Dennis Anderson: Mille Lacs limits continue to be a huge problem

The Dow was up Thursday, a respite for those worried the bottom will fall out. This is what people do, worry, and most of it is needless As it has been in the past, everything, generally, will be OK, no credit to those politicians now promising the moon.

Unless, that is, you are an angler or a business owner dependent on the walleyes of Mille Lacs to provide your recreation or pay your bills. Then you have problems.

Quite a few people in the central part of the state fall into this group. Resort owners. Bait dealers. Boat and motor salespeople. Gas station owners. Restaurateurs.

Not too many years ago the Department of Natural Resources estimated the sport fishing economy that surrounds Mille Lacs to be worth some $50 million annually, far from chump change for an area nearly devoid of manufacturers and high-tech start-ups, among other going concerns.

Which is why the headline in Thursday's Star Tribune over a story by Doug Smith must have gotten the attention of these people. "Expect fewer Mille Lacs walleyes this summer." The relationship, after all, between the health and abundance of the Mille Lacs walleye population and the ringing of area cash registers is direct. More walleyes, more money; fewer walleyes, less.

That Mille Lacs is the most intensively managed walleye fishery in the nation is a given. Since 1999, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that eight Chippewa (Ojibwe) bands reserved the right to half the game and fish over a wide swath of east central Minnesota in an 1837 treaty they signed with the federal government, management of Mille Lacs has been torturously planned, reviewed, amended and documented.

The state claims to be the head honcho. But the lake for all intents and purposes is co-managed with the bands. Yet all of this management effort has amounted to little more than chasing tails. The variables the DNR can control -- slot size of walleyes anglers can keep, fishing hours, season lengths -- seem to have no predictable effect, year over year, on a fishery that a federal court, in its decision, presumed to be, well, manageable.

Or not.

Either way, in mid-summer, a surprised DNR made a surprising move: It instituted a 2-inch walleye slot on Mille Lacs, saying the angling quota for the year had been reached and even overrun.

The agency's action virtually ridded the lake of fishing boats, and quieted cash registers.

Now comes word that biologists representing the state and the band say the angling quota this year for Mille Lacs walleyes will drop by 142,000 pounds from last year. The reason: too few walleyes in the lake. The band's allotment, meanwhile, will jump by 22,500 pounds.

Which brings us to the subject of nets, the bands' preferred method of fishing -- in spring, during the spawn, when Mille Lacs walleyes are pushed into the shallows.

Thus we have the major components of the modern Mille Lacs walleye conundrum, courtesy of a Supreme Court decision that, as the then chief justice said in his dissent, should have gone the other way:

A heavily managed fishery that seems to defy managers' best intentions, leaving anglers and particularly area businesses in the lurch, while the Ojibwe chip away, using nets, an ever larger portion of available walleyes, whatever their number year to year.

A similar mess has been avoided on Leech Lake by an agreement forged years ago that pays the Chippewa a fee, essentially, for non-band angler access.

Could a similar agreement be made at Mille Lacs? Critics of the idea have said it smacks too much of taking once more from the Indians what is rightfully theirs.

Not so. This is a resource issue that -- absent a solution that recognizes the modern interests and, yes, interdependencies of neighbors -- will only grow worse, and more divisive, as time passes.