During their Dec. 4 meeting, the Kenai City Council passed a pair of resolutions accepting nearly $78,000 in relief funds for fishery disasters in 2018 and 2020. Both resolutions were adopted by unanimous consent.
The first resolution accepted $10,633.50 from the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission (PSMFC) as part of the 2018 and 2020 Copper River and Prince William Sound salmon disasters. Those funds originated with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G), which allocated $1,027,000 to communities as part of those fishery disasters.
The resolution memo highlights the role of fishery revenue for local governments, stating, “The State’s Fishery Business tax rate is 3% for shore-based landings, with revenue split 50/50 between the State and municipalities or boroughs where the landings occurred. If landings happen within both a municipality and a borough, the tax revenue is divided equally between the two entities.”
The second resolution accepted a substantially larger amount, $67,185.84, from the PSMFC as part of the 2018 East Side Set Gillnet (ESSN) and 2020 Upper Cook Inlet (UCI) salmon disasters.
Kenai Mayor Brian Gabriel, who joined the meeting via Zoom, gave a nod to the work of the the Kenai Peninsula Fisherman’s Association in securing this funding. “The Kenai Peninsula Fisherman’s Association did a lot of the heavy lifting on this,” Gabriel said, who specifically honored the contributions of longtime Kenai resident and commercial fisheries activist Kenny Coleman, who passed away in may of this year. “I just wanted to just say, you know, a lot of his leadership went into this. There’ll be other ones coming forward, but I just wanted to note the work that he did on this and the benefit to the city of Kenai for his work.”