The Alaska Board of Fisheries Thursday voted 5-2 to adopt a proposal allowing anyone who owns two set gillnet permits to operate within existing regulations despite heavy opposition from some who said it would create absentee fishermen or fishing cartels.

Many of the board members were on the fence the three days they deliberated Proposal 58, but the last-minute addition of a sunset clause toppled many into supporting the proposal.

According to the addition, anyone holding two permits “may operate not more than 300 fathoms of set net in the aggregate, with no more than four sets of gillnets none of which may be longer than 150 fathoms in length.”

Kodiak fisherman Richard Blanc submitted the proposal in an effort to revitalize the set-net industry.

“The Kodiak set gillnet fishery is an economically depressed fishery,” he said. “We feel the fishery can be revitalized through the restructuring opportunity, provided by the Legislature, of owning and fishing two set gillnet permits under current regulations.”

Vince Webster, who voted in favor of the proposal, felt the practice was already being conducted and that adopting the issue wouldn’t change day-to-day operations.

“This practice is basically being done already under medical transfers or transferring permits to crewmembers’ or family members’ names, so I don’t see where this would change the fishery whatsoever,” he said. “This (proposal) would allow a family to have the historical income they have had in the past.”

Board member Bonnie Williams, who also voted in favor of the proposal, weighed the other opposition arguments that passage would decrease opportunity for new fishermen.

“I’m puzzled on that,” she said. “I think what we have in place … is effectively a surrogate system. We have a fisherman that owns and uses two permits on paper but effectively owns one. What we would be doing is regularizing that.”

The arguments helped sway votes in favor of the issue.

More importantly to many of those voting in favor of the proposal though, was that the new regulation would expire Dec. 31, 2010, allowing the Board of Fisheries to review the process and either permanently adopt or kill it.

The addition of the sunset clause raised some concern with board chairmen Mel Morris.

“There is a good chance that if we do include this sunset clause that it might be something like the Chignik co-op where people bought permits thinking those permits were going to be valuable and, in fact, they were not,” he said. “The co-op went away and the permits became just another permit. That is the unintended consequences of these things sometimes.”

The sunrise clause did not convince everyone to vote in favor of the proposal. Jeremiah Campbell and Larry Edfelt opposed it.

Edfelt voted against it because he felt the proposal did not give young people a chance to enter the set gillnet fishing industry and, like many others opposed to the issue, he felt it would encourage permit stacking.

“It doesn’t reduce the gear,” he said. “It just reduces the number of owners.”

Mirror writer Ralph Gibbs can be reach via e-mail at rgibbs@kodiakdailymirror.com.