Thank you.

Halibut have been managed on an annual quota allocation for years. Change is hard. The Makah did their homework with their historical data and working with the IPHC Secretariat personnel to evaluate the IPHC data. The halibut population in 2A is on the Southern edge of the range. Any impacts on the biomass are very limited to the regions to the North.

The Conference Board (CB) is comprised of commercial, tribal, charter, and sport anglers. From my perspective, most of the folks probably didn't fully understand the proposal and don't know the history of the halibut fishery in 2A. The big stumbling block, I think, was that the Makah proposal had a statement that the fishery would establish a base limit and didn't have a "sunset" provision. Also in the mix was the on-going issues in Canada over their desire for a larger quota that isn't substantiated by the biomass science. The proposal said the TCEY would be in place for 3 to 5 years while the fishery was evaluated and the FCEY (1.5Mlb) would become a base.

The Commissioners recognized the biological arguments of the Makah proposal and saw an opportunity to initiate a stable fishery base (4 years) to see how the concept plays out without impacting the Canadian and Alaskan fisheries.

While not privy to all of the conversations after the proposal was made, we're sure there was some political discussions between Canada and the US that were done to preclude the problems that came up last year when the US and Canada couldn't agree on a quota and we went back to the 2017 quotas.