Kodiak Daily Mirror
December 15, 2004

Small Kodiak Island Communities May Be Eligible for Quota Shares

By Jan Danelski

Six Kodiak Island communities may soon be able to buy catcher vessel quota share (QS) for halibut and sablefish on the open market and lease it to permanent residents.

The city of Craig, 60 miles from Ketchikan in Southeast Alaska, qualified Dec. 8.

“Federal, state, council, municipal and private efforts have given Craig the opportunity to bring fishing quota back into the community. That is the purpose of this new program,” said James Balsinger, NOAA Fisheries Administrator for the Alaska Region “It looks like other communities will follow suit.”

Amendment 66 to the halibut and sablefish individual fishing quota (IFQ) program became law April 30, 2004.

“It gives small communities around the Gulf of Alaska an opportunity to maintain their fishing fleets, Duncan Fields, representative to the NPFMC Advisory Panel, said.

Fields has worked since 1999 with members of the Alaska Coastal Communities Coalition to amend the IFQ program so that fishermen living in small, remote, GOA communities can commercially fish halibut and sablefish, even if they cannot afford to purchase QS on their own.

“Several of the six eligible communities are doing internal discussions,” Fields said, “and I expect we’ll see a number of applications from Kodiak in the next few months.”

James Skonberg of Ouzinkie says their group has completed the first step of the process.

“So far we’ve formed our nonprofit,” he said. “We’re moving slow; we started last spring. We’ve formed committees for various things. We still gotta get our status.”

Skonberg is chairman of Spruce Island Development Corporation, formed specifically to manage community IFQs.

The next step is to figure out how to distribute the IFQs, he said.

Once that plan is laid out specifically, the group can apply to NOAA Fisheries for status as a Community Quota Entity (CQE).

“The hurtle will be getting the money, Skonberg said. “Hopefully there will be some seed money and hopefully we’ll be going in a year.”

Senate Bill 387 provides a funding mechanism through the Alaska Division of Investment’s Revolving Loan Program; however, dealing for QS in the open market is a challenge, Shelley Thissen said. Thissen owns and operates the marine brokerage firm, Thissen and Associates.

“The years from 1995 to ’98 were very open years,” Thissen said. Quota share was available and shifting around among eligible buyers.

Now availability is down and “In every port, the price for product is high,” she said. “Now you’re buying high because the price of fish is high.”

Thissen explained that price also relates to the class of share one wants to buy; the area where the share can be fished; and the grouping or amount of the share involved in a sale.

Other factors she believes may influence availability and price are trends in abundance, based of surveys by the International Pacific Halibut Commission, and the emergence of potential buyers like the newly quality CQEs.

Kodiak Island communities eligible to qualify as CQEs are: Akhiok, Karluk, Larsen Bay, Old Harbor, Ouzinkie, and Port Lions