge value on maintaining and contributing in that way of life. Myself, I was born on the coast in a small community I'm a Tlingit, officially a Mossback, from Grays Harbor, and so I have a keen awareness of the value of these commercial fisheries and the importance of these commercial fisheries to our local and rural communities.

Many of our fishermen participate in these Alaska fisheries, from the independent operator up to the big, bigger corporations, as you're aware. Many of those all have a part of the Alaska fishery in their portfolio, In addition, we have the key ports of Seattle, Bremerton, and Bellingham, and Westport providing infrastructure and also a pipeline for supplies for those fisheries. Don't have to tell the folks here the importance of fish to the economy of the country and to providing that high, high protein, clean protein to folks that just can't rely on that where they might live. And as you know, most of that comes from Alaska.

Since it's— we're at this meeting, I want to also take special note to recognize it's the 50th anniversary of the Magnuson-Stevens Act. We hold that up as a great example of where industry-states can work and engage in federal decision-making. So it's a great, great model, we believe. I got to sit through some of the reports this morning. Very impressed.

I'm always impressed by the level of scientific integrity that this, this council uses. Your method for public engagement, uh, I hear complaints sometimes about the slowness of council processes, and I always think that, well, that's because they're doing a good process. They're basing it on the best available science and making decisions that are durable and sound. Really critical for us all. I also, in addition to welcoming you here, I wanted to thank you all on the, on the council for your time and your dedication to these jobs.

I know how tough it is to be up here, the amount of energy and devotion it takes to do this and be sitting here making the really hard decisions and doing it for, for the benefit of us all.

Also, I touched on NOAA, NOAA Foye's. I really enjoyed, I guess you all are used to it, that was my first presentation by Dr. Foye and wow, a little nervous following a presentation like that, but particularly the reduction in staff at NOAA Fisheries, particularly concerning for us with the huge reductions that Dr. Foye laid out, and a great appreciation to Mr. Kurland and Dr. Foye for prioritizing the resources. When you lose that much, it's a terrible cost, it's also a burden on those that are left behind that have— are left to carry that load. And I believe you do a really exceptional job of prioritizing the needs of this council to make sure that we can continue to have those solid decisions made and based in science. So thank you for that.

On that front, I will say that we are closely engaged with our congressional delegation to try to send that the other direction on your funding, and we'll continue to do all that given the increasing challenges and demands on this group, along with changing environmental conditions, we can afford less now than ever to do that, to not have you funded properly. Thank you to my DFW staff and team here. I've been on— I've been the director for about 8 years, and in that time I've only had 2 representatives here at this council. I've been very lucky. First, the legendary Bill Twight served for many years, and I really thanks to Bill, who I think— there he is, he's in the room— and now for Nate.

Both Bill and Nate are exceptional intergovernmental negotiators, understanding this fishery, and do a great job. I'm always comfortable and proud to have them represent the agency in the state. I know we're in good hands. Uh, I meet with Nate before each meeting. Nate, if you don't know yet, is an Alaska by raising in Alaska, and he's stepped up and became an adopted child of the state of Washington now.

And so, uh, those of you that know Nate already know this. Those who are getting to know it probably already know it as well. Nate's an exceptional communicator. He uses that skill to keep me abreast of what's going on before and after these meetings. So again, I'm, I'm very confident of what's going on here.

This is my first time actually attending, but I'm keeping an eye on you through Nate, and it's, it's always helpful to, to have great employees in that, that role. Uh, I know you're on a tight schedule and you have some really interesting presentations, so I'll wrap up there mainly. Again, welcome to Washington. I'm going to hang around for the day and then into the reception tonight, so I'd encourage each of you, if you get a chance, stop by, and I'd love to, to meet you, and I'll get to know you a little better. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you. Thank you for those kind and thoughtful remarks. Really appreciate it. And we also really appreciate working with Nate and Ms. Bill tremendously. So, and thank you for welcoming us to Washington.

So I think that'll bring us to a good spot for our mid-afternoon break. Break. Let's come back at 3:10, and we will begin, uh, with the cooperative reports under B9. We have a number of reports that we'll try to make it through before the end of the day. Thank you.

Hello, Keith.

I'm having— Council members, please come back to order.

Hey, welcome back everyone. So we are beginning our B9 cooperative IPA, C-Share, and TRAL-EM reports. Uh, we have Sarah Merriman and Dr. Kate Hapla here to introduce B9.

Thank you, Madam Chair, members of the council, Sarah Merriman, council staff. With me, as you just mentioned, is Kate Hapla. We're going to provide a, just a quick intro here for B9. This is cooperative reports, salmon bycatch incentive plan agreement reports, trawl electronic monitoring monitoring, IPA reports, and a C-Share report as well.

The council's received a number of written reports. We have a designated webpage for cooperative and IPA reports now that's linked in the e-agenda, and it's linked here on this slide. Hopefully you've had a chance to see those submitted reports and review them. Under this agenda item, you're tasked to consider the written reports and the letters submitted to the Council, and then you're going to receive a suite of oral presentations on some of those reports as well. So there's no action associated with B9, but the Council can consider these data collection requests and any possible modifications to the information presented.

I just want to note here, um, as highlighted in the action memo, and as we kind of remind you every year, that mandatory or voluntary information requests of 10 or more people or entities requires review and approval by Office of Management and Budget, OMB. This series of reports all have approval by OMB, so this would be if you have additional information or changes to information you see, there may need to be a modification to an existing information request. This isn't to dissuade you from asking for different information or clarification of information, information, but just even if it's a small request for these reports, it's best if those kinds of requests are pursued with a clear explanation of the objective of the information so staff can track those types of requests.

The first type of reports, um, that are listed on the agenda, um, The next are the co-op reports. These are typically provided each year to the Council in April. As you know, the Council has developed several cooperative-based catch share programs over the years. As part of the— these programs, the Council's often included some type of reporting requirement or request. All of these reports are focused on different aspects of the fishery that we've highlighted— that have been highlighted as important topics along the way.

The AFA is the only cooperative report that's required to be submitted to the Council, and you can see on our webpage that's linked, all 5 active inshore cooperatives have been submitted, and there's an inshore intercooperative report as well. The mothership report is linked as well as the CP co-op report, and we're planning to hear 2 presentations from the AFA co-op reports today. Amendment 80 has a reporting requirement to NIMS with a voluntary submission to the to the Council. In recent years, the one AMM 80 co-op has submitted that written report to the Council that's linked on the agenda and on the web page. The Central Gulf Rockfish program used to have a required report, but when the program was reauthorized in 2021, that turned into a voluntary submission.

In recent years, we've received a report from one of the rockfish co-ops, and as we're planning for today, an inter-co-op presentation on behalf of the other 4 active cooperatives.

We'll hear about that as well. The crab rationalization program has a voluntary report since 2013 that was focused around a few key topics of interest. We've— this year we received 3 written reports from crab co-ops. The Bering Sea Aleutian Island Pacific Cod Trawl Cooperative Program has a voluntary reporting requirement environment. We received 4 written reports from all of the active co-ops and will receive a PCTC inter-co-op presentation today as well.

Okay, members of the council, Kate Hoplow with council staff. So as Sarah mentioned, you will also be receiving oral presentations from IPA representatives today. Just as a brief reminder, the Salmon Bycatch Incentive Plan agreements, or the IPAs, were established for participants in the Bering Sea pollock fishery alongside the Chinook salmon hard cap, which was implemented in 2011. The IPAs establish incentives and penalties for salmon avoidance, and those IPAs are required by federal regulation to submit annual reports to the council, and regulations also specify the content that must be covered in these reports. And so today, the presentations that you'll receive will cover both 2024 and 2025 performance.

And then this is the first year that the Council is receiving a trawl EM monitoring IPA report. NOAA implemented a regulated trawl EM program for pelagic trawl catcher vessels and tenders in 2025. For the BSAI and the GOA— excuse me, the Gulf of Alaska— participation in the trawl EM category is voluntary, and a vessel owner or operator must opt into the category on an annual basis. So for CVs that are directed fishing for pollock with pelagic trawl gear in the Gulf of Alaska or Aleutian Island fisheries specifically, if they do opt in, they must also be a part of the trawl EM incentive plan agreement. Certain exemptions were provided for CVs in the trawl EM category when the program was implemented, and the annual report is intended to demonstrate that vessels have not changed their behavior in response to those exemptions.

This is the first year, and so there's one trawl EM IPA that was formed and approved by NMFS, and the council will receive an oral report on that in addition to the written report that's posted to the webpage.

Okay, the council will also receive an update from C-Share under this agenda item. C-Share is a nonprofit and tax-exempt organization authorized by NIMPS to distribute Pacific salmon and halibut to hunger relief agencies, food bank networks, and other distributors under the Prohibited Species Donation Program. The council periodically receives or has requested an update from SeaShare on its efforts and work over the last or recent years. So this update is somewhat different from the annual cooperative and IPA reports, but it's included under this agenda item because it has related and relevant information. There's no action for the council that's associated with the C-Share update.

So here is our list of presenters under D9. Some of the representatives have a few presentations to provide. This is the list we originally established, but we're going to go with a little bit of a different order because we have two AP members in our presentation list. So we're going to start the list of presentations with Chelsea Riddell and Danielle Bennett presenting on the trawl EM IPA report. We can switch over from there unless there's any questions for us.

Not seeing any. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Madam Chair, members of the council. For the record, my name is Chelsea Riddell, and this will be my last time presenting to you in this capacity. As you know, I'm the outgoing inter-co-op manager for the Rockfish program and trawl IM, trawl EM IPA representative. So this is the conclusion of the 2025 duty duties, and then I brought with me Danielle Bennett, who has taken over and been hired by the Trawl Association and the Rockfish Co-ops to continue this work, and so I thought it would be good for her to come sit with me once before she has to do it alone for you next year.

All right, to get started, as staff noted, there's a very comprehensive report. I know this is the first time you're hearing this. I was asked to try to keep this short, um, in the oral presentation since you have so many. So I am happy to answer any questions, but I did try to keep it a little bit high level, um, and summarizing it, but there is a lot more nuance in the document.

Alright, so what is the trawl EMIPA? The trawl electronic monitoring program was developed as a compliance monitoring tool to increase monitoring on pollock catcher vessels and improve accounting precision, precision for salmon. A key element of this program program is the maximum retention requirement, which means that vessels must retain all catch with a few limited exceptions for like safety and large sharks so that all harvest can be accounted for by the observers at the plant instead of sampling on the vessel. So when developing the Trolley M program, the maximum retention requirement made some exemptions from other existing regulations necessary, and those regulations include the prohibitions against exceeding the Gulf of Alaska 300,000-pound pollock trip and daily limits, which were part of Stellar Sea Lion regulations, prohibitions against exceeding maximum retainable amounts, or MRAs, which you guys should be experts at after the last action, and then prohibitions exemptions against vessels having on board any time 20 or more crabs of any species, and then requirements to discard halibut or crab PSC at sea on non-AM trips. The purpose of the IPA is to monitor behavior against these exemptions and evaluate whether behavior has significantly changed, and to create incentives and disincentives for fishing behaviors and hold vessels accountable to the intent of the regulations despite them being exempt.

As staff said, all Gulf of Alaska trawl E/M vessels must be party to a TMIPA, and this is currently the only aval— available IPA for trawl E/M, but that doesn't preclude someone else from starting another one.

So the Gulf of Alaska Trawl Electronic Monitoring Association, Association was created to manage the IPA. It has 6 board of directors plus the trawling IPA representative who acts as a 7th voting board member. The association is responsible for designating the IPA representative who administers the IPA in coordination with vessel operators, processors, and NMFS Alaska Region staff. The incentive plan builds upon the operational standards that we use during the development of the Trolley M program during the EFP years between 2020 and 2024. So the representative throughout the season monitors vessel performance relative to Pollack trip limits, MRA performance standards, PSE requirements, and other obligations established under the IPA.

At the conclusion of both A and B seasons, vessels are notified their performance, and then the enforcement framework includes requirements for forfeiting proceeds if they did have overages and had value from those overages, a liquidated damages schedule, and potential loss of eligibility for future participation.

The primary incentive to participate in Trawl EM is, as I said, improved salmon accounting due to census counts of all salmon, all EM deliveries, which was new for the Gulf with the implementation of this program. Other incentives to continue to participate include improved monitoring data for catch accounting and compliance, reduced at-sea discards through maximum retention, operational flexibility under the framework, and then particularly for the Western Gulf Fleet, no long wait times for vessel observers in remote ports.

So one of the requirements of the IPA and the regulations for the annual report is to report about the trolley and pollock harvest and PSC. There were a total of 964 Gulf trolley and pollock trips in 2025, and I will note that that's just from what the data the Alaska Region gave me at the end of the season. I haven't compared that number to the annual report, so for the Observer Program. So there was 233,413,000 or million pounds of pollock harvested in the Gulf on trawl EM trips, which accounts for 78.6% of all Gulf pollock harvest, which is the highest to date, higher than any of the EFP years since all but 2 Gulf trawl vessels participated in the program in 2022. 2025.

Despite being exempted from the prohibition of having 20 or more crab on board at any time, the data shows there wasn't any changed behavior. So I do realize that typically we look at salmon and crab numbers in counts rather than pounds, but this is how the data is provided. You can see that PSE species were a very small percentage of all Pollock harvest and trolley M. All right, so the pollock trip limit performance standard, and this is where it gets a little complicated. So the goal is to ensure that vessels on trolley M trips remain at or below 300,000-pound pollock trip limit on an average basis over the course of 4 trips, because remember, if they were still on non-M trips, they would be able and required to discard so that they didn't deliver more than 300,000 pounds. But fishing isn't perfect, and so they needed that flexibility of averaging it out over 4 trips so that they could comply rather than potentially having a lot more overages.

So there are 3 trips, 3 types of trip limit calculations to monitor performance. There's this sequential 4-trip average calculations for vessels greater than or equal to 600 feet in length, the egregious trip overage provision for deliveries exceeding 335,000 pounds, which matches, um, what it would be on non-EM trips. And then we also created in 2023, after 2023 I believe, a calendar day delivery, uh, 4-trip average calculation, which is primarily used for smaller vessels under 60 foot in length that can't deliver more than 300,000 pounds in one trip. But due to their use of tender deliveries in the Western Gulf, it is possible for them to potentially deliver more than 300,000 pounds in a calendar day, which is also part of the regulation. So when we saw that behavior change, we made the change— not really behavior change, it's just there was tender trips and it started happening.

And so rather than being delivered across the dock in Accutane And so we made that change for the following year.

So the public trip limit offenses and fines. Trip limit overages, whether they are a 4-trip average or an egregious overage, are counted consecutively across the year. One egregious overage plus one trip average overage would equal 2 offenses. So they're not calculated separately, you get 4 total. Vessels are required to forfeit the value of that overage plus are issued the respective fine.

And I would urge you as we're looking at the data to understand like the operational reality is that no matter how close a captain is paying attention even to that 4-trip limit average, there are unavoidable circumstances and challenges that result in overages.

So in 2025, as I said, there was 964 trawl EM trips, and 29 of those trips had pollock overages, which represented just 3% of trawl EM trips, and 0.39% of the total trawl EM pollock harvest was overage pounds. So this indicates that the performance standard is working to prevent behavior changes from the requirement to retain pollock. Overall, the type and distribution of overages was pretty consistent with what we've seen in past years. A season when pollock are spawning always has the tendency to have more overages, and the— when there's less 4-trip average overages, that indicates that they are paying attention to to stay under that average, but there's these egregious situations that come up. Um, and overall there was just under 1 million pounds across the year that was, um, overage pounds.

All right, so the Gulf of Alaska maximum retainable amounts— these are the percentages found in Table 10 of the CFR. MRAs These are the percentages of incidental species a vessel is allowed to retain when targeting a different species. Note this does not apply to prohibited species. Outside of Trolley M, vessels are required to discard any incidental catch of an MRA species over that species-specific or aggregated species percentage. While incidental catch happens in every fishery, MRAs help to prevent excessive incidental catch and are also used to trigger a directed fishing definition, which determines how many other regulations may apply.

Since incidental catch is unavoidable to an extent as well, the first and second offenses for exceeding an MRA do not have an associated fine. However, vessels are still required to forfeit proceeds above $250 for all overage offenses.

And this, this is the table with the offenses, and then once you get to the third offense, the fines increase much more rapidly than they do on the trip limits since you do get two sort of passes. But regardless of whether it's your first or second offense, you still have to forfeit any proceeds if the processor does pay you for that catch.

So trawling M performance towards the MRA performance standard. Overall for the year, MRA overages occurred on 4.4% of trawling M trips and comprised 0.17% of the total trawling M pollock harvest. All MRAs were of aggregated rockfish, which is for catcher vessels in Table 10 almost every species of rockfish except for a few others that aren't really even seen in the pollock fishery. However, the main species in the catch as usual was primarily Pacific Ocean perch, which is consistent with prior years, and I'm sure you've all heard me say multiple times and also our stock authors say that the biomass of POP in the Gulf has dramatically increased. So the data also shows that the performance standard appears to be working as intended, and there was just 6 overages in A season, which is also typical for MRAs.

When fish are spawning, the pollock are spawning, fishing is clean, so this is usually just kind of trips at the beginning or end of A season may run into rockfish um, but B season when fishing is slower and the pollock aren't aggregated, they tend— and they're also fishing in 630, which has the majority of the quota— they just interact with rockfish a lot more, which look the same as pollock on their net sounders and are frequently commingling in the water column.

And so the total overage pounds for the year on Trolley M was 0.17% of the catches. I said said, or 391,000 pounds.

Another requirement of the annual report in the IPA regulations is to communicate, um, that all participating vessels remain subject to applicable Steller's sea lion protection measures found at 50 CFR 679.22 throughout the year. And while this is a requirement for me to report in the IPA, it also remains a regulatory requirement for the fleet, but it is impacted by directed fishing definition calculations that— and it's monitored by NMFS Office of Law Enforcement through vessel monitoring systems or by review of EM video data. The regulations also require that this annual report to address whether trolley EM vessels fished in conflict with the specifications during the fishing year. If any of these types of violations occurred, neither the Alaska Region nor law enforcement notified the IPA representative, myself.

So in conclusion, Troll E/M was developed to increase monitoring, which it has done an amazing job in the Gulf Pollack fishery and has really dramatically dramatically improved our accounting precision for salmon PSC. So the requirement to retain all these species means that they can be accounted for by observers, and while these maximum retention requirements require the exemption, this IPA, which I should have mentioned at the beginning, is approved on an annual basis by NMFS Alaska Region, allows us to ensure that vessels performing with the intention of the regulations. I'll also note that when overages did occur, vessels nearly always self-report prior to the fish ticket information being available. The IPA has really created an important culture of communication and accountability despite necessary exemptions from regulations. As IPA representative, you spend a lot of time on the phone throughout the season with the safely, as I'm sure Danielle could now attest, because they're always making sure they're doing it right.

Um, so with that, I will be happy to take any questions.

Thank you very much for the report. And Miss Speaker?

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Miss Riddell, and thank you, Danielle, for being here. Um, I, I have a couple of questions. 2 Questions. One's kind of detailed and then a broader one, and, and it's actually on your very last bullet on the conclusion slide.

I just think this is more to make sure I'm understanding.

When overages did occur, vessels nearly always self-reported prior to the fish ticket information being available. What you mean by that is vessels self-reporting routed to the man— to the IPA manager, and then as part of the process, the IPA manager verifies using fish ticket information if in fact an overage did occur. I think there's just sometimes maybe some public perception that some of our catch accounting data is self-reported, and I just want to be very clear that what I just described is the way that it occurs under the trolley MIPA. Yes, thank you, Ms. Baker, through the chair. That is an important distinction, so I'll just go a little bit more into detail on the process.

So yes, the MIPA representative can verify that information in eLandings in season and usually uses that to help vessels determine their overages, but at the end of the the NIMS region sends a full database of all the Gulf trolley am trips. It's usually a couple weeks after the season just to make sure that everything in eLandings is, and then in the NIMS system, is accurate and updated. Sometimes there's some trip miscoding, and so they then send that data to the IPA representative. So the representative representative gets that data, and NIMS, I'm sure, is also reviewing that data themselves too to ensure that what we're reporting is accurate. And then we do the calculations of all the overages at the end and issue all the invoices at the end.

But yes, that is all data that is submitted through eLandings by the processing plant, and processors are still required to mark the overage on the fish ticket. It's just instead of communicating to OLE that an overage occurred, the IPA manager deals with it at the end of the year season.

Thank you for that. And my second question is, is really, given that this is the first year of the report, and I would love to take advantage of, of your knowledge and experience as we move on to future years. Were there any reporting requirements or any of the aspects that, that the council program implemented by NIMS required you to report here for TrolleyM that were difficult, or was it pretty much as you expected to, you know, collect these things and, and report out? I'm just wondering if you have any feedback for us in that regard.

Thanks. Through the chair. Um, yes. So, So in general, yes, it's pretty easy. So we had been doing this exact same process throughout the EFP, so we've kind of gotten a well-oiled machine.

I think one challenge, and this is also sort of just a challenge for region staff, is, but they've made some improvements to providing the data in a pivot table, just because all landings, there'll be like multiple rows for the same landings when you get data from eLandings, and that's kind of a pain. So getting, you know, I think if someday catch accounting improve, um, just our infrastructure and ability and staff— staffing improves to give a prettier report, that would be great. Um, so there's not quite so much manual copying, pasting. Um, and then the other piece is it is just a little bit awkward, the requirement to like report on the things that the IPA manager doesn't have the ability to monitor, like the Stellar Sea Lion and fishing in compliance with the harvest specifications. I think that was added during rulemaking and isn't something we had done prior, so that's a little bit different.

