48 



Ms. Blackburn. The councils, I think, do under at least the 

 mandates. We have two major problems in speed. One 



The Chairman. The reason I ask, they are slower than the Con- 

 gress, I am told. That is pretty slow. 



Ms. Blackburn. Well, I am on the city council. Sometimes I 

 know it is good that we are slow. If we would have been too fast, 

 we would have made a mistake. 



Yes, it does get slow. And within the agency we have had real 

 problems with things like regulatory amendments, and those are 

 usually amendments that are designed to protect the stocks, just 

 bogging down in the system. And it has been suggested, and we 

 suggested in our written testimony, that once a council rec- 

 ommends a regulatory amendment, that either the Secretary reject 

 it in writing or it is automatically into effect 60 days after it has 

 been approved by the council or recommended by the council. 



There is no reason for these things to wait 6 months, and we 

 have an example in the gulf, where the thing is overfished only be- 

 cause a regulatory amendment would have taken care of the prob- 

 lem and it was sitting on somebody's desk back in DC. 



The Chalrman. Ms. Stewart. 



STATEMENT OF BETH STEWART, DIRECTOR, DEPARTMENT OF 

 NATURAL RESOURCES, ALEUTIANS EAST BOROUGH 



Ms. Stewart. Thank you. Good morning. My name is Beth Stew- 

 art and I would like to take this opportunity to present comments 

 on behalf of the Aleutians East Borough. 



The Aleutians East Borough is located on the Alaska Peninsula 

 and adjacent islands. It includes the small communities of Akutan, 

 Cold Bay, False Pass, King Cove, Nelson Lagoon, and Sand Point. 

 Geographically, this area is unique, with borders along the Bering 

 Sea and the Gulf of Alaska. All of the communities except Cold 

 Bay, which is our gift from World War II, are native communities 

 that depend entirely on commercial fishing. 



Let me begin by saying that Aleutians East Borough supports 

 the council process. We believe that this process is working well 

 now and does not need substantial change. Most of the frustrations 

 our fishermen have are similar to those that Chris expressed, prob- 

 lems with implementation of the act rather than flaws within the 

 act itself. 



Today we are going to comment briefly on five issues, which are 

 gone through at length in the written comments we have. We are 

 very concerned about comprehensive rationalization, bycatch reduc- 

 tion, critical habitat designations, emergency order closure author- 

 ity, and conflict-of-interest standards. 



People of the Aleutians East Borough, even though they would 

 receive IFQ's under the limited entry systems currently being pro- 

 posed, have no ability to deal with the concept that fish can be 

 owned, traded, or sold before they are caught. This is perhaps a 

 cultural difficulty, but it is a very real difficulty within the region. 

 And more importantly right now, we do not see how an IFQ pro- 

 gram can be implemented in any kind of cost-effective way. 



As I suppose you have probably heard more about that, and I 

 will skip through that one fairly quickly. 



