SITKA — Rep. Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins is asking Gov. Bill Walker to include Southeast Alaska in the regions for which the governor is seeking federal disaster funds related to the crash in the pink salmon run this year.
In late September, Walker wrote to U.S. Commerce secretary Penny Pritzker requesting disaster funding for several Alaska regions affected by the poor pink salmon run. Funding was specifically requested for the Prince William Sound, Chignik, Lower Cook Inlet and Kodiak areas.
“That raised some eyebrows in our office,” said Kreiss-Tomkins’ legislative aide Berett Wilber in an email to the Daily Sitka Sentinel. “What about Southeast?”
Kreiss-Tomkins’s office reviewed the thresholds for determining whether a commercial fishery is a disaster under the Magnuson-Stevens Act, using the same steps the governor’s office had taken for determining the eligibility of the regions that he had named in his request to Pritzker.
Under the federal guidelines, if revenue from a fishery has fallen 80 percent from the five-year average it automatically qualifies for disaster status, Kreiss-Tomkins’ office explained. If revenue has fallen between 35 and 80 percent the fishery is eligible to be considered a disaster “upon further evaluation by the executive branch.”
Using public data from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game Kreiss-Tomkins’ staff calculated that “the Southeast pink salmon fisheries suffered a 51.1 percent loss of revenue in 2016.”
“We came to the conclusion that things penciled out numerically,” Wilber said in the email. “Southeast is eligible for inclusion: it’s a matter of whether or not the governor’s office is willing to include our request to the Department of Commerce.”
She said that Kreiss-Tomkins and Rep. Dan Ortiz of Ketchikan sent a formal letter to the governor on Friday asking that Southeast Alaska be included in the request for federal disaster relief funds.
“We are the legislators for 30 rural towns in Southeast Alaska: commercial fisheries are the economic backbone of our districts,” the legislators said in their letter to the governor.“With pink salmon fisheries across the state facing near historic lows, our constituents have not gone unaffected. We have fishing families that are facing huge losses through no fault of their own.”
• This story first appeared in the Daily Sitka Sentinel. It is republished here with permission.