The other thing that I didn't kind of get into the nuance but is included in the report is that when the regulations were made, because this is how we did it in the EFP, the regulations require us to compare the amount of overages to non-EM trips. And so I checked with Region staff before I was submitting the report because there's no longer enough non-EM POLIC trips. If there's only 2 vessels, that's not confidential data anymore. So, so it kind of creates this awkward, um, yeah, we may need to improve, like, fix that. So what I do is I compare the fleet overall all to each other.

You can see there's multiple different tables in the written report to look in and further evaluate the behavior change since we really only now can compare it to themselves. And then also just looking at factors like, is this vessel consistently doing this, or, oh, is that a new captain that's learning the ropes? So there's definitely those nuances Mr. Thum. Thank you, Madam Chair. Ms. Riddell, I really appreciate this.

It's a good program, and I was curious about the incentive piece. I think you make a statement in here that the incentives seem to be working as planned. I was curious with the graduated sort of enforcement penalty side of it. I didn't see any information of talking about like how many vessels had multiple multiple, you know, times versus 1 or 2, and are they sort of self-correcting and avoiding 3 or 4 times, that kind of information, if you have that? Yes, thanks.

Through the chair, I should have had the report, written report pulled up. So, in general, yes. For example, so all of those tables were required to report by vessel name, so that's all in the written report. I will say there's 1 vessel that had 4 overridges, and it was a brand new captain that had never fished in the Gulf with a trip limit and a larger capacity boat, and there were some challenges. But in general, yes, vessels are very much self-correcting.

Honestly, they get really stressed out about making sure that they're under it. And so yes, they are in general, like, very self-correcting. I also always give them feedback on how they compare to the average when we're doing invoices, and I did that in the FP, and they don't like to be the worst at things. So if nothing, fishermen are competitive. So thank you.

And Mr. Kerlin. Thanks, Madam Chair. Thanks for the report. So I have two related questions to dealing with offenses and fines. First is, were the IPA managers able to collect all the penalties listed in the report, or were there any issues associated with that?

Thanks. Through the Chair, Mr. Kerlin, yes, the IPA managers were able to collect all of the fines And so that's where the legal structure of the Gulf Trolley Em Association comes into effect, and I maybe should have clarified that a little bit more in the written report that those fines were also paid. But yes, they're able to do that. And then so there's penalties and requirements in the legal documents of like the IPA that we would report that to NMFS, and then that could be factored into whether they're allowed into trawl Trolley M in subsequent years if they are not paying fines, since that determination is ultimately like the agency's responsibility of whether they can participate or not. Okay, thanks.

And then second question was the, the Trolley M Association. How did the Trolley M Association use the collected penalties, or could you explain the disposition plan for any remaining funds. Thanks, through the chair. Yes, so the, the primary goal of the Trolley M Association is to pay for the management. So that is the ultimate goal.

So they, um, in 2025 paid, um, for me to work and do this, this work. Since, as you're aware, the golf doesn't have any cooperative structure, there had to be a structure to have someone to be able to pay somebody to do this. And so now they're paying Danielle to be able to complete this work. And then beyond that, the structure allows— it's a nonprofit, and so it's allowed to donate to research and other projects that will better the Gulf of Alaska fleet in terms of advancing research or data. So right now, especially with this transition, they are are just holding the funds to ensure that they have the ability.

They're also considering some data improvements that the Rockfish program has put in, in creating database to better manage the fishery so that the IPA representative doesn't have to do everything by just Excel spreadsheets and downloading every day from e-landings like we did. So the Gulf was still very like behind in their management, like their tools that they have. Um, so that's really been the primary focus for now, is modernizing the data system so that hopefully we can make sure Danielle stays forever. Thanks very much.

Okay, thank you for the report. Appreciate it.

All right, thank you. Um, through the chair, are you ready for me to begin? All right, so I will now begin the Central Gulf of Alaska Rockfish Program, and I'm really sorry to everyone in the background. The lighting is not great on this presentation. So once again, for the record, this is Chelsea Riddell, the outgoing 2025 Rockfish Co-op Inter— or Rockfish Program Shoreside Inter-Co-op Manager, and with me is Danielle Bennett, the 2026 Inter-Co-op Manager.

So this— we'll go through a brief summary of the Central Gulf of Alaska Rockfish Program. Allocates not only primary brockfish species of POP, northerns and duskies, but secondary species of sablefish, Pacific cod, and thornyhead, as well as halibut to catcher vessels. There's a bycatch cap with allocation— with allocations to vessels and their cooperatives for the halibut, but then there's a sector-level bycatch cap for Chinook salmon that is shared among all vessels. It's 1,200 fish. The program was created to slow the pace of the fishery, reduce PSC, and provide economic benefits to Kodiak by stabilizing the trawl fleet, processor workforce, and removing the processing time conflict with the summer salmon seasons.

There is a 100% observer coverage requirement with a 100% requirement for retention except for halibut, which is still required to be discarded at sea with a minimum of injury. There are catch monitoring and control plans at the processing plants. Oops, and I forgot to remove a bullet from last year. We already did the rockfish program review.

All right, so weekly primary rockfish harvest 2022 through 2025. I put 2025 in red bold again for you so you can see where it compares to recent years.. You'll see a gradual ramp up in April, which I'll talk more about later in the presentation, with our peak in May. No summer fishing this year, or in 2025, and then a peak at the end when Pawlik closed.

Mussel participation was still below average but was improved from 2022. 2024, Which had that dip down to 18 vessels, so we were at 21. There's 46 catcher vessel LLPs in the program, but typically an average of 26 vessels participate each year. Participation did improve, as I said.

Processor consolidation. The number of active qualified rockfish processing companies continues to decline, and so in 2025, There was further consolidation in Kodiak where two Rockfish Program processing companies consolidated into one, bringing the number of companies purchasing Rockfish Program deliveries in Kodiak to 3, which I just think is an important distinction. Although there are still 4 Rockfish Program cooperatives and deliveries are still being processed at 4 facilities, that's just a nuance in the, in the consolidation.

Our Salmon Bycatch Avoidance Agreement, I won't get too into detail because most of you have seen this in previous years. So the Salmon Bycatch Avoidance Agreement is part of our intercooperative agreement that all 4 cooperatives must sign on to each year, and the agreement had largely been the same since from 2015 to 2023, and we did a major overhaul in 2024. So then we've largely stayed the same since then, excuse me, including this year in 2026, although there were a couple modifications, small modifications. So Part 1 is our general provisions. This includes the salmon excluder requirements, which is required on all pelagic and non-pelagic rockfish tows, and I've— and that was new in 2025.

So in 2024, I had reported it was only required on pelagic trips, but the Inter-Co-op Board gave 1-year notice to vessels that they also needed to develop an excluder for their non-pelagic trips and start using it. So in 2025, now all rockfish trips, regardless of gear type, had— were required to have given excluders.

And then Part 2 is the slow start provisions, which govern the beginning of the fishery. They are by co-op, and they typically start in April, but if a co-op doesn't start fishing until May, then they are at a slow start as well. It begins again based on the co-op, and so this really helps a lot of communication slow the pace of the fishery down on the grounds in April or May when they're beginning. There's definitely been a lot more salmon on the grounds in recent years, and so things are different every year. And then Part 3 is the performance standard that outlines how the fishery operates once the slow start ends.

And just to reiterate, we use Rockfish Program Chinook areas now to close individual vessels out of areas where they receive a hot spot, um, unless it becomes a, a fleet-wide problem, um, because sometimes one boat may get a hotspot in an area and another boat will be completely clean, um, and so it also allows us to have areas that can be closed completely if needed, but really moves the Gulf Fleet away from areas of high, um, PSC rather than just having hotspots reported.

So there's a red, yellow, and green light for every delivery. Processors are required to notify the fleet before they leave the dock, and this table, which I won't read completely, documents the, the rate for each rate level and then the required action that has to occur, and they only apply to directed rockfish trips just because we've never had an issue with salmon PSC on target sablefish or cod trips.

So for our Central Gulf Rockfish Program Chinook PSC, this is based on at-sea basket samples by observers, so the cap is the red line and 2015 shows when the cap went into effect. In 2025, the number according to NIMS catch accounting was 498 chinook out of 13,667 metric tons of rockfish harvest, which was a slightly higher rate but still better than, um, 2023. So it was 0.036 chinook per metric ton of rockfish, and that is below the long-term average.

Our halibut PSE management, we have a halibut management plan that also has performance standards for vessels. They don't really ever reach that level where it's an issue, but it does exist and it does put individual accountability on a vessel, so they're allocated their halibut quota and they must stop fishing until the vessel vessels' fishing practices can be assessed if they do have a rate that is problematic. And so last year I went into detail about the extrapolation in 2024 that was really based on an observer only sampling a small number of hauls on a boat. And so we had an extrapolation on a single trip that was far above what we had ever seen and wasn't indicative of fish tickets, and so we have returned back down to our normal level of halibut PSC.

Oops, and then lastly, since I've been reporting every year on the impacts of Amendment 113 to the Gulf Fisheries Management Plan, which was 4 different amendments, I wanted to report on on the movement of the season start date from May 1st to April 1st, since 2025 was the first regulated year that that change was in effect. It was by emergency rule in 2021, and since we also have activity, like we also did that again in 2026, and you guys are receiving this presentation in June rather than April, I had Danielle also put together some 2026 data to just show kind of some of the challenges and the slow start pace of the fishery. So salmon bycatch during April has proven to continue to be a constraining factor to harvest in both years. There was definitely more hesitancy to begin fishing in April this year, since I now work for one of the rockfish fish program processors, I still am monitoring the fleet's activity. So the normal slow start provisions that we had alone weren't adequate, but the, the other measures that we had, such as a 300 salmon emergency trigger, allowed the fleet to stop fishing much sooner and completely close off areas.

So while our normal slow start wasn't quite enough because of just how salmon were in different grounds when they would move a little bit. The other measures in the management plan really helped to minimize salmon PSE while they could still operate in other areas. So I just wanted to note that while flexibility for processors and vessels to operate in April is really helpful for Kodiak and for processors. Unless the abundance of salmon on the grounds changes, it will likely continue to be an even slower start to May's slow start, where we are still having slower management measures in place and really trying to ramp up the fishery much slower to minimize PSE.

And with that, I will be happy to take any questions. Thank you for the report. Are there any questions?

Okay. Seeing none. Very clear. Appreciate it.

Ms. Marinan, do we know who's next?

Um, yep, Madam Chair, members of the council, Sarah Marinan, council staff. Um, next up is going to be Susie Zagorski, and I believe the order is going to be the AFA inshore CV interco-op report, followed by the PCTC interco-op report, and then she has an inshore IPA report that will be presented along with— James Mize will come up on behalf of the mothership fleet. So, 3 presentations. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Good afternoon, Council, Madam Chair. For the record, my name is Susie Zagorski. I am the— I wear many hats, but in this presentation, I am the Interco-op Manager. Of the AFA Catcher Vessel Fleet and associated with United Catcher Boats. So today I'm going to be presenting you the annual AFA Catcher Vessel Intercooperative Report.

This is a culmination of all of the co-op reports that come from our fleet, and this is from the 2025 fishing year.

So to start things off, I'm fairly sure most are familiar that obviously we have co-ops and inter-co-ops, but I put together some new images to really show the, what the cooperative structure and the inter-cooperative structure is like, especially considering I'll have another presentation after this with, for a program that has a slightly different structure. So for the AFA Inshore Co-op, the membership is the individual AFA permitted fishing vessels. This is the catcher vessels, so this includes the CVs that deliver to inshore, it's the CVs that deliver to mothership as well, and there are some dual qualified ones in there. This does not include AFA inshore open access that is managed by NIBS. Then there are the processors.

So every cooperative has a designated processor which is contractually responsible for receiving 90%, at least 90% of the co-op's POLIC allocation. So there's a 10% that only 10% or less can be delivered outside of that cooperative. Um, and then the cooperative agreement is essentially the contract amongst those cooperative members. The cooperative is governed by a board of directors, and then each cooperative has its own co-op manager. Um, and those co-op— there's multiple co-ops, so then those co-op managers are then speaking with me as well as other, um, inter-co-op members.

And so the inter-co-op structure is all 5 inshore cooperatives plus the mothership cooperative and the high seas cooperative. This is all the catcher vessel co-ops that we have at the moment. The inter-co-op follows another contractual agreement, which is the inter-co-op agreement. This includes things like the GOA sideboard provisions, overharvest prevention, bycatch mitigation measures, fishing protocols, and some data reporting. Reporting provisions.

All of this following, obviously, the AFA regulations. And so I myself, the inner co-op manager, then work with the co-op managers and the inner co-op managers and take direction from them on a day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month basis.

All right, so all of the AFA catcher vessel co-ops landed their fish inside the state of Alaska in 2024. 2025. There are 90 registered AFA CVs in total. However, 80 of the AFA inshore CVs were— sorry, 80 AFA inshore CVs, and there's 76 in the co-ops, 4 that are in that open access sector. So there were quite a few vessel changes within the co-ops in 2025, but only one co-op had a percentage change in their allocation.

The written report, written inter-co-op report for 2025, describes all of these co-op vessel changes. Most of them were replacements, so a vessel retired and got replaced, or the permit was being replaced with a new vessel to take over that permit. And so, as you can see in this table, in Table 2.1, the number of vessels in co-op where there are— where they are italics, that just indicates that there were some vessel changes within those co-ops. 13 Of the 19 mothership catcher vessels are the dual qualified catcher vessels. This hasn't changed in a few years, so same vessels that will switch back and forth between inshore deliveries or mothership deliveries.

So Table 2.1 has all the cooperatives listed, their number of vessels in the co-ops, their annual allocation percentage, and that's based off of their AFA permits. Each individual vessel has an individual percentage of the AFA, and that all combines to then create the co-op percentage. And then they're at— that then gets calculated into the annual allocation in metric tons. And then you have harvest, and then how much was of that allocation was either over or under the their allocation. So for 2025, all of the inshore catcher vessel cooperatives stayed under their allocations.

Quite a few of them were quite, quite a bit under, but there were no overages. And the offshore catcher vessel cooperatives, the Mothership Fleet is the only one that actually has the catcher vessels that are operating. High Seas Catcher Vessel Cooperative Cooperative has obviously 4 catcher vessels in it. However, they're not harvesting or delivering in 2025. And Mothership Cooperative, they only had about 90 metric tons over, so they had a pretty high utilization.

So section— continuing on with Section 2, the— we just touched slightly on the bycatch reduction measures for for the whole inter-co-op. However, I will be— my third presentation is going to be the inshore bycatch avoidance IPA presentation. So this is just a touch on it a little bit. So all of the AFACVs are members to the incentive plan agreement. So there's the Mothership IPA and then there's the inshore IPA, but all of the CVs are part of one of those agreements or both of those agreements if they're dual qualified.

And most of the, the most prominent and known tool in the inshore IPA is our rolling hotspot program. So in 2025, this is just showing a highlight of the inshore sector, but there were 10 Chinook rolling hotspot closures in A season, 6 chum rolling hotspot closures in B season, and 5 Chinook rolling hotspot closures in B season. Everybody, all of the vessels are required to use salmon excluders for the entire year, so both A and B season, all of those were— there were no incursions with that, and none of the— there were no restrictions or exceedances of the bycatch limits for any of the catcher vessels.

Thank you. Ms. Baker. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Ms. Zagorski, for the first of your reports, and I just want to follow up on your final few points there. Just again, for a reminder to the council and the public, how do you as the Intercoastal Manager monitor that salmon excluders were used and there were no incursions of the salmon savings areas?

Through the chair, Ms. Baker, thanks. So for the salmon excluders, we— I do check-ins with the vessels. I also am checking in with the co-op managers just to ensure they're the ones that are directly working and talking to their— those individual vessels more frequently. If a vessel has a mechanical issue with their excluder, say a few bars or meshes were broken in it, or something about the hang is off and it's not functioning properly, there are limited relief— there is a limited relief that I can, as the the IPA manager offer to them, but there is a whole long list of information that has to be collected to deem that a limited relief situation. As far as monitoring the rolling hotspots and weekly information, we work directly with Sea State.

They're the data monitoring agent for the IPAs, and so we kind of together are watching where the vessels are at via AIS and watching their tracks where they're fishing. We're We're looking at daily catch accounting data, we're looking at bycatch rates and bycatch amounts in these different areas. And one of the things that I really focus on is just kind of where the fleet is moving on a day-to-day or week-to-week basis to understand their avoidance efforts and trying to not hinder their efforts at any, I guess, any further. So maintaining pollock fishing efficiency while avoiding bycatch. Catch.

And one thing that's not noted on this slide is, and it's probably in any of the presentations, is the Inter-Co-op manages herring bycatch avoidance, not necessarily the individual IPAs. So in 2025B season, we had 3 advisory herring areas And that was similar to kind of like a rolling hotspot where we see herring on the grounds reported or higher herring rates, and then we'll put in a similar polygon closure like this for that week that acts as an advisory area to the fishing fleet.

All right. Okay.

The, all our Bering Sea salmon bycatch limits are based on the Three River Index, and so 2024 Three River Index fell below the threshold, and so for 2025, both the inshore and the mothership sectors were working under the lower limits. So I had a typo here, so that should be 2025 inshore sector limit and performance standard, and same with mothership, and that just shows that those were those lower limits. And so overall, the Insure Salmon Savings Incentive Plan group, so the Insure IPA, had a Chinook bycatch annually of 9,315, and the chum bycatch for the inshore sector in 2025 was 73,500. The mothership IPA, they had had for annually 1,562 Chinook and just over 8,000 chum for the year. This last row of Table 2.2 is just the salmon bycatch reporting for that High Seas Co-op.

So this is not indicative of the CP IPA. This is just indicative of those 4 vessels that belong in the High Seas Co-op., and since those 4 vessels were not fishing, they, there's zero for bycatch. There is one thing within the request or the requirement for reporting on the inshore or the interco-op agreement, and that is to report on the Dirty 20 list. That no longer exists within any of the IPA management, so we just have the caveat in there that there's no Dirty 20 list anymore.

Anymore. And one thing to note about the Salmon Bycatch Program is that while the open access co-op is not managed directly under the inter-co-op, those vessels are part of the IPA, and there is a voluntary agreement that they have a co-op manager and then still communicate with me as the inter-co-op manager and the IPA manager to ensure that they're not going over any pollock allocations and that they're staying under their salmon bycatch limits. So we are monitoring and managing them, we just aren't required to report on them exactly.

Okay, Section 3 is about the sideboard fishery management. So for the Bering Sea groundfish sideboards, there's really only the sea season that's remaining as Pecod sideboard fishery, and this is managed at the sector level given that there's very few vessels that even fish this. However, so the sideboards exist for the AFA non-exempt vessels, and the sideboard limits do, and so there were no non-exempt vessels that had fished the Bering Sea cod sideboard in sea season in 2025. The only vessels that had fished in that sea season for cod were some exempt vessels, and that is not managed under that sideboard limit, but the peacod limit for those exempted vessels was not exceeded, and any of the unused peacod quota was reallocated by NIMS to other peacod fisheries.

For the Goa groundfish sideboard harvest for those non-exempt vessels, this is again is also quite both of these sideboard limits and fisheries have been affected by the PCTC implementation. So GOA sideboards have been reduced since that implementation, and in 2025, there was some effort by non-exempt, by one non-exempt vessel that was fishing pollock in 620 and 630. A second non-exempt vessel was also fishing in the, for the GOA sideboard fisheries, but they are one of the open access vessels, so that data ends up getting separated out. And the— as you can see in Table 3.1B, this vessel that was fishing sideboards in the Gulf for pollock, they were well under the sideboard limit, and none of the Gulf sideboard limits were exceeded.

This is just continuing on with sideboard catch or bycatch. So the PSC catch in the GOA, there was zero in terms of the halibut mortality, mainly the fisheries that were part— the vessel that was participating in a sideboard fishery was fishing pollock. We don't normally see much halibut bycatch in that fishery. Then for Table 3.2c, this is the non- exempt sideboard vessels their bycatch of Chinook in the Gulf. So this was just in the Central Gulf, that was the only area that they were fishing, and the PSC limit is 18,316 and they only had a PSC bycatch of 273 Chinook, so that was not exceeded.

Continuing on with just, this is This is just PSC bycatch in the Bering Sea. So this is for when they're fishing in the pollock fishery. These three, herring, halibut, and sablefish, are three PSC species that we are monitoring. Technically, sablefish is not, doesn't go to no retention unless the harvest limit is exceeded or the incidental catch limit is exceeded. So for herring, it was an unprecedented year for herring.

We saw a lot on the fishing grounds in 2025. There were, like I said, a lot of efforts to avoid herring by all of the sectors, including our 3 avoidance areas.

And during— in September, technically September 23rd, 2025, the herring PSC limit for the entire fishery fishery was exceeded. This then triggered, just based on the time of year, it triggered the winter herring savings area to close. That winter herring savings area in the blue box, or shaded, I guess the lighter shaded box up in 521, that was closed until March 1st of this 2026 year.

And sorry, halibut, halibut PSC was low. There was about 20 metric tons of of that, and the total sablefish bycatch was 28.6 tons.

All right, and that's all I have for the AFA Inner Co-op. I really appreciate all the participants in this program, the co-op managers, Sea State, NMSTAP, and support services. We all work together to make this happen and happen well.

Thank you for the report. Are there any questions?

Seeing none, thanks.

All right, for the record, still Susie Zagorski. This time I am the Interco-op Manager of the Pacific Cod Trawl Cooperative Program, and I am presenting to you the 2025 Interco-op intercooperative report for that. Again, it's a culmination of all of the co-op reports. This one is slightly different. There is no written intercooperative report posted to the council's website.

However, all of the written cooperative reports, which are, are voluntary, all of the co-ops submitted one, and those are posted to the council website.

Okay, so similar to the last presentation, like I said, we tried to describe some of the cooperative and the intercooperative structure. So this slide just shows you kind of pieced out the cooperative structure and function for the PCTC program. It's slightly different than AFA. So the members are the actual harvester LLPs, and there must be at least 3 LLPs to create a cooperative. The— and they can only join join one cooperative.

The LLP can only be a member of one cooperative. There is a vessel list, so there can be— for the vessel list, this is the vessels that will be harvesting the quota that was derived then from the harvester LLP's membership. This vessel list, vessels can be in multiple co-ops, and there I'll get to a little bit more about that towards the end of the presentation. Then, so, and then there's processor association. So processors may also be part of multiple co-ops, may be associated with multiple co-ops, and there's no kind of 90% type of rule like there is in AFA in terms of delivering that fish.

There is an open class of processors as well for this program. So if a vessel wanted to go to a processor that's outside of their co-op, that is acceptable.

And then there are shoreside processors and offshore processors. Processors, so that are, that can be part of these processor associations. And then the cooperative is the governing, the governing document is there's articles of incorporations and all, again, contractual cooperative agreements still governed by a board of directors, and they are managed, each one is managed by an individual co-op manager, and they are usually responsible for responsible for kind of the day-to-day operations, implementing the co-op's decisions, and kind of taking direction from their board.

Okay, so the interco-op structure— similarly, all of the individual co-ops are part of the interco-op. In 2025, there were for cooperatives that belong to the interco-op, and there are no— there's no open access outside of this during A and B season when the program is managed through the co-ops and interco-op. There is also an interco-op agreement. This again is the contractual agreement that lays out all the provisions following the PCTC regulations. This includes the AI set-aside provision, GOA sideboard provision, decisions over harvest prevention and mitigation measures, as well as fishing protocols and data reporting.

And again, all of the co-ops must sign off on this. I am also the inter-co-op manager for this, and so I am working with talking to the, the co-op managers to take and taking direction from them, as well as the group that is determined as the inter-co-op.

Okay, so in 2025, this table here is a little— the language off to the side helps you understand the table a bit more. So there were 4 cooperatives and the harvester LLPs, these are each individual ones, and like I said, they can't be in multiple co-ops. So 89 were the individual unique LLPs that were part of the program in 2025. 5. For the associated processors, so that column's not going to add up to 9.

9 Were the individual processors that were associating with co-ops. However, there was one processor that was associated with multiple co-ops. Similar situation with the authorized vessels. There were a total of 70 vessels that are authorized in this program. However, 10 of those vessels were listed, therefore authorized, on multiple co-ops vessel lists.

And 2025, there was a much better utilization of vessel lists, lists, and again, I'll get to that in a little bit. All of the co-ops were members of the inner co-op, and the one notable thing is that there were 2 less co-ops from in 2025 than there were in 2024. So there has, in year 2, we were already seeing some organizational changes.

Changes. So the PCTC program has an A season and a B season. Again, that C season for cod is sideboard, so the InterCoop is only managing really the A season and B season. Then there is an A season allocation that gets broken down into a harvester-derived allocation and a processor-derived allocation.. This is based on all those LLPs.

Same for B season, and then we have our annual tag. A season can be rolled into B season, however you cannot fish your B season in A season. So the total annual tag for PCTC was 21,670, and there is a 5% vessel use cap. This equated to just over 1,000 metric tons and a 20% processor use cap, and that equated to 4,300, just over 4,300 metric tons. And this is what we call our CQ.

Our allocations are CQ.

So the CQ allocations and harvest table, you have all 4 of our co-ops here split out by A season and B season. There is a transferability provision, so co-ops are able to transfer some of their CQ to another co-op throughout the year. This is part of the cooperative style of a program. So you can see here where, which co-ops had some transfers. And then the, the total catch for the program in 2025 was about, was 19,000 metric tons.

So this was a slight underutilization of of the overall allocation, but there was obviously no exceedances. There's also a provision in the PCTC program where a vertically integrated vessel must not exceed their harvesting, what they bring to the co-op based off of their harvesting LLP from the processors derived quota. It's very confusing, but no vertical— this is something that we track at the.

At the co-op level, the co-op managers are very specifically, um, tracking and making sure that there are no overharvests of that specific limit. And so in 2025, no vertically integrated vessels had exceeded that harvesting limit, um, and then none of the use caps were exceeded either.

So all of the PSC limit reductions have been implemented. Uh, this was a 2-year implementation process for those PSC reductions. So now there is a fixed percentage reduction to the A and the B season PSC apportionment derived from the overall trawl CV sector halibut PSC apportionment. This happens during tax setting is where you see those, that 25% limit for halibut PSC and the 35% limit for crab PSC. That's where you see those incorporated into, into TAC.

And then the intercooperative agreements do include a best fishing practice protocol, protocols, and these are essentially our bycatch mitigation efforts laid out contractually, and similar to what was used prior to the PCTC program, but those provisions include no night fishing, hellbit excluder use requirements, and some mesh size limits, and no PSE limits were exceeded in 2025.

So I've laid out the tables of all of the PSE limits and bycatch for comparison in this slide and the following slide. And for halibut PSE, about 62% of that PSE limit was left at the end of the, the A and B season, and there was a total halibut mortality of 38% of the total PSE limit., and that was about 82 metric tons. There was no red king crab bycatch by the PCTC co-ops in 2025. And then we have 3 more crab PSC limits, so the Coopelio in the Cobles, the C. Bairdi in Zone 1, and the C. Bairdi in Zone 2. And as you can see, all of these 10% or less of any of these limits had been used throughout 2025.

Madam Chair, I think there is a question.

Yes, Miss Cohen. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you, Susie, for the presentation. It's more of a curiosity. I see there's transfers of crab, but the crab PSC is so far under the limits. I'm curious why there are even transfers.

Through the chair, Ms. Cohen, that is a good catch. So there is transferability of PSE in this program, both halibut and crab. While it doesn't seem necessary for operations to have transferred that, this was usually if— so it's kind of, it's a unique case where there may be a vessel or an LLP that is in one co-op and they're affiliated with a certain processor in that co-op, but another co-op is delivering to that processor or also has some of that processor's LOP, so processor quota share, that determines your total CQ. So this, it was basically just to even out allocations and PSE limits based off of having affiliations with processors is the easiest way to explain that.

Okay, so this program has a required AI set-aside, so Aleutian Islands set-aside, and this is required to be in the interco-op agreement and the co-op agreements. The AI set-aside provision, it was improved, so The first year of the program, we were still trying to figure out in detail the AI provision, the AI set-aside provision. So we had it there, but we improved said provision for 2025. And given that there was no intent to process submitted by the communities of ADAC or ATCA, there was no CQ required to actually be set aside by the co-ops for that use. However, that provision lays out what happens and how to set aside and how much to set aside and how to manage if those intent to process notifications do come in.

And to kind of wrap things up for PCTC, I just wanted to put some highlights from the 2025 fishery up here as well. So we did see, this is obviously year 2, there was much more collaboration between the co-ops and better utilization. It seemed like the co-ops were kind of understanding the program a little bit more now that we were into year 2. It was a pretty quick implementation in the first year to really understand all the nuances of it. So we saw more collaboration, and this was mainly through vessel lists.

So for a vessel, you can either transfer quota and have a vessel in one program or one co-op or another fish it.

This the vessel-less use allowed for there to be more cooperation among the co-ops because that multiple vessels were in different co-ops. So you weren't, we weren't seeing as many inter-co-op transfers happening of quota, and so that helped with utilization as well. And the reason why this is usually used is to stay under either vessel caps, vessel use caps, or processor use caps.

We, due to the fewer co-ops that were part of the program in 2025, we did see some increased constraints to the processors and the vessels because of those processing and use limits. There were more, there were more vessels and less co-ops to catch the same amount of fish but with the same percentage of a have a use cap, and so we were seeing some discrepancies there and some constraint. There is still a heightened focus on bycatch reduction, so in year 2 we worked with Sea State and we were able to put together some voluntary monitoring tools and alerts through our Sea State system. And so this was, this was better for our fishermen to be able to kind of see, track daily, and we could communicate with them a little bit better, more organized on bycatch avoidance. And there were no penalties issued throughout the by the interco-op throughout this year.

We did notice, obviously this is only the second year, but we are trying to track like what could be improved or where we are seeing some challenges still. So the one of the challenges that we ran into in 2025 is the discard rate programming could be improved to reflect the 100% observer coverage for this fishery. We were working with NMFS quite a bit, meeting with them to understand the discard rates and the fact that the programming is still left over from when it was a partial coverage fleet.

We, as with most cost recovery programs, obviously there is some— have been requests for transparency and detail of those cost recovery fees, specifically to individual agency costs when they increase or decrease. And the vessel use cap at 5% does still in 2025 seem to be artificially constraining, and it did reduce some operational flexibility. And similarly, the processing use cap at 20% and offshore processing limits also reduced flexibility and co-op full utilization of CQ in the co-ops. And then one last thing to note that I forgot to put up on the highlight side is the polychaete— or the cod fishery prior to becoming PCTC used to do a late start. This was to avoid bycatch.

This is part of the bycatch mitigation measures. The Inter-Co-op does not prescribe that, however, all of the co-ops tend to agree individually their own late start dates. So rather than starting fishing on January 20th, they'll start usually beginning of February to avoid some of that halibut PSE on the grounds. And that's all I got. Again, thanks to all of our co-op managers, they do a great deal of the work, working together with me, and then our participants and Sea State and NMFS for all of the questions we have for them.

Thank you. Are there any questions? The PCTC report. Okay. I'm not seeing any.

Thank you. That was very thorough. Appreciate it.

So just for notice to members of the public, so we'll get through this last report.

For the SSIP IPA. Then we will move to the C-Share report, and we will probably break for the day and then take up the CPIPA report tomorrow. We do have one person needing to testify before the end of the day, and so we'll take Adrian Tuhi after the C-Share report. Before we break. Thank you.

All right, for the record, Susie Zagorski. This time I am the Inshore Salmon Savings Incentive Plan representative, so IPA representative for the inshore fleet, and with me I have James Mize. I'm the representative of the Mothership Salmon Savings Incentive Plan Agreement. I did not prepare a presentation, but have come up in order to take any questions on the report that has been included in the book. So I will be presenting you the 2024 and 2025 annual report.

So all of this data that we're presenting is in two separate written reports on the council's website, the 2024 annual report of the Inshore IPA and the 2025 annual report for the inshore IPA. So I've combined it all because last year the actual presentation to the council was, um, passed for timing, and so, um, just including it all here.

Okay, so all the— some of this will be repetitive here at the beginning, but all of the vessels from all 5 AFA inshore cooperatives and the open access were participants in the inshore IPA agreements for both years. In 2024, '24, we saw a few more vessels that were active catcher vessels than we saw in 2025. This again was due to some of those vessel replacements and some of those cooperative vessel changes that we saw in 2025. And you'll notice that the difference between active vessels in A season and B season changes a little bit. This is just individual fishing operation decisions.

So, but they generally will stay the same and we'll have about just around 60 both seasons, just a few less in B season.

So the way that the inshore, the inshore IPA operates is at the individual vessel level, and so this Chinook salmon limit that's for the, for the pollock fishery as a whole starts out at a quite high number, and that's that number that's based off of the Three River Index. So that came in again in 2024 for 2025 year, lower than the threshold. And so we were, we started the, at the highest level at 45,000 Chinook, and then that comes down for the inshore Chinook limit, that gets reduced then to 25,020 Chinook. Then there's an inshore Chinook performance standard, and that reduces that number of Chinook PSC limit down to 18,525.

We then will, as the inshore IPA, we then will take $500 off the top from that, and that is what we put into what we call our insurance pool. So this is just kind of our own little buffer that we take out, and then we apply then that $18,025 Chinook PSC limit to the individual vessels with an A and a B season split, and that individual vessel limit is a pro rata limit, and it's usually a single-digit percentage of the overall 18,000 Chinook PSC limit for each vessel. So 2024 and 2025 were managed under this lower Chinook limit, and there's one of the other provisions within the IPA is that one of the other tools is these saving credits. So during A season, one of the incentives for this program and for the inshore sector is that as they avoid salmon and do not catch salmon from that PSC limit is they can earn savings credits. Those savings credits can only be used in B season.

Those savings credits do not exceed actual PSC limits, and that their account of those savings credits only has a rolling 3-year shelf life. So if they don't collect them in perpetuity, because again, we have an overall limit that we're maintaining under. There were no use of savings credits or the insurance pool in recent years, and if there ever is a use of them, there are penalties to use the insurance pool. So there is some disincentives to have to dip into that. There— no vessels had exceeded their initial allocations in recent years, and no sector limit or performance standard had been exceeded in recent years.

So in 2024 and 2025, we saw a slightly different landscape of PSE encounter. So 2024 was a very low year of 3,876 Chinook for the inshore sector, and in 2025, we saw an increase up to 9,315 Chinook. All of this is still quite low in comparison to the overall 5 and 10-year averages. A season, we saw, so our pollock harvest was fairly similar between the two seasons, and Chinook bycatch in 2024 for A season was quite low at 1,848. This was a very, even during the season, we were noticing that this was quite a bit less than we normally are seeing.

And then in the B season of 2024, we were actually seeing quite a bit more, than the A season, and that was mainly— we had some in the beginning of B season that were trickling in off the tail end of A season, and then we saw more in the late B season, which is where we have extra provisions to avoid Chinook. For 2025, it was similar trends as previous where we saw more of the Chinook bycatch in the A season, so 5,815 fish. In A season and about 3,500 fish chinook bycatch in the B season. Most of the chinook bycatch in the 2025 B season was in that later season. It was a much longer B season than in most years, and there were multiple bycatch avoidance efforts going on given that we were seeing higher herring amounts, so there was a lot of moving the fleet around, and we were managing to avoid all of all three of these PSE species.

So this is just to kind of show you the Chinook, the history of our inshore Chinook bycatch and how low we've been able to kind of maintain that Chinook bycatch level. A season's in light blue with the, the dot, I believe that's a dot, B season is a yellow square, and the triangle and purple line is the total. And then just kind of for reference, you can kind of see where When we first started the program, that we were doing some, uh, back in 2008, 2009, we were kind of testing to make sure these provisions would work. So that's where you see the big decrease. And then as you move through, um, you see where Amendment 91 and then again Amendment 110 were implemented.

But our 21-year history, and, um, you can see that the rates have been maintained quite low.

So moving on to chum salmon bycatch. So the, for the inshore sector in 2024, we had a very low year. Both years again were below the, I believe it was the 5-year average, but 2024 was a very low year with only 21,900 chum, Majority of this was from B season. It's usually, chum is mainly a B season PSC species. And then 2024 B season was the first year that BBSRI was doing in-season chum genetic testing.

However, we were not getting these reports on the daily basis. This was again, their proof of concept year, making sure that the, the actual genetic testing and the data was accurate before they started sending it out to the fleet for management purposes. But at the end of the year, we were able to get that information back, and based on the BBSRI testing, 13.8% of those, um, 21,000, over 21,000 chum bycatch, um, were estimated to be Western Alaska chum. The AFSC, so the Auke Bay Lab Genetics, was, their estimate was 15.3%, so they were very similar. Percentages, but again, quite low for Western Alaska chum.

And then when you break down that Western Alaska chum estimate for 2024, it was about 5% attributed to the upper middle Yukon, 7.7% for the Siuak, and about 0.9% for the Kotzebue Sound area. And it was a total, for the total combined Western Alaska chum estimate in 2024, it was just under 3,000 that were estimated to be from Western Alaska. For 2025, we saw for the inshore sector just over 73,500 chum bycatch, again, all B— majority B season, and the Western Alaska chum genetic stock composition estimate was about 6.4%. That was— this was much reduced from 2024, and this is the BBSRI data. But at the time I was putting the presentation together and the report, I did not quite have the 2025 total from Auke Bay yet.

When you break down that western, the combined Western Alaska chum estimate for the inshore sector, overall it was about 4,700 fish from Western Alaska chum, or sorry, from Western Alaska. Upper Middle Yukon was about 1.2% overall, and Siwak was about 5.2%.

And this 2025 year was the first year we were able to get those in-season weekly genetic estimates from BBSRI. And that was just an inshore sector testing at the time.

So this is just kind of showing all of that data plus a little bit more of the genetics for all the other stock.

Yeah, all the other stocks that they have the genetic data for. As you can see, we are in, we in 2024 and 2025, we were in pretty low years of chum bycatch. And the majority of the inshore sectors 2025 chum bycatch was estimated to be from the Eastern Gulf Pacific Northwest at 64.1%, followed up by Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, And then you start to get into the Alaskan, so the Siwak, the Upper Middle Yukon, and the Southwest Alaska were under 10% each.

So, again, the rolling hotspot closures are the most prominent known program within the IPAs, and The actual number of rolling hotspot closures that go— that get implemented in a year is not necessarily a metric of success or not. This is just an indicator that the tool is working as it is, as it should, and we are using, you know, we're monitoring on a daily, weekly basis, and we're using those base rates to understand and then move the fleet if they're exceeding those base rates. So in 2024, we had a total of 7 rolling hotspot SAM enclosures, and in 2025, we had 15 total weeks, and that equated to about 21 actual rolling hotspot closures. Some weeks we'll have up to about 2 in it if necessary, if the fleet is fishing in a couple different areas. So, I'll just focus here on 2025 for time.

So there were 10 Chinook rolling hotspot closures in 2025 A season, 11 in the B season, and those were split 6 for chum, 5 for Chinook.

So here are the 2024 rolling hotspot closures. This is off to the side. You can see the, what the weeks in which there were 1 versus 2, and on the chart here, you can see that the red or the orange boxes are the chum closures, the yellow are the Chinook closures. This is for the entire year. This is not A and— this is A and B season.

And these are all of the 2025 rolling hotspot closures. Again, the list on the side is the dates in which they were implemented, whether they were Chinook or chum, and some of these would have 2 per week, so you have to kind of look at the date range to see if there were 1 or 2. So the yellow ones are the A-season Chinook rolling hotspot closures. The green, which may be kind of hard to differentiate up on the big screen, but on your screen it might be a little bit easier, are the B season chum rolling hotspot closures, and the pink ones are the B season Chinook closures. And one thing to just kind of point out here is that as we get later in the season, those Chinook, especially the Chinook rolling hotspot closures in late B season, they tend to get a lot more narrow and focused.

And this is oftentimes we're seeing kind of patchiness, and so we're really honing in on just where those Chinook encounters are happening and trying to avoid those areas. A lot of the, some of the green ones, especially as you move further to the west, they get a little bit bigger. This sometimes is whether the fleet is kind of more spread out and fishing for pollock and they're running into and encountering chum, or just we're putting a larger area in based off of where we're getting where we're getting bycatch data from. So if the fleet is basically the rolling hotspot polygons, they don't necessarily line up with a stat area. They line up with where the fleet is encountering the salmon, where we want them to then avoid.

So this was the A season in 2025, where there was majority of the rolling hotspot closures were up along kind of that following up north past Unimak, and then the— there were a few out to the west around St. George and the Mushroom.

And then in bee season, there were some small focused rolling hotspot closures down around the Horseshoe. So that's just out here past kind of between Akutan and Unimak. And then there were some along the shelf edge, that large green one with a few pink ones overlapped with it.. And then their fishing fleet, the inshore fleet, had been fishing much further west this season, this B season, because there was a lot of chum, Chinook, and herring avoidance in the nearshore areas. So some of the fleet had ventured much further west and were even encountering some out there.

So we were putting in some protections out there as well.

Some of the additional elements that are in our inshore IPAs, just that, again, The salmon excluder requirement, this is for the entire duration A and B season, and that was not exceeded. There were no incursions, actually, there we go, no incursions in recent years for the salmon excluder use requirement. We have October fishing restrictions. Normally this isn't in place because we're not normally fishing late into October. However, 2025, the fleet really got familiar with these October fishing restrictions considering we were fishing pretty late into the B season and Essentially, this is saying that the, on a, it gives them another rate that they must keep their bycatch limit below.

If they do go above this, then they are subject to a provisional trip, 2 provisional trips to try to clean up. If they do not clean up, then they must end fishing for their season regardless of how much quota or regardless of how much quota they have left. And then there's the Chinook Conservation Area Agreement, the CCAA, that's this little box in the image on the bottom.

This is an ases enclosure because there's regularly high Chinook presence down there and no incursions in that area in recent years.

Okay, almost there. The inshore catcher vessels are 100% observer covered. This is required, this was required through Amendment 91 regardless of size, capacity, and quota.

And 2024, majority of the vessels chose to participate in the final year of the EFP EM program. 2025, The trawl EM program was implemented, and all the Bering Sea pollock vessels, catcher vessels, had participated in trawl EM. And with this, there is a full retention requirement, so they're required to retain all of their bycatch salmon on board the vessel, which then gets delivered to the processor along with their pollock catch, where then that gets enumerated. So salmon are required to be censused, and so we're regularly seeing that information come through fish tickets, catch accounting, etc., and that's what we're— how we're keeping a close eye on our salmon avoidance.

And then just to touch on, you've already heard about the Salmon Excluder Project, EFP, that's going to continue testing again this B season. We'll have that going on, and this will be the third year of BBSRI conducting their in-season chum genetics project, and that is with the CV fleet, and I believe there's talk about some expansion out into some of the other Pollock vessels.

And that's all I have for the inshore IPA report. We are happy to take questions on either inshore or mothership.

Thank you very much for the report.

I just have a quick question back on slide 7. Just wanted to make sure that I understood what, what this was depicting.

The slide with annual CDQ, is this, this includes all CHUM associated with all CDQ pollock, not that pollock caught within, with inshore CVs? Is that correct? Through the chair, to the chair, yeah, so this was something I noticed kind of late in the game of putting the presentation together. So annual with CDQ is really just the annual Pollock fisheries chum bycatch with CDQ included. There are some reports that get kind of spit out from NMFS that takes out CDQ for all various reasons.

So this annual with CDQ, the orange line, is all Pollock fisheries um, chum bycatch, including the CDQ in that, so that regardless of CP, CV, it's— thank you. Yeah, and so it's, it's my understanding that most, if not all, CDQ is caught on CP, so I just wanted to make sure when we're looking at the next reports that we're not, um, potentially double accounting for, yeah, chum associated with CDQ pollock. Okay, thank you. To the Chair, yes, and I just was including this as a kind of a reference point to compare, to kind of see where the inshore sectors performances overall. Thank you.

Appreciate that. Yes, Ms. Kimball. Thank you. I have a question on slide 6.

And so the, the statistic from BBSRI that the, for the total chum attributed to the inshore sector, 6.4% was Western Alaska chum. And so that's from the final report when they looked at all the data. Did, did you see anything different in season that really drastically— that's a pretty small percentage, but did you see days or weeks, it should be weeks I guess, where you're getting that in-season data on a regular basis where it was drastically different from that, or did it kind of stay at that low level? I'm wondering if you had any instances where you saw, you know, significantly higher weeks than that and then it averages out to 6.4%, or if this was pretty standard for the whole season. Through Chair Miss Kimball.

Yes, so the BBSRI weekly report and their annual report will— they break it down on a stat week basis. And so there were a few weeks where we did see a greater percentage, but there were also some weeks where we saw a much lower percentage. And I think this just kind of shows that the in-season reports that we are receiving from BBSRI is actually being used to then inform the fleet. So if we do see a high week, that informs us that, hey, we got to get out of this area. Not just because of the chum bycatch rate, but because we're seeing a higher rate that we would be— that we definitely don't want to be in.

And so there were also some weeks where some of the other genetic stocks were kind of fluctuating as well, because they don't just report on Western Alaska chum, they report on all of those stocks. So we are using that information, and anytime where we do see some higher spikes in that, we will be moving the fleet accordingly. And that was one of the provisions that was added into the inshore and the mothership IPAs to include that genetic data, as much of that genetic data that we have available to us, to include that in our weekly rolling hotspot assessments.

Mm-hmm. Okay. Thank you for the report. Appreciate it. Thank you.

So we will take the C-Share reports, um, and then we will go to, uh, one public testifier, Adrian Tuhi, um, and then we'll break for the day. Thank you.

Hi everyone, uh, thank you for having me here. I am Hannah Lindhoff, the executive director of C-Share, and I have a quick update to share with you all. It's been a while since you've had a presentation from C-Share, I think since Jim Harmon was the executive director. So happy to be here, and thank you for listening.

What do we— perfect. Okay, so very quickly to introduce C-Share, we are a hunger relief organization, and we are national organization that specializes in getting seafood into food banks and feeding programs. And I just wanted to share this slide that shows sort of the what should we do with surplus food hierarchy and explain that this is sort of the same way that we look at the prohibited species. Prevention comes first in the hierarchy, and so we're very behind the whole industry and everything that they're doing to evolve their bycatch prevention I think it's incredible to see how far they've come. We are the second on the hierarchy, and that's distribution or redistribution of surplus food or donation.

And so we do have the permit to donate prohibited species to food banks and feeding programs. And this picture here shows the Sea Share box that says "Partnerships to End Hunger," and that is really a great description of how this program works. It works across a lot of people putting a lot of work in. Looking at the actual totals of donations that we've made in the past couple years, there are a few things that you— that might stand out. One is that you see the volume of H&G going down, and then we've added filet as a category, steak or filet.

I know it's 2026 and we're just getting to filets, But it is a way that we can try to do more local donations within Alaska, is if we can fillet the fish before rigor, then we can have something that's more palatable for an Alaskan. And we also just want to be really cognizant of the fact that hunger relief organizations, you know, the shelters that we donate to, are generally very strapped. They don't have a lot of labor. For them to get a whole fish and have to process it and cook it is a tremendous burden, whereas if we can ask the processors to, to do that, or we can use our grant funding to pay for, uh, staking or filleting, that is preferable because we don't want to put the burden back into the hunger relief organizations we work with.

So looking at the past couple years, these are our total donations, and for 2025 we are at $1.85 million, and then I put in there the total that was from the Prohibited Species Program, which was 165,552 pounds. So I think this is really illustrative of the fact that the Prohibited Species Program is only a small part of what SeaShare does. But I also want to acknowledge that the prohibited species program is, is what built SeaShare, and it was the idea that we should not be wasting fish which allowed this organization to be formed over 30 years ago and to grow to what it is today. So I think we have— we, we certainly owe a lot of the people in the room and the architects of this program a lot for for creating where we are now at 1.8 million pounds throughout the nation.

Um, and, and here's our why. This is the hunger map of the United States. This is the food insecurity map put together by Feeding America, and this shows, uh, the rates of food insecurity throughout the United States. This map is from 2023, so I can promise you It's only worse, um, most places, but it's worth noting that there is not a single county in the United States that doesn't have food insecurity. And if you were wondering what it's like here in Clark County, where we are right now, um, it's 12.4%, uh, are food insecure right here in this county.

And that adds up to about 20,000 children. So they'll break that down with you.

That's where we are here today. I also like to look at Alaska. Of course, Alaska has a much smaller population, so our overall— the overall food insecurity rate in Alaska is about 108,000 people, of which we've got about 31,000 children who are going hungry in Alaska. And over 11,000 elders. So should be none.

And I think that that's something to keep in mind, why we work so hard, why we take every fish is important, is because we have the resource in this state to feed everyone. And it's, it's not a big population, and we can certainly make significant changes.

So I want to talk about the way that SeaShare works with the Prohibited Species Program, but also how that fits in with everything else that we're doing, because they all tie together and they're all foundational. So these are our donation buckets. We have the Prohibited Species Donation Program, which, from which we take the salmon and the halibut, and then also we do sometimes see rockfish or lingcod that is not not technically part of that program, but is something that wasn't supposed to be caught and goes into donation. We also have the APA Million Meal Pledge, which the ASC processors donate 1 million meals of pollock every year, which is amazing. We work throughout the US seafood industry to take other donations as they come up.

Maybe they're off size, off color, non-spec. Somebody changed their packaging so they can't sell it. That's my favorite. And we work on grant-funded purchases, so we go out, we look for grant funding where we can actually buy some fish, and we have a really amazing program in Alaska right now that allows us to do that, and I'll explain a little bit more. But I also want to say we've got our eye on getting into invasive species.

It's a really interesting area, and I think that there's a lot of opportunity for us to find more sources of high-quality protein for people in need and solve a problem for the industry. So I'm super interested in that. And I have to tell you that with the rates of food insecurity that we see in the United States and the fact that protein is generally about 2% of what's donated to food banks, and most of what they're getting are, you know, like 4-day-old baked goods there's a lot of interest. There's a lot of interest in anything that we can come up with, and I have a lot of soup kitchens reaching out saying, "We'll experiment. Try us.

Give us something interesting." So, a lot of smart people here in this room, and just want you to know, to remember that the prohibited species program was kind of a weird idea somebody came up with 31 years ago, and it worked, and we're open to new Weird ideas. Um, okay, so about the Alaska program, I know this is hard to read and you don't need to read it. This is mostly an illustration. So we have a grant, uh, in the state of Alaska to work with Alaska seafood companies, um, who may have excess inventory and make purchases for Alaska food programs, uh, food banks, women's shelters, elder feeding programs, etc. So this is a look at everything that we did in Alaska in 2025.

We put the prohibited species in purple, and then our purchases are in orange, which I want to note, we do have one ongoing donation that has come out of the Bay and was sent up to Imoniq that we did not purchase, that was fully donated by the processors. So we have to Thank them for that awesome donation. But these, these are the donations that we did in 2025, and we continue to learn with this program and look at how we can improve what we're doing and continue to move more seafood into more feeding programs throughout Alaska and make the correct match with the community and with the type feeding program that they have so that we can get fish to those in need. And we owe a humongous thanks to all of the agencies on the ground who are receiving this fish. You know, the Manilik Diabetes Prevention Program is actually the one who, you know, took a shipment in Kotzebue and then got it out to 11 other villages.

So, you know, it's really the people on the ground who are doing a ton of the work, and to the seafood companies who are not at all designed to give us 30 pounds of cod for an elder feeding program. They send, you know, 40-foot containers, but they do it for us because we ask nicely, or just ask a lot. And I'm really proud of what we've done, and we will continue to press on Alaska donations.

Um, okay, so this is our map of all donations. And so after looking at the 99 donations that we did in Alaska last year, the rest doesn't seem quite as impressive. But Washington State is also another massive recipient of C-Share donations. And part of the reason is that a lot of the product is processed here in Washington. And so we give Food Lifeline the first right of refusal on that, and they just— they didn't turn anything down last year.

So we saw 468,304 pounds going into Washington State last year, and then the rest was spread out throughout the United States with quite a cluster in the Northeast as well.

And so just To remind us all why we're, we are a little bit of a pain in the butt to the industry and why we are constantly nagging is because I really, I know how good seafood is for people and for those in need. And to think about those in need who, you know, are going without quality protein. And these are actually outdated. This says that you should eat Twice a week, we— they are supposed to be eating these healthy foods, the dietary recommendation. And that's— 3 times a week is the new recommendation for something like salmon.

So, um, we have a huge shortfall for those in need, and we have in seafood a tremendous source of brain food, heart food, and everything else that is a building block of health.

When I talk about this program, I'll acknowledge that we have some challenges, but also state some goals. As C-Share, we want to make sure that we have continued industry outreach so that we can increase participation in our program, increase retention of donations, and increase quality. And we'd like to serve more Alaskan communities through this program. We are— the grant funds that we have to run the purchasing program in Alaska will not last forever. And we would like to see, you know, more of this resource moving to Alaskans.

But this needs to go hand in hand with increased quality.

We also, you know, I showed you the slide about the amount of vitamin D and why it's important. Halibut is a huge source of vitamin D, and we live in a northern climate without a lot of sunshine, so we'd like to make sure from now on all halibut coming from this program goes into Alaskan feeding programs. And we got, we got a grant from Columbia Bank to help us fund doing that. And, you know, I think that that shows just a step in, in the direction that other stakeholders around the state would like to see us take. But we do— we are challenged to have consistent quality for the donations that we receive.

And, you know, I'm not on the vessels. So I think, you know, when I think of that captain coming up with an invention, how he might, you know, exclude bycatch, maybe there's a captain or somebody else involved who can come up with a way to help improve the quality, or maybe there's something that can be done so that more can be preserved at donation quality. And then I think, you know, we're challenged by confusion surrounding the rules and regulations a little bit. There's there's certainly been some confusion. And I think, you know, even for my own part, I look at, you know, some of, some of the donation requests we might get.

For example, the Kodiak School District reached out. They are hoping for seafood donations. They were well— they lost— I won't say it on the record how much money they were in the hole last year, but they are not— they're a nonprofit and they are struggling to run their school kitchen.

And so, but it's not clear that a school feeding program would be eligible for this program. So that's the type of thing where we're looking at confusion surrounding the rules and we're hoping that with some of the suggestions that Noah has made, we can just continue to evolve and improve the program.

That was all I have for you guys today. I just really appreciate the opportunity to, to be in the room and invite you all to participate with C-Share anytime. There's always a way to be a part of our organization.

Thank you very much for the presentation, for joining us. Looks like we have a couple questions. We'll go to Ms. Vanderhoeven. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you for the update. It's been a long time.

It's nice to see. Just a quick clarifying question. When you talk about pounds distributed, those are, those are final processed weights, right? In this process, we normally deal with round weights, and I think Some of the criticisms I've heard have been, you know, it's not that big of an amount compared to the bycatch, but, you know, when you're not including guts and that kind of thing, it makes a big difference. And so those are, those are processed weights, correct?

Yeah, we, we count the actual donation that went into the food bank or whatever.

Thank you, Lieutenant Commander. Through the Chair, thank you for the presentation. I have a question regarding one of the more common violations that we see at sea in some of the fishery sectors is that they discard rockfish, and a quote from one of the masters is, "We always discard rockfish, no one buys it." And then I see that, and then I also know that there's dedicated rockfish fisheries. So I was just wondering what the challenges would be for a fish that's marketable for some sectors, but then other sectors are discarding it because they say it's not marketable, and it maybe it's a small quantity issue.

Through the Chair, are you asking what the challenge would be for C-Share to accept that as a donation or for—. Yes, I think that's my question is we have a person who knows that they're supposed to be retaining rockfish, but they say I'm gonna discard it because it's not marketable. I'm gonna essentially, if I keep it, I'm going to take it to the fish house to land it and nobody's going to buy it. So how do we, how do we get over that hurdle? You have— yes, they can call me.

Mr. Isakata.

Yep, thank you very much for the presentation, and I just wanted to personally thank you and C-Share, the former CDQ group that I was working for. You did tremendous work in providing the food. I think, and just from a question point of view, I guess my first question would be, is most of the food that you deliver in Alaska frozen?

So through the chair, yes, um, most of what we do is frozen. The only exception is really, I think, cans. Otherwise, the logistics are just pretty difficult. Well, thank you. Um, well, I was just going to address one quick thing.

Um, I know people news, social media, I think complaints are often prioritized over saying thank yous. And I have seen a few where the, you know, C-Share kind of got some quality complaints, but I just wanted to reassure folks that do donate and receive the product that we were in a very similar situation at one time where we had fish coming through Bethel to our villages, and had it not been for our staff that went to kind of the intermediate transit points, to ensure that the frozen fish was getting placed into freezers and things, uh, um, that fish would have ended up bad. And so what I want to say is that it's not SeaShare's, uh, fault, especially moving small quantities of frozen product in Alaska is a very challenging endeavor. I would say fresh is actually easier, probably not for the processors. So, um, I just wanted to clarify that, and once again, thank you for everything you've done, not only on the food side of things, but, uh, Seashare has been a tremendous help on things like equipment, food banks, and so I just wanted to make sure that people recognize that it wasn't just you passing food along.

And so thank you very much for your efforts. Thank you. Thank you. And Ms. Kimball. Thank you.

I, I had somewhat of a related question on the, um, capacity in Alaska and rural Alaska to accept donations. And from previous, um, when Jim did the presentation, he, he kind of honed in on that, that you still need a certified food bank-type distributor in order to get the food to them, and then you also need, like Mr. Sakata was saying, some freezing capacity in the community. And so I guess I don't know if that capacity has changed or improved at all, or whether any of the grants that you mentioned could be used for that support in a community, or if they're really only geared toward buying food. So through the chair, thank you, Miss Kimball. Um, so the grant that we have for the state of Alaska does include the purchase of freezers.

So I think that we've— so we've done a few large freezers, but by and large what we're doing is chest freezers to small agencies who either their freezer broke or they would need another one in order to accept seafood donations. So that has been something that we wrote in when we, when we got that grant. There's also, prior to us with this grant, a lot— the Food Bank of Alaska has an amazing network, and so even though they're one of the only major food bank hubs, they have done a lot to help small programs Freezers throughout Alaska also, you know, get certified and how they had, I think, ARPA funds before Seashore started doing freezers that they were giving out freezers. So, in terms of if you are trying to do distributions in Alaska on a shoestring budget, there really are only a few places that can take a container. There are really only a few places that can take more than a couple thousand pounds.

But because we have the grant funds and we can actually move really microscopic amounts in the grand scheme of things, and that allows us to fill those smaller, uh, freezers. And then we're also just trying to build a network of more local donations. Um, We were in Homer just a few weeks ago, and we have one halibut processor now who's saving the collars for us, and then those will go into the Homer Food Bank and the Anchor Point Food Bank and the Ninilchik Food Bank. So that's all happening very, very local and can also sort of be shifted around. The Homer Food Bank said, "Is it okay?

We actually gave the collars to Ninilchik because their freezers were empty." I said, "Yeah, obviously that's okay." and we'll get you guys next time. So, you know, everything in Alaska is kind of case by case. We don't have, you know, no community is quite like the next, but we just keep working at it.

Thank you. And just my second question, or maybe it's just an observation, as I always think of this as being an Alaska program, but the vast majority of what you're getting is not PSC, it is donated product, and it seems to be from all over, not just from Alaska or even the Pacific Northwest. Is that true, that you get donations from other seafood companies outside of Alaska and the Pacific Northwest? Yes, through the chair, yes, that is true. We, we do quite a bit of other species.

We did some seaweed, we did some imitation fish that was actually plant-based. We're willing, you know, if it was created by the seafood industry and it needs to be donated, we'll find it a good home.

Thanks. Yes, Ms. Cohen.

Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you, Hannah, for the presentation. And just really want to commend C-Share for the work that you do. It's really important work. Um, on your challenges and goals slide, you mentioned the challenge of confusion surrounding rules. Do you have a specific example or advice or request of the council that we could help with?

Regarding that.

Well, um, yes, through the chair, thank you, Miss Goin. I would recommend, um, that Mr. Kerland's letter probably addresses some of what the confusion was, and then we'll continue to work on our part as C-SHARE to communicate what is decided.

I'm not seeing any other questions. Thank you so much for joining us this afternoon. Thank you.

And that will conclude our reports for the day. We will take one public testifier, and then we will resume in the morning at 8:00 AM with the remainder of our B reports. So, Adrian Tuhit.

You can please give it to Sarah. Thank you.

We have a 6-minute time limit for organizations.

Thanks. Oh, there we go.

Council members, thank you for the opportunity. I'm Adrian Tuohy, a biologist taking part in the Let Our Salmon Come Home campaign. Across the North Pacific, too many of our salmon are intercepted and killed far from home in distant ocean fisheries, and too few fish return to spawn for recovery and support the ecosystems, economies and communities that depend on them. Today I'm urging the council to fulfill its obligations under National Standard 4 of the MSA and let our salmon come home. National Standard 4 was designed to ensure that when fish harvests are allocated among competing uses and users, those allocations are fair and equitable to all fishermen, reasonably calculated to grow conservation, and structured to prevent any single entity from acquiring an excessive share of fishing privileges.

Critically, NS4 also establishes that management measures cannot discriminate against residents of different states. Presently, this council's delegation of salmon management plan authority to the state of Alaska does not appear to adequately satisfy non-delegable NS4 obligations under the MSA. Firstly, it must be noted that the Alaskan Chinook salmon fisheries in question overwhelmingly harvest salmon that are produced in Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia. For example, the Southeast Alaska Commercial Troll Fishery, an ocean-based mixed stock fishery, represents the largest Chinook salmon fishery across the West Coast. Of the Chinook salmon caught in this ocean troll fishery, only 2% originate from Alaskan rivers.

In total, 98% of the landed catch from the Southeast Alaska Commercial Troll Fishery originates from rivers of Washington, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia. And you can see that in the figure there in the document. Therefore, Southeast Alaskan Ocean Chinook fisheries predominantly rely upon the harvest and stale— sale of salmon that are produced by other states and provinces with substantial financial support, millions annually, from local taxpayers and governments in Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia. While Southeast Alaska Ocean Chinook fisheries overwhelmingly rely upon the harvest of salmon from other states and provinces, Pacific Salmon Commission data clearly show that these fisheries routinely harvest excessive shares of Washington and Oregon Coast Chinook, discriminating against tribes, fishers, and residents of Washington and Oregon, states represented within the management region of the PFMC. For example, Pacific Salmon Commission data clearly show that over the most recent 20-year period, 47% of the total harvest of Grays Harbor Chinook occurred in Southeast Alaska, leaving only 23% for communities of Washington, Oregon, and the greater PFMC management region.

A similar story plays out for Chinook stocks across our coast. This clearly demonstrates that Southeast Alaska has acquired an excessive share of fishing privileges of Washington's own salmon. The State of Alaska, with approval from this council, has acquired well over twice as much harvest allocation and salmon landings of Washington Coast Chinook than all Washington and Oregon fishers combined, and that's tribal, recreational, and commercial. Now, things might not appear so egregious if the trends were improving, if they were improving over time, but unfortunately this is not the case whatsoever. When looking at trends over this 20-year period, the inequity has only grown worse.

Looking at the exploitation data from the Pacific Salmon Commission, it is clear that the Southeast Alaskan exploitation of Washington Coast Chinook has significantly increased over the most recent 20-year period. In contrast, exploitation of Washington Coast Chinook in Washington and Oregon's own fisheries has steadily declined. Now, once again, it might not appear so bad if Washington and Oregon similarly intercepted Alaska salmon, creating some sort of balance in interceptions and fishing privileges for Chinook. However, given the data, it is abundantly clear that zero Alaskan Chinook are intercepted in fisheries of Washington and Oregon. This trend of zero interceptions of Alaskan Chinook under the PFMC has remained constant over time.

Along with the growing inequity that fishers of Washington and Oregon are experiencing, it is clear that conservation goals are not being met for the Washington and Oregon Coast stocks that are being severely harmed in Alaska's ocean salmon fisheries. Across the same 20-year period, the data show a declining trend in escapement and numerous years of missed escapement targets for many Washington and Oregon Coast watersheds.

Chinook age structure and body size have further been reduced, also products of mixed stock ocean fishing, and you can see that in the uploaded document through your database. The situation is abundantly clear. In no way, shape, or form is this situation equitable, sustainable, or producing optimal yield. Undoubtedly, this council should work with the state of Alaska, the PFMC, and NOAA to rectify the situation, or the MSA upon its 50th anniversary, isn't working. So in closing, I urge this council to rectify this matter of conservation inequity and let our salmon come home to the local watersheds, communities, and ecosystems that depend on them.

Thank you so much for your time and service on, on the council.

Thank you for your testimony. Thank you. Let's see if there are any questions.

Yeah. Yes, Ms. Kimball. Thank you. I just wanted to understand the membership of your group. Yes, so Let Our Salmon Come Home is a group of individuals, businesses, and organizations that spans California to Alaska.

Anybody can take part.

Okay, thank you for your time. Thank you very much.

So, um, we will be breaking for the day and come back at 8:00 AM, and again, we'll complete our, uh, B agenda items. So, uh, a reminder, there's a reception today from 6:00 to 8:00 PM. Everyone is welcome. Can you remind where is that I'm gonna find out where that is. It's in the— it's on the second floor of this hotel in the Oak Hemlock rooms.

Thank you. So we'll resume at 8 AM. Have a good evening.