Alaska Supreme Court hears arguments on personal watercraft ban near Homer

On Wednesday, the five members of Alaska’s highest court heard arguments in a lawsuit that seeks to restore a ban on personal watercraft, commonly known as jet skis, in a pair of conservation areas near Homer.

Alaska Department of Fish and Game Commissioner Doug Vincent-Lang repealed the 19-year-old ban in 2020, an act that prompted a lawsuit from the Alaska Quiet Rights Coalition and three other nonprofits.

In 2023, an Alaska Superior Court judge ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, and the state appealed that decision to the high court.

“Jet skis are polarizing. People love them. Or they hate them. Whether to allow their use in Kachemak Bay divided the local community back in the 2000s, and it has continued to divide the local community ever since,” state attorneys wrote in a filing with the Supreme Court.

In the lower court, and in arguments to the Supreme Court, attorney Samuel Gottstein — representing supporters of the ban — said that the state law that created the conservation areas prohibits the commissioner from revoking the watercraft ban once it was installed by regulation by a prior commissioner.

Justice Jude Pate interrupted Gottstein as he laid out the argument.

“Wait a second,” Pate said. “So as a matter of logic — if they didn’t have the authority to repeal it, they didn’t have the authority to enact it. Doesn’t that automatically follow?”

Gottstein responded by turning to the original law, which says that the state should “protect and preserve habitat areas especially crucial to the perpetuation of fish and wildlife and to restrict all other uses not compatible with that primary purpose.”

Supporters of the ban argue that personal watercraft aren’t compatible with that purpose, so the department might be able to ban them but not return them to the conservation areas.

“It’s like a parent saying, ‘I brought you into this world and I can take you out of it,’” Gottstein told the justices on Wednesday. “The reality is, no parent has that right, just like Fish and Game doesn’t have that right.”

The state disagrees, and in both written and oral arguments, attorneys for the Department of Law said that the lower court’s decision was based on a bad interpretation of state law.

“Decisions on uses within (conservation areas), to the extent they affect fish and wildlife and their habitat, fall to the commissioner under his general authority from the Legislature,” wrote Assistant Attorney General Laura Wolff, who represented the department in court.

Gottstein said that even if the court rules that the commissioner does have the power to eliminate the ban, it should rule against Vincent-Lang’s 2020 repeal because it acted arbitrarily, without regard for public input and analysis, and in a way that was inconsistent with other regulations.

The state disputes all three of those points, and Wolff suggested in written arguments that the issue could be sent back to the lower court for further judgment.

On Wednesday, she acknowledged that the high court could short-circuit the process and decide all issues right now.

“I think this court should reverse the (lower court) order that was clearly wrong,” she said.

Originally published by the Alaska Beacon, an independent, nonpartisan news organization that covers Alaska state government.