Anchorage Daily News
October 6, 2004

Stevens throws back quota rider

BLACK COD: Fisherman who would have benefited asks senator to pull it

By Wesley Loy

U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens has dropped controversial legislation that would have shifted millions of dollars worth of catch rights to a Petersburg commercial fishing boat owner.

The owner, John Winther, said Tuesday that he had asked the Alaska senator to drop the legislation, which Stevens had attached as a rider to a pending federal spending bill. Stevens, a Republican, is chairman of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee.

Winther declined to explain why he made the request other than to say, "We pulled it because we thought it was the right thing to do."

Courtney Schikora, press aide to Stevens, confirmed Winther's request and said the senator will drop the rider.

"We were asked to not pursue it, and that's what we're doing," she said. She had no further information.

The rider outraged some commercial fishermen, who said it would have taken catch rights, known as individual fishing quotas, away from them and awarded them to Winther and a partner, Bart Eaton, an executive with Seattle-based fish processing company Trident Seafoods Corp.

Winther, an avid Republican political donor, and Eaton share ownership of two boats that catch and freeze black cod. Harvest of the fish, popular in Japan, is restricted to those fishermen who hold quotas to catch a certain number of pounds of black cod each year.

The rider, according to the senator's office as well as federal fishery regulators, could have awarded Winther and Eaton quotas for as much as 450,000 pounds of black cod annually. At current prices, that much fish could be worth as much as $1.5 million at the docks, and the fishing rights themselves could be sold for some $5 million, according to people knowledgeable about the fishery.

Winther had argued he was due the catch rights as credit for scientific research fishing his boats did under contract with the government in the late 1980s. But regulators with the National Marine Fisheries Service, as well as the federal courts, disagreed. The courts said fish caught while researching the size and health of the black cod population was not a commercial catch that would qualify Winther and his partner for catch quotas beyond those they already hold for black cod.

Stevens, in an interview last month, said he believed Winther was entitled to the quota and the regulators and the courts were wrong.

The rider blistered some fishing industry players, who said it would have meant shaving away the size of the quotas held by the other 875 black cod harvesters prowling Alaska waters. That's because the overall catch of black cod is limited and the quota pool can't be expanded.

Jim Hubbard and his wife, Rhonda, who own a black cod boat based in Seward, fired an angry letter to Stevens on Monday, accusing him of abusing his office by going around regulators and the courts to benefit Winther and Eaton. Jim Hubbard said the rider could have cost his fishing operation $50,000 a year.

On Tuesday he was still upset, but Hubbard saluted Winther for asking that the rider be withdrawn. He said Winther had taken a lot of heat from other fishermen in the black cod fleet.

"I'm really glad he did it," Hubbard said. "He would have been ostracized."

Daily News reporter Wesley Loy can be reached at wloy@adn.com or 257-4590.