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Date Posted: 04:52:53 04/28/04 Wed
Author: Don Johnson
Subject: Fisheries Special Interests

Fisheries Special Interests

I understand that the Kenai River Special Management Area, KRSMA is looking for comments on its proposed new working group to address alleged "Kenai River crowding". Ok so here is my comment.

I have been observing KRSMA board members come and go for years and there is one thing which most of them appear to have in common, most of them are pure bureaucrats. I define a bureaucrat as a person who is very good at talking, ax grinding and avoiding the common good. Anyone can be a bureaucrat they just need to be more interested in their own personal agenda than the common good.
I will go on record to predict that any "working group" the KRSMA puts together on the "crowding issue"
will also fit my bureaucrat profile. It is nice that the KRSMA will attempt to bring the Dept. of law onboard this time but that alone will not prevent its bureaucrats from incorrectly identifying Kenai problems as it has in the past.

When I go into a KRSMA meeting I expect to see about 17 Board members actively grinding an equal number of "special interest axes".
I expect to see sparks flying everywhere as each board members attempts conceal their true hidden & personal
agenda while they work to "make the world a better place". The annual agenda appears to be to locate a
group of people who stand between them and the Kenai River. If the target group is not well represented
on the KRSMA, the board then declares open season on them. All the freshly sharpened axes then become sound science "management tools" as they attempt to manage away at the unfortunate target group. One of their favorite management tools is to send out surveys asking if you dislike the targeted group.
These surveys seems to never mentions that they are tainted with misleading questions.
That is bad science in anyones book but that is how the KRSMA targets people for "management".
This group writes a bunch of tainted survey questions and then gives them to a bunch of locals who would love to be the only persons using the river. These questions then ask it the river is crowded?
I could also stack the polling deck if I wanted to prove my position. I have been fishing the Kenai River for 22 years and taken thousands of people fishing in my boat. I have never heard a single person in my boat claim that the river was crowded. That is around 10,000 persons without a single crowding complaint.
That would be about twice the total population of Soldotna claiming to be more interested in fishing than complaining about alleged crowding. I guess that removes the crowding issue, right? My point is that anyone can manipulate an issue to work in their favor but that is what special interest groups do. They grab only the sound science on their side of the issue and make-believe the sound science on the other side does not exist.

Surveys which ask tainted questions attempt to place created problems into a persons mind and then forces them to address it. I told these bad science survey writers of their survey error but they did not care if their survey was corrupted by forced issue questions.
This was the beginning of the "great crowding non-issue". The Kenai River Capacity Survey was and still is corrupt as are the motives of many KRSMA board members. If you start to really look at many KRSMA board members you begin to see the real reasons they are on the KRSMA. Each member basically has some kind of personal special interest which allows them to somehow benefit from being on this board.

It really does not even matter what the truth of an issue is, most of these members are so full of self interest that they have little chance of locating the common good. I claim that many KRSMA board members place their own personal agendas before the common good. I claim that many of these members have huge personal axes to grind and many times those axes
are much more important than the public good or what is good for the Kenai River.
If the common good were really important to the KRSMA they would not be seeking to form another special
interest "ax grinding working group" to do the same as they have. Cloning the KRSMA into another working group full of ax grinding members would only produce
another group of people with preconceived problems and preconceived solutions.
If the KRSMA board really wants to look for the truth on an issue it needs only put together a working group "without special interest axes to grind".
This is no doubt impossible because the KRSMA believes that only people with a special interests may qualify to decide Kenai River issues.
This KRSMA belief forces a real catch 22 situation. This desire to have only special interests decide Kenai
issues produces so much personal ax grinding that most of the time the common good takes a back seat.

Alaska deliberately does not place special interests like cops or criminals on our juries because we
believe them to reduce the chances of justice. Alaska deliberately places special interests like river
bank owners and sport fishermen on our State boards to increase the chances of justice?
Does this make any sense to you? It makes little sense to me. I suggest that we remove all KRSMA board members witih special interests and give justice and the Kenai River a chance.

I have a real and simple solution for anyone looking for a way to avoid crowding on any lake or river.
Just generate a specific lake or river public access stamp. Once a Kenai River access stamp were available the only thing left to argue about would be the price.
The price of a Kenai River access stamp could be adjusted for total access.
This would be a very simple and fair solution but that may be the real problem. It could be so simple and so fair that a bureaucrat could never think of it.


Thank you.

Don Johnson
Soldotna, Alaska 99669

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