The "Rat" Plan

What's with this Kodiak Daily Mirror story about rationalization? SB 113 possibly still allows allocation to the “seafood processing” sector as a co-op or association or some other entity, effectively taking the resource out of the independent fishermen’s reach.

Picture of my old stomping grounds: the Alaska State Office Building, affectionately referred to as the S.O.B.

What if a group of fishermen, say all the fishermen in an RSDA region, got their association going and got a processing plant or two or three? I just hope there was and is going to be plenty of public input on all these "rationalization" plans to hear what EVERYONE is planning. I know that the big trawl and shore-based companies have "government affairs" people on staff. And I hear that independent fishermen, for the most part, are not computer users.

So, go figure who is getting heard in the halls of various capitols. My blog traffic is always heavier in the time-zone somewhat east of Alaska. It's just a fact of life. If the writer of the above article needs more information on rationