Kodiak Rep. Stutes Asks Governor To Declare Pink Season a Disaster  Alaska Gov. Bill Walker was asked to declare this year's pink salmon season a disaster, which would open up access to federal relief funds. Rep. Louise Stutes, R-Kodiak asked for the declaration since the statewide harvest is just 36 million humpies, far less than a preseason forecast of 90 million fish. "This is the worst salmon year in nearly 40 years, and that's huge," she said. "It doesn't just affect the fishermen — it's a trickle-down effect on the cannery workers, the processors and nearly all businesses in the community. It's a disaster, there's no other way to describe it." Until this season, the worst pink harvest this century is the 68,035 taken in 2012. A proposal to keep California Dungeness crab fishing open under evisceration orders should the fishery show signs of high domoic acid was not well received among fishermen. The executive committee of the California Dungeness Crab Task Force discussed the plan at meeting this past Friday. Fishermen pointed out there are maybe 40 live buyers in the state and a handful of major processors that can operate under an evisceration advisory. The evisceration order could up a situation in which crab prices to the fishermen would drop dramatically since live crab buyers frequently pay more for the crab than processors that have the processing and distribution infrastructure. “An evisceration order would exclude a large segment of industry. You’d have a real nightmare," said Bill Carvalho, a processor who buys live crab. In other news, we run a letter from D.B Pleschner, the executive director of California's Wetfish Producers Association, that asks why the President wants to curtail sustainable fisheries. The letter is a response to last week's decision by the Administration to quadruple the size of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument. "This unilateral action happened without the transparency, science-based decision-making and robust public process trumpeted in the President’s own National Ocean Policy, nor the bipartisan Congressionally mandated Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (MSA), which requires fisheries to be managed under a transparent, science-based process administered by regional fishery management councils," Pleschner writes. Meanwhile, the casual dining sector in the US might be in an irreversible decline as major restaurant chains continue to lose market share to competition from fast casual concepts and other shifts in consumption. The segment has struggled to generate traffic growth for more than a decade now. And this year, it’s been hit by a broad decline in industry sales. “The old notion of sitting down for dinner at six and be there for an hour at the restaurant is disappearing in the minds of a lot of consumers,” said Victor Fernandez, executive director of insights and knowledge for TDn2K. Finally, ISF Trading Company has pleaded guilty to illegally importing sea urchins from Canada. Maine-based ISF falsely labeled sea urchins it was purchasing from a Canadian company that was not authorized to export goods to the U.S. ISF faces up to five years of probation and $1.25 million in fines and forfeitures.