OPINION: Fight for Life at King Cove

I will always appreciate the wisdom of this saying: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” I am a fisherman. One of my grandfathers was a fisherman and another was a lifelong employee of Peter Pan Seafoods. My father and brother are fishermen, and my mother worked at Peter Pan her whole life. We live in the Southwest Aleut community of King Cove. My extended family and families like mine all rely on fish processors for their knowledge of the ocean, their skills to catch fish, and to pay a fair price. At the end of each day, we see the fruits of our hard work.

We relate to water the same way a farmer relates to the soil by putting his hands in it. Water is our place of work and our place of reverence. Water is our livelihood but it is also connected to our identity. When we leave the safety of our harbor and set sail for the open sea, we feel the spirits of our ancestors on deck with us. Water demands respect and must never be taken for granted or we will pay the price. This is the way the world should be.

Similarly, seafood is more than currency. It is a pillar of our diet, connecting us to our Aleut past and anchoring us to our present. King Cove has been home to a seafood processor since 1911 and a year-round fishery for the past 50 years. We catch crabs in the fall and winter, salmon in the summer, and groundfish year-round. We pride ourselves on implementing very high standards of sustainable practices. Not only are our seafood admired around the world, but we want to leave a bountiful ocean for our children so they too can make a living on the water and return to this place we call home. A world that makes sense.

until now.

As Mayor of King Cove, it pains me to say that it has only taken a few short months for my world to become unrecognizable. A confluence of events threatening our very existence; the collapse of individual and city-wide incomes; the shock that city projects years in the making may come to a halt; the cold whip of fear that has recently swept through our city streets. Older residents are realizing that for the first time in 50 years, there will be no year-round fishing season, no more processing plants, no more employees, no more commerce and no more support systems to support an operation of that size, no more tax revenues that the city has safely built its budget on. We may be able to weather this awful year, knowing that a buyer for the plant is on the horizon, but the biggest blow of all is the heart-stopping realization that one more year like this one and it will all be downhill.

Not only did Peter Pan Seafoods fail to pay many of its fishermen for last year’s catch, they also waited until the last minute to tell them they would not be operating in the 2023-2024 winter fishing season, and then, giving local fishermen and the city no time to prepare, they made the unbelievable last-minute announcement that they would not be operating in the summer salmon season either. By the time we could process the sound of the doors slamming, we learned the plant was closing, likely for good, and that the company was nearly $100 million in debt.

The financial impacts are devastating: Our city’s annual general fund revenue budget is approximately $3 million, with roughly 70% of that amount coming from local and state fish taxes to support the King Cove fishing fleet and city sales taxes on boat fuel and retail sales.

We are doing all we can to stabilize our budget by drawing down on our meager savings, using some of our anticipated crab disaster fund from the devastating 2021-23 snow crab season, and finding ways to reduce general fund spending. But these numbers represent people I know, and they feel like they will add another blow to an already depressed town.

Please don’t mistake us for faint-hearted people. Like farmers at the mercy of the weather, we have experienced droughts before, fish prices and quantities have been too low, events have impacted us, and various other challenges have marked our lives. But this is a triple whammy. Our savings accounts are quickly depleting, there is no reason at this point to believe that next year will be any better, and we risk losing valuable momentum on a number of projects that made every sense when we thought we had a strong fish processing plant in town.

• After more than a decade of design and permitting, we secured 60 percent of the funding needed for a new solid waste treatment facility that will use air curtain burner technology to incinerate up to 90 percent of the area’s waste. This $7 million facility was planned in part to house the large amounts of industrial and household waste generated by a plant that averaged more than 500 temporary workers per year. Those workers are now gone.

• Federal funding has been allocated for the upgrade and expansion of our groundwater wells and distribution system. The primary purpose of this project was to expand the City’s water system to meet our own water needs and those of Peter Pan Seafoods, which has hundreds of millions of gallons of water per year.

• Last but not least, we have bragging rights to two very successful hydroelectric facilities that produce over 80% of our electricity needs. For years we have been in serious discussions with Peter Pan about how to most effectively sell our surplus power to them. The engineering on how to connect our grid to theirs is nearly complete, but ironically, their plants are permanently closed. Our greatest hope is that this will be an incentive for a new owner.

Walking the city’s promenade, we are confronted with a frightening truth: this vibrant fishing village that dates back to 1911 may quickly become a ghost town. This time, our self-sufficient approach may not be enough. But we also know that without our passion, we would not have gotten this far. For now, we take solace in our shared passion for this place and our fierce determination to become fishermen with an economic future again. We will do our part, and hope that others will stand up for us, too. After all, home isn’t just a place where the heart feels at home, it’s a place where the world makes sense.

Warren Wilson I’m the mayor of King Cove.

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