June 15, 2018 — SEAFOOD NEWS — The newly released McDowell Report on the economic impacts of shore-based processing was requested by the processors to support their position on the cod issue at the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council.
The results of the analysis demonstrate the inshore seafood sector is the primary source of economic activity in the BSAI region and a critical source of income for the region’s communities and residents. It further illustrates the importance of a diverse portfolio of species and products in sustaining the industry’s important regional and statewide economic impacts,” according to the study.
In 2016, inshore processing paid $41 million in wages to 1,230 of the region’s residents, and over $22 million in fish and property taxes to six communities, including Unalaska, Akutan, Adak, Atka, King Cove, Saint Paul, and the Aleutians East Borough, according to the report.
Although the report has just been released, a 7-page executive summary of the weaponized document was published in February, and distributed at an Unalaska City Council meeting by Trident Seafoods’ Chief Legal Officer Joe Plesha. That meeting has been called a ‘side show’, with the main show now being the council meetings themselves.
The NPFMC took its first formal look at various proposals last week and is expected to spend the next two years considering a range of alternatives from the various sectors of the groundfish industry, according to Unalaska Mayor Frank Kelty, who attended the meeting in Kodiak.
The issue is based around whether the increased use of motherships to purchase cod at sea is destabilizing to the shore-side sector. The shore-side sector wants to retain their traditional share of the cod quota in the Bering Sea. However, in the past two years the volume of cod purchased directly from vessels by catcher-processors in the Amendment 80 fleet has increased.
The issue came to a head when the Pacific Seafood Processors blocked a congressional waiver for F/V America’s Finest owner, Fishermen’s Finest. America’s Finest was determined by the Coast Guard to be in violation of the Jones Act because it used more than the allowable amount of foreign steel. The processors wanted any waiver to come with a prohibition on catcher processors purchasing cod as motherships.
Representatives of the Amendment 80 fleet said such a prohibition would cripple their business plans.
As a result of this opposition, Congress has twice failed to grant a waiver to America’s Finest, and the vessel is now up for sale, at a substantial loss.
The current controversy harkens back to the inshore/offshore fights over pollock between shore plants and factory trawlers in the 1990s. Those bitter allocation battles were ended by the U.S. Congress with the passage of the American Fisheries Act, which permanently divided the resource.
An acrimonious debate is again taking shape.
Frank Kelty, mayor of Unalaska and a vocal supporter of the shore-plants, was upset when Fishermen’s Finest expressed opposition to state sanctioned local fish taxes. Kelty also faced a recall election in Unalaska, which he survived. Now Kelty has called remarks about him by Fisherman’s Finest’s Seattle publicist, Paul Queary, “threatening”.
Although tempers can get hot, the arduous council decision making process has just started. Like recreational halibut, bycatch management in the Gulf of Alaska trawl fishery, bycatch affecting halibut and salmon, and the proverbial inshore / offshore fight, these issues all have real economic consequences on both sides.
The job before the council will also be one of maintaining the status quo while working out the options to resolve the conflict. Toward that end, the one decision the council made was to separate the issue of Adak’s set aside cod quota from the broader issue of mothership purchases. The council will treat the two independently.
This year processing in Adak was sufficient to reach the threshold to use most of the set aside quota, but still there was controversy when other vessels steamed out to legitimately fish cod trips in the Western Aleutians and deliver back to Dutch Harbor.
This story originally appeared on SeafoodNews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.