Land swap would resolve dispute
Source: Anchorage Daily News, by Elizabeth Bluemink
July 02, 2007
FISH CAMP: CIRI would trade Lake Clark beachfront to keep Cook Inlet acreage.
A few years ago, eviction seemed the likely outcome for a disputed fish camp used by Native nonprofit groups affiliated with Cook Inlet Region Inc. as well as guests of the Rasmuson Foundation.
Ending a land ownership dispute that had simmered for decades, a federal appeals court in 2004 ruled the five-acre rustic camp sits on land belonging to the National Park Service, not to Cook Inlet Natives.
CIRI had occupied the land, over Park Service objections, since the mid-1980s. But the eviction never came.
In a federal budget bill steered by U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens, Congress directed the park to postpone eviction of the camp while the Park Service tried to find an alternative.
Instead of eviction, another solution bubbled up: a land exchange.
Park Service officials say they're nearing completion of a deal to swap the contentious five acres for 80 acres of Lake Clark shoreline now owned by Southcentral Foundation, CIRI's largest nonprofit.
If the new deal is approved, Southcentral will become a new private landowner within Lake Clark National Park and will operate the camp on the west shore of Cook Inlet across from Ninilchik.
The Park Service has already authorized the land swap despite opposition from some private landowners around the camp, as well as the Sierra Club and the Alaska Wildlife Alliance.
These opponents are waging a last-ditch attempt to stop the land exchange. On June 20, they asked the Washington, D.C.-based chief of the National Park Service to cancel the deal, saying it is unfair. The request is pending.
"Our frustration is, politically connected organizations get favorable treatment," said David Coray, owner of the Silver Salmon Creek Lodge, which is on private land within the park, upstream from the fish camp.
Stevens is one of a few public figures who weighed in on the fish camp matter. Nobel Prize winner Vernon Smith, the Rasmuson chair in economics at the University of Alaska Anchorage, lobbied the secretary of the interior to keep the camp open after CIRI executives had agreed to dismantle it.
The fish camp was part of a larger bid to resolve Native land claims in the region. In the 1990s, Stevens, Young and then-Sen. Frank Murkowski each unsuccessfully pushed legislation to settle Native claims to 30,000 acres in the park along Cook Inlet.
Park officials said a land swap has always been a way to legitimize the fish camp.
"I said from the beginning that I would entertain a land exchange," said Joel Hard, Lake Clark park superintendent.
Southcentral says it wants to maintain the camp because it serves a vital fundraising role for it and other nonprofits in Alaska, many of them run by and for Alaska Natives.
It's an ideal spot to give a sense of Alaska Bush life to out-of-state donors, especially the ones visiting the state for the first time, said Kevin Gottlieb, Southcentral's chief of staff for resources and development.
"For many of them, it's the first time they've slept under Visqueen," and at the camp, they are within two miles of spectacular bear viewing and silver salmon fishing, he said.
LAKESHORE LAND
After losing the legal battle to obtain the fish camp and other lands on behalf of Cook Inlet Native villages, CIRI distanced itself from the camp, handing over its operations to the foundation and not running any of its own trips there, said Barbara Donatelli, CIRI senior vice president.
But the camp's operators' success in enlisting Alaska's congressional delegation still sticks in the craw of neighbors opposed to the land exchange.
Existing laws and park rules call for "eviction of squatters" on park lands, said Coray, who complained in a letter to National Park Service Director Mary Bomar that Alaska national park supervisors made an exception for "an influential, politically well-connected Alaska Native regional corporation and its affiliate (Southcentral)."
Bomar is expected to rule on the petition soon, Alaska park officials said.
Hard, the park superintendent, sees the land exchange as an ecological gain for the park, which despite its name, owns only 30 percent of the Lake Clark shoreline.
The 80-acre Sucker Bay parcel -- which Southcentral recently purchased from a Nondalton Native allotment owner -- contains valuable sockeye salmon spawning habitat, he said.
"We think we have a further opportunity here to protect the lake's shorelines," he said.
For the land exchange to proceed, Southcentral must agree to a set of deed covenants on the five acres along Cook Inlet.
For example, the foundation or any other future landowner would not be able to do any for-profit commercial activity on the parcel, Hard said.
"I'm concerned about the creation of a lodge where they are bringing commercial guests that diminish business for locals or causes a detriment to resources," he said.
Once the covenants are agreed on, the Park Service will survey and appraise the parcels to verify the financial benefit of the exchange, he said.
He said that could begin any day. But he didn't know when the land swap would become final.
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