PRIEST RIVER - Around 60 concerned anglers and "lakers" turned up at Thursday night's meeting with the Idaho Department of Fish and Game to voice concerns about the future of fishery management at one of Idaho's top fishing spots in Priest Lake.

A packed Priest River Senior Center set the stage for the lively discussion, which was centered around the collapse of kokanee in the late 1970s and domination of the Priest Lake fishery by lake trout ever since.

To suppress, or not to suppress the lake trout was the question posed by Fish and Game.

Jim Fredericks, Fish and Game regional fishery manager, was on hand to provide an overview of current management, answer questions, and look at alternate options for the previous plan that he called, "a finger in the dike" approach to controlling lake trout.

One option is to allow lake trout to dominate both the Priest Lake and Upper Priest Lake systems, which would likely mean the functional extinction of bull trout and further decline of cutthroat trout in Upper Priest Lake, Fredericks said.

The second alternative is to suppress lake trout to a level where bull trout, cutthroat trout and kokanee populations could expand and begin to provide a fishery again.

Fish and Game officials pointed to the six years of aggressive lake trout suppression efforts in Lake Pend Oreille as an example of proper management, saying they've seen a significant decline in lake trout abundance and an increase in kokanee survival.

The annual lake trout exploitation estimates have ranged from 40-70 percent and suggests lake trout could be suppressed in Priest Lake to the point where management of other species is an alternative.

Proving many anglers would like to see the restoration of native fish while many others prefer managing the fishery for lake trout was an opinion survey conducted by IDFG, which Fredericks said showed a public divided nearly right down the middle.

IDFG netted the response of more than 1,300 people in angler opinion surveys in 2012, which showed 42 percent of respondents supporting efforts to suppress lake trout, 39 percent voting to discontinue suppression efforts, and 17 percent with no opinion.

Out of 62 respondents from Bonner County in a non-random survey, 24 said discontinue suppression efforts, 21 voted to develop a plan for lake trout suppression, and 17 had no opinion either way.

"It just comes down to a person's opinion," Fredericks said. "Do you like lake trout or kokanee, and all the comments have been split right down the middle."

The good news is that Fish and Game has the next six years to review and develop the current 2013-2018 management plan, which was approved in November of last year.

Historically, Priest and Upper Priest lakes contained three native sport fishes, the westslope cutthroat, bull trout and mountain whitefish. The cutthroat fishery was the most popular with many accounts of 20-fish limits.

Kokanee were introduced in the 1930s and 1940s and quickly became the most abundant game fish. Through 1971, fishermen harvested an average of 64,000 kokanee a year at a catch rate of 1.2 fish per hour.

Though lake trout have been present in the system since being introduced by the U.S Fish Commission in 1925, they were only occasionally caught, and were a minor component of the fishery community and trophic structure.

The popular and productive cutthroat, bull trout, and kokanee fisheries that lasted through the 1970s abruptly collapsed in the 1980s. The IDFG fisheries management plan explains "there is little doubt that the ultimate collapse was a result of the introduction of mysis shrimp in 1965 and the subsequent explosion of the lake trout population."

By 1978, only 4,500 kokanee were harvested, and by 1983 it was less than 100. Cutthroat harvest plummeted from more than 2,500 in 1978 to just over 100 in 1983. Bull trout harvest peaked at more than 2,300 in 1978 and was less than 100 in 1983.

Since the 1980s when the lake trout became dominant, Fish and Game has taken many approaches toward fishery management, including stocking Priest Lake and its tributaries with millions of kokanee fry and hundreds of thousands of cutthroat fingerlings, implementing lake trout gillnetting and channel spanning trapnet programs in Upper Priest Lake, and blocking the Thorofare with everything from electric weirs, floating weirs, and strobe lights.

None of which proved fruitful for the department, Fish and Game officials said.

Currently the combined spring and fall netting efforts cost about $100,000 and are considered to be a short-term solution.