Thursday, April 4, 2019

BBRSDA sued

Six commercial fishermen have filed this lawsuit seeking to bar the Bristol Bay Regional Seafood Development Association from spending its money on trying to kill the proposed Pebble mine.

Deckboss first learned of this suit from craigmedred.news.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Noting new here, when you're unable to read Alaska Statutes, and the mission, goals, and requirements related to Regional Seafood Development Associations, you should be in Court. I still have yet to read anything even slightly related to a Regional Anti Mining Development Corporation in any of this legislation passed in Juneau. Joe Juneau had a Gold Mine, then they moved the Capitol from Sitka. Any fisherman who reads an anti mining clause into the statute, should get sued, and an IQ check, when he gets his bank account cleaned out for flunking 8th grade reading comprehension. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/56b0dfb660b5e98b87fc3d52/t/56ba79ed2fe131625b062427/1455061486760/BBSRDA-Statute.pdf

John Wise said...

Probably best to stay anonymous with an inane comment like that. As for reading comprehension, if you can read and you take a minute to use that skill, you'll see that no individual fishermen are being sued here and no monetary damages are being sought. And if the part about Joe Juneau is meant to suggest that mining made Alaska what it is, well that's far from the full story.
Abe Williams, who I thought did an excellent job in many respects as president of the BBRSDA, helped expand its activities in ways that similarly had nothing to do with promotion of a seafood product. During his tenure the BBRSDA spent money to prevent the need for any cost recovery fishing and dedicated funds to making sure towers were in place, all intended to pickup the ADF&G funds shortfall. These expenditures and others like genetic testing are not about marketing, they're ultimately about conserving our salmon resource and the fleet's economic health on harvesting side. The same is true here. So maybe the plaintiffs have an argument, but it's kind of interesting that Abe and friends didn't see it when he was BBRSDA president.