82 



I got two great telegrams this year. The first one was when the 

 Cook Inlet Fishery took the limit off of king salmon. The run was 

 so great that the limit which was previously one per fisherman was 

 taken off entirely. 



The second was from my good friend who is the leader of the op- 

 posite party, as a matter of fact, in the House of Representatives 

 from our State. He urged me to come join him on Montana Creek 

 because the king salmon were coming in at 60 and 80 pounds. They 

 had almost disappeared for years. So, the proof of what we all did 

 on driflnets is there for people to see in Alaska this year. It is a 

 wonderful thing. 



Now, back to the situation here, though, I have read your testi- 

 mony. I appreciate what you say. I have some problems about it 

 because having just been home and talked to some of my Eskimo 

 friends, they see this as another mechanism to get greater control 

 over their subsistence fishery. Do you see this in the proposal that 

 came from the industry and environmental groups? 



Ms. lUDlCELLO. Probably, there are several thousands of years of 

 justification for that, and experience. But certainly, in the context 

 of our negotiations, there was no intention — in fact, we explicitly 

 stated a number of times both in the agreement and to some folks 

 who were observing from both Rural Cap and some other native or- 

 ganizations — we expressed clearly our position that we had no in- 

 tention to move outside the four comers of section 114 of the 

 MMPA; that is, we are talking about incidental take in commercial 

 fishing. We had no intent to regulate or increase the likelihood of 

 regulation of subsistence. 



Indeed, the issue of revisiting the recovery factor, the recovery 

 time in cases where subsistence was a major source of take, the 

 whole debate on that issue and the whole point of taking it up was 

 raised by some Alaskans and some Alaskan Natives who were ob- 

 serving the proceedings. And they came to us and said "Well, you 

 know, the recovery factor is a mathematical calculation. And wnen 

 you come up with this calculation it does not take into account that 

 there might be — ^you are going to pop out with a number that is 

 basically a cap, and what if we are over that number? Then you 

 are going to affect our subsistence." 



We went back and, with some excellent assistance from Lloyd 

 Lowery from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, walked 

 through the issue to the point where we decided that what we 

 needed to do there with that recovery factor was acknowledge that 

 the time of recovery of a marine mammal stock — whether you get 

 harbor seals or beluga whales or whatever it is to OSP in 5, 10, 

 20 years — is a policy call when, in order to do so, you are affecting 

 somebody's sustenance. And that in order to give the flexibility to 

 change the mathematical calculation, we agreed that the Secretary 

 ought to be able to adjust the recovery factor downward which ex- 

 pands the time longer. 



It did not occur to us at the time that that flexibility might work 

 the other way around. We certainly never intended it that way. 

 The idea was if you do your mathematical calculation, let us say, 

 and you come out with a number for seals at 100, and that would 

 cut into the subsistence use, then you would redo the recovery fac- 



