Community Sketches

for FMP Crab and Groundfish Fisheries

Twelve communities were identified as being Highly Engaged in the North Pacific FMP groundfish and crab fisheries (in the harvesting or processing sector, or both) for at least one year from 2008-2023: Akutan, King Cove, Sand Point, Homer, Kodiak Island, Nome, Petersburg, the Seattle MSA, Sitka, Seward, St. Paul, and Unalaska. In the following section, detailed sketches provide an overview of how these communities differ geographically, historically, culturally, economically, and demographically. The purpose of the Community Sketches is to: 1) present a detailed snapshot of the communities with sustained and substantial engagement in Alaska FMP crab and groundfish fisheries; and 2) show linkages among social, economic, and policy processes to inform management decisions. By identifying key social and economic trends, these sketches can inform decision-making in Federally managed fisheries.

Seattle MSA and Anchorage were rated as Highly Engaged; however, as major cities, both are involved in multiple industries and are distinct from smaller, more remote fisheries dependent communities. Seattle MSA was added in 2022 to the Community Sketches in an effort to capture the role of Alaska fisheries within the Seattle MSA.

The sketches will be updated yearly and additional communities of interest may be developed and presented according to feedback and decision-making needs. Given the aim of the Community Sketches, it was necessary to modify the constraints of the information slightly for certain communities. The engagement indices identified Kodiak City as one of the substantially engaged communities; however, the choice was made to include the greater Kodiak Island borough in the community sketch in order to give attention to the close economic, social, and governance linkages among Kodiak Island communities. Finally, confidentiality concerns required that Akutan’s and King Cove’s fishing engagement data be aggregated with neighboring communities in order to avoid disclosure of confidential information. For that reason, the Akutan and King Cove sketches provides information on each community, but presents aggregated fishing data from Akutan, King Cove, and Sand Point communities.

Note on Tax Data

In the “Current Economy” section of the community snapshots, we present municipal tax data as reported in the Alaska Taxable 2023 report,1 as well as shared fisheries-related taxes reported by the State of Alaska Fiscal Year 2023 Shared Taxes and Fees Annual Report.2 Municipal taxes as presented in the snapshots include property tax, sales tax, raw fish taxes, and “other taxes”, which include bed tax, alcohol tax, among other taxes. It should be noted that some municipalities include raw fish taxes in their sales taxes and do not report these separately in the Alaska Taxable report; in these cases, we are unable to extrapolate these raw-fish taxes without the capacity to groundtruth the reported data. Additionally, municipal raw fish taxes are sometimes collected at the borough level—for example, in the Aleutians East borough. Total values of fisheries-related taxes–the sum of shared fisheries business, shared fisheries landing, and municipal raw fish taxes, where these are reported separately from sales tax—are included in Current Economy section, and comparisons between these total values across communities can be found in the and Fishery Tax sections of the earlier chapters on community participation in North Pacific groundfish and crab fisheries. Aleutians East borough and Kodiak Island borough both receive revenue from shared fisheries taxes, in addition to member communities also receiving disbursements from the shared revenue program.

  1. Alaska Department of Commerce, Community, and Economic Development. (2024). Alaska Taxable 2023. Juneau, AK: Alaska Division of Community and Regional Affairs. Retrieved from https://www.commerce.alaska.gov/web/Portals/4/pub/OSA/taxable%20reports/2023%20Taxable%20Final.pdf?ver=2galdYexo8Z0NAYS6wwyvQ%3d%3d↩︎

  2. .Alaska Department of Revenue, Tax Division. (2023). Fiscal Year 2023 Shared Taxes and Fees Annual Report. Retrieved from https://tax.alaska.gov/programs/documentviewer/viewer.aspx?1791r↩︎