Herron bill creates rural 'breadbasket' reserve

Published on February 4th, 2010

By BOB TKACZ

The House Fish Committee has opened its 2010 agenda with a hearing on legislation intended to create a rural reserve to be intensively managed for maximum hunting, fishing and trapping harvests. HB 227, creating the "Holitna River Basin Hunting, Fishing & Trapping Reserve," was scheduled for a 10:15 hearing on Tuesday.

"The bill is specifically written to be compatible with other 'breadbasket' areas within the state's Intensive Management Areas, which exemplify high quality habitat and productivity contributions to entire Game Management Unit sub-regions," wrote Rep. Bob Herron, D-Bethel, in his sponsor statement with a bill that is much-expanded but little changed from the measure introduced last April.

The bill has grown from three to 11 pages, but the added language only describes the boundaries of the vaguely pyramid-shaped reserve. It covers an area running nearly 100 miles east to west from the Lake Clark Reserve to the Kuskokwim Mountains and almost 80 miles north to south.

The bill establishes the reserve to "ensure management and protection of fish and wildlife populations and habitat to perpetuate subsistence use, commercial use, and other consumptive uses of the area's fish and wildlife (and) to regain or maintain historical harvest levels with human consumptive use of these resources as a priority."

It requires the boards of fish and game to manage fish and game in the reserve "to provide for high levels of human harvest." To achieve this goal the boards are empowered to "control predation and adjust predator and prey population rations through whatever methods or means are considered appropriate to particular circumstances."

The bill bans the Department of Natural Resources from using eminent domain to acquire privately owned land in the reserve, but allows it to buy or trade for land.

Access to the reserve "may" be regulated by DNR, in consultation with the Department of Fish and Game to meet the purposes of the law and access to private property within the reserve is guaranteed.

Exploration and development of non-renewable resources is subject to approval by DNR in consultation with ADF&G. However the bill also declares that each department exercises its respective authority within the reserve through a fish and game management plan prepared by ADF&G in consultation with DNR.