LINCOLN CITY — It’s fitting the Ocean Policy Advisory Council is holding its final meeting on marine reserves at the Chinook Winds Casino, said one person testifying Monday, since the council is gambling with peoples’ futures.

The comment got a laugh out of the more than 175 people in attendance, but many fishermen and businesses owners remained serious when they talked about the effect closed ocean areas would have on coastal communities.

At the same time, environmental groups were all business. They testified about the benefits of creating set-aside areas in Oregon’s territorial sea. The divide is about as wide and deep as the Mariana Trench, said another person who testified.

That will make the council’s decision today all that much more difficult. Members must decide which of 20 proposals to move forward for further study and possible funding by the Oregon Legislature.

Two sites, one at Port Orford, at Redfish Rocks, and one near Depoe Bay, at Otter Rock, have the most support. Even several coastal groups and fishermen have supported them because the community and the fishing industry was actively involved from the beginning, they said.

Most other sites, though, were developed with little or no input from the fishing industry. The environmental group Our Ocean, a coalition of Oregon- and national-based environmental groups, proposed a full network of eight reserves.

Florence fisherman Al Pazar said one site, at Cape Perpetua, would eliminate some of the best Dungeness crabbing grounds in the state.

Pazar said he approached Our Ocean when he heard about the group’s plans. He took latitude and longitude coordinates to them to show them where fishermen actively fish. Nothing came of it, he said, except that Our Ocean could say it spoke to a representative of the fishing industry.

The group used the independent nature of fishermen in a divide-and-conquer sort of attack when it developed its proposals.

“This is a whole-scale frontal assault,” he said.

Our Ocean representatives and paid staff admitted a lot of the group’s support comes from inland and metro areas.

Staffers Erin Anderson and Susan Allen delivered more than 4,000 postcards and 1,000 e-mails addressed to the governor and the legislature in support of marine reserves.

The group actively solicited comments from the public during seafood festivals in Newport and Yachats and at festivals in the valley, such as DaVinci Days in Corvallis. Our Ocean also has two staff members dedicated to obtaining support from inland Oregon areas. The reason, said director Susan Allen, is because Oregon’s ocean belongs to everyone in the state.

Now fishermen fear environmental groups will try to do an end-run around the OPAC and state-approved process to get not just a couple, but a network of marine reserves in place.

“It’s clear they don’t want to work with fishermen,” said charter boat owner Linda Buell, of Garibaldi, referencing an Oregon Conservation Network document circulated among OPAC members and some state legislators. OCN is a coalition of more than 50 environmental groups.

The document, “Oregon Conservation Network Priorities for a Healthy Oregon Application,” labeled “Sensitive and confidential — do not circulate,” details plans for the 2009 legislature: how conservation groups plan to generate interest in marine reserves in the media, what a “win” in the state legislature would mean for the environmental groups, whom OCN plans to use to lobby the legislature, who the opposition is and how to deal with them, and how the governor’s office would look favorably upon the group’s winning support for marine reserves.

“There is a risk with that the legislature’s proposal would not be a network or the network would not be of sufficient size to protect and provide resiliency to the ecologically significant areas (too few and too small),” the priorities document said. “That is the main risk, and several creative options exist for pursuing additional sites (e.g. additional areas of study, reappointment of a new OPAC and proceeding with another round, or other statewide policy medium).”

That other medium could be a future ballot measure.

The immediate future, however, will be in today’s decision coming out of OPAC.