On The Hook

[dropcap]The[/dropcap] Western Pacific Fishery Management Council is the federal body that oversees fishing in more than 1.5 million square miles of the vast Western Pacific Ocean. The commercial fleet it regulates lands much of the ahi tuna and swordfish served in Hawaii, among other fish species.

To put it mildly, Wespac has a lot to do with the availability of fresh, locally caught poke in the islands. The council receives millions in federal dollars to operate and to hand out in the form of grants that pay for projects in Hawaii as well as Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands and American Samoa.

For the past 38 years it has been run by Kitty Simonds, an outspoken and unapologetic champion of the commercial fishermen.

Environmental groups, Native Hawaiians, state officials and others have complained for decades that Simonds and the council members have short-changed conservation concerns in favor of exploiting the resource to benefit fishermen, and that they are inappropriately using taxpayer money for political lobbying and efforts to manipulate public policy.

Two years ago, Civil Beat investigated a secretive fisheries fund controlled by Simonds and Wespac. Our investigation caught the attention of congressmen involved in natural resource management and in part prompted a federal audit of Wespac, a review that is still going on. UPDATE The audit was released the day this series was published. Read about it below in “Ongoing Coverage.”

Since then Civil Beat has been taking a much deeper look at Wespac itself, with an eye toward how Wespac is spending its federal budget. We wanted to see if Simonds and the council are essentially using taxpayer dollars to try to influence public policy rather than manage fish stocks in a way to make sure they continue to flourish.

We found that Simonds and Wespac have not been hesitant to use their political power and their federal budget to benefit the commercial fishing industry to the detriment of other interests. The council’s activism has ranged from working to establish community-based resource advocacy groups that state officials say clearly oversteps and treads on the state Department of Land and Natural Resources’ turf to highly visible opposition to the national marine monuments like Papahanaumokuakea. They’ve paid to stack meetings with their allies and organize rallies that protest federal restrictions.

More recently, Simonds tried to convince President Trump to roll back protections for fish and habitat that had been put in place by Presidents Bush and Obama. And now the council is gearing up to oppose any changes to the Magnuson-Stevens Act, the nation’s primary fisheries management law which is up for congressional review.

Federal investigators have so far found the council’s activism stops short of violating prohibitions on lobbying by government officials but auditors have warned Simonds and her staff that they should only be responding to legislative matters when asked and only with factual and technical information. Citing Wespac’s actions, two congressmen have introduced changes to the MSA that would specifically prohibit the kinds of political action Wespac has engaged in over the past decades.

Using the federal Freedom of Information Act, we obtained thousands of pages of Wespac documents, correspondence, emails and other records including the past 10 years of the agency’s financial ledger that details the expenditures it’s made.

What emerges is a picture of an agency and its leader who have worked to make sure the commercial fishing industry can keep operating at the highest level possible, even as stocks struggle and bycatch remains a problem that threatens some species with extinction.

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