A pair of new stipulations added this year for Kenai River commercial fishing guide permits triggered questions about public process and the role of the Kenai River Special Management Area Advisory Board amid a call to reverse the changes.

Stipulations 32 and 40 were included in an updated list emailed Feb. 11 to Kenai River guides by the State Department of Natural Resources. Stipulation 32 says that a guide’s permit can be “revoked at any time at the discretion of the director or his/her designee without compensation to the permittee or liability to the State.” Stipulation 40 bars guides from conducting any pickup or drop-off of clients at the the Eagle River Boat Launch.

The guide stipulations are, broadly, boilerplate legal language that dictate what insurance guides need, what first-aid training they need, how to license their vessels and other such requirements. State Parks staff said in February that language resembling Stipulation 32 has long been part of the permit paperwork for guides, though it was previously messaged differently and wasn’t listed among the guides’ stipulations.

The addition of Stipulations 32 and 40 were made without public notice and without input from the KRSMA board, Kenai River fishing guide Greg Brush said Feb. 25. He was in an emergency meeting of the KRSMA board’s guide committee that afternoon.

“We have a process,” he said. “Stipulation 32 is the scariest thing I’ve ever seen. It’s actually titled ‘revocable at will’ — don’t need a reason, anyone, at any time for any reason can revoke your license. There’s no industry in the state where that’s legal.”

Monte Roberts, a member of the KRSMA board and president of the Kenai River Professional Guide Association, said the last time the KRSMA board was involved with deliberating on the stipulations tied to the permit, they were pared down to 23 stipulations. It was last year, he said, when the permitting management was consolidated at the state level and the number jumped to 38. Then, again without input or public process, that number was raised to 40.

The stipulation package, as opposed to other measures like a director’s order, Roberts said, is like a contract that he’s accepted — “I’ve given up my right to due process on any of those.” Because one of the stipulations says that the guides must follow all regulations and laws, Roberts said it would be redundant to add a regulatory issue to the package.

“What I’d really like to know is what changed,” he said. “What’s changed in the Kenai River guides’ behavior that’s led us to go from 23 to 40?”

Most of the additions, State Parks Permitting Manager Nikki Potter said during the Feb. 25 meeting, were made by her office to “clean up” language and standardize permits across the state. Language similar to the revocable at will text was already included in the permit paperwork, though not as a stipulation, and the bar on operating at Eagle Rock was passed down by State Parks Director Ricky Gease. She said they can make those changes without input from groups like the KRSMA board.

“There’s a couple of regulations that give us or the director the power to put stipulations in the permit,” she said. “We don’t really have a public process.”

Rep. Justin Ruffridge, R-Soldotna, during that meeting said he was “somewhat unsatisfied” with the explanation offered by state parks as to the addition of the stipulations. He called on state parks to take “steps backwards” and engage in a public process before enforcing any new stipulations.

“It is extremely odd, to me, to have a package of stipulations that seem to essentially appear out of nowhere,” he said. “I’m actually, frankly, shocked at hearing that regulations or stipulations can essentially just be put in place without going through this process.

Matt Wedeking, operations manager for state parks, said that state parks isn’t required to engage in a public process for commercial use permits, that they can institute “reasonable stipulations.” State parks, he said, would engage on the questions brought forward by the guides, though he said he hoped to reach an outcome that would be favorable to direction from Gease.

By a follow-up meeting of the KRSMA guide committee on March 5, Stipulation 40 had been revoked. But Gease was clear that when construction begins for both the parking lot at Eagle Rock Boat Launch and for the expansion of the Kenai Spur Highway, the question of parking at Eagle Rock will be revisited.

Gease defended the revocable at will stipulation as a provision handed down to state parks by the Alaska Department of Law. A representative from the Law said that it stemmed from a 2013 Alaska Supreme Court case that decided that an Alaska State Parks permit that isn’t revocable at will “effectively becomes an easement that’s an impermissible disposal of park lands and park resources.”

Potter repeated the claim that the revocable at will language has applied to guides for some time.

“All I did was pull it out of the signature box and put it as a stipulation,” she said. “I didn’t try to sneak this in. I didn’t make this up. This has been in your permit.”

Fishers, including Brush and Roberts, called for a return to language included in the permits in 2014 that said that permits “may be revocable” at the discretion of the director. That was the recommendation by the committee to the full KRSMA board. Brush said that the previous language created less “heartburn.” Roberts said, in the long term, he’d like to see all the stipulations, including 32, reexamined.

The KRSMA board on March 13 unanimously adopted a pair of resolutions in response to the stipulation discussion. The first calls on Alaska State Parks both to remove Stipulation 32 and return to the signature box previous language that doesn’t include the “revocable at will” clause. The second asks state parks to “reset” its relationship with the KRSMA board as an advisor on policy discussions affecting the river.

Roberts said to the full board that the question being tackled by the two resolutions isn’t a guide issue. It’s a question of the authority of the advisory board as a participant in policy discussions. Many of the recommendations generated by the board go unanswered, he said. The board was chartered to advise both state parks and the governor.

“I am not interested in sitting here and wasting time anymore,” he said. “We do volunteer our time. We intend for people to, at least, listen and value the process. Part of that process says that the commissioner shall bring issues to this board relating to use.”

Alaska State Parks did not respond Tuesday to a request for comment on the two resolutions.

For more information, visit dnr.alaska.gov or “AlaskaStateParks” on YouTube, where full KRSMA board meetings can be found under “Playlists.” As of April 1, the March 13 meeting video had not been published there.

Reach reporter Jake Dye at jacob.dye@peninsulaclarion.com.

Greg Brush, right, speaks during an emergency meeting of the Kenai River Special Management Area Advisory Board’s guide committee at the Kenai Peninsula Region Office of Alaska State Parks near Soldotna, Alaska, on Feb. 25, 2025. (Jake Dye/Peninsula Clarion)

Greg Brush, right, speaks during an emergency meeting of the Kenai River Special Management Area Advisory Board’s guide committee at the Kenai Peninsula Region Office of Alaska State Parks near Soldotna, Alaska, on March 5, 2025. (Jake Dye/Peninsula Clarion)