Nobody, it seems, much trusts the Alaska Department of Fish and Game these days. Never was that more obvious than last week when Dale Rabe, the new assistant director of the Division of Wildlife Conservation, tried to outline how wildlife management in the state is getting bogged down in paperwork.

As part of his presentation to the Board of Game, he popped up on his Powerpoint display a graphic outlining board action on the proposals that come before it twice each year in a thick booklets of regulatory suggestions.

The graphic showed that in the last several years the board has approved only 17 percent of 521 regulatory suggestions from the public and only 30 percent of the suggestions from officially sanctioned advisory committees, while voting in favor of 90 percent of the 182 proposals from Fish and Game staff.

The graphic was meant to illustrate how the board and Fish and Game staff waste a lot of time dealing with proposals without merit.

By Rabe's calculation, the board sat through testimony and deliberated on almost 600 proposals destined to go nowhere. The regulatory process in Alaska, he noted, brings in a lot more quantity than quality. In fact, he said, the staff is often forced to review and the board to deliberate on proposals that can only go into the garbage heap.

For instance, given the overpopulation of moose in Anchorage, I might submit a regulatory proposal suggesting Fish and Game be directed to provide a moose harvest permit to anyone like Craig Medred who can get the property owners on all lots surrounding his house to agree to his shooting a moose in his yard, with said moose to be shared communally.

This, it would seem to me -- as a lover of moose meat like Alaska half-term, ex-Gov. Sarah Palin -- would be the ideal way to trim Anchorage's moose population. But even if the majority of the members of the Board of Game agreed, and in the kill-baby-kill mood of the moment they just might, they couldn't approve a regulation like this.

Why? Because it is illegal to discharge a firearm in the developed part of Anchorage, and the Board of Game doesn't have the authority to override that local ordinance. The board regularly gets into situations like this, which is why Rabe was trying to suggest it might want to find a way to cut off some of the unworkable proposals now coming before it.

The reaction he got from the board on this suggestion was, however, just the opposite of what might have been expected. The board was most concerned by that 90-percent approval rating for the staff.

Lord knows, it wouldn't want to be caught accepting the recommendations of professionals more often than those from three guys who got together in a bar down the street.

"It looks terrible when you look at the stats,'' said board member Ben Grussendorf. "What does the Board do, just nod its head (to staff suggestions)?''

Shouldn't the suggestions from the public -- as opposed to those from the staff -- be the prime concern for a board trying to implement a "public process,'' said board chairman Cliff Judkins.

Board member Ted Spraker, a former state wildlife biologist, tried to point out that the statistics were somewhat weighted because the staff must bring before the board every proposal for a cow moose hunt in Alaska -- nearly all of which are instantly approved -- but it was to little avail. There seemed a lot of concern about how that 90-percent figure looked because, well, you know, nobody should be trusting the professionals when there are plenty of amateurs and know-nothings with opinions, too.

Much, if not most, of this is, unfortunately, the department's own damn fault.

In a world where "transparency" is the word of the day, it's back to operating behind a curtain. This has happened before. Some seem to believe that if you make a practice of hiding data and muzzling employees to make it look like a public agency is in agreement on everything, you increase public trust.