{"id":29378,"date":"2016-10-26T08:05:57","date_gmt":"2016-10-26T15:05:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/with-poor-pink-salmon-run-legislator-seeks-disaster-aid-for-southeast-fishermen\/"},"modified":"2016-10-26T08:05:57","modified_gmt":"2016-10-26T15:05:57","slug":"with-poor-pink-salmon-run-legislator-seeks-disaster-aid-for-southeast-fishermen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/with-poor-pink-salmon-run-legislator-seeks-disaster-aid-for-southeast-fishermen\/","title":{"rendered":"With poor pink salmon run, legislator seeks disaster aid for Southeast fishermen"},"content":{"rendered":"

SITKA<\/strong> \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat raised some eyebrows in our office,\u201d said Kreiss-Tomkins\u2019 legislative aide Berett Wilber in an email to the Daily Sitka Sentinel. \u201cWhat about Southeast?\u201d<\/p>\n

Kreiss-Tomkins\u2019s office reviewed the thresholds for determining whether a commercial fishery is a disaster under the Magnuson-Stevens Act, using the same steps the governor\u2019s office had taken for determining the eligibility of the regions that he had named in his request to Pritzker.<\/p>\n

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\u2019 office explained. If revenue has fallen between 35 and 80 percent the fishery is eligible to be considered a disaster \u201cupon further evaluation by the executive branch.\u201d<\/p>\n

Using public data from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game Kreiss-Tomkins\u2019 staff calculated that \u201cthe Southeast pink salmon fisheries suffered a 51.1 percent loss of revenue in 2016.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe came to the conclusion that things penciled out numerically,\u201d Wilber said in the email. \u201cSoutheast is eligible for inclusion: it\u2019s a matter of whether or not the governor\u2019s office is willing to include our request to the Department of Commerce.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are the legislators for 30 rural towns in Southeast Alaska: commercial fisheries are the economic backbone of our districts,\u201d the legislators said in their letter to the governor.\u201cWith 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2022 This story first appeared in the Daily Sitka Sentinel. It is republished here with permission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

SITKA \u2014 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[230],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-29378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-state-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29378"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29378\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29378"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=29378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}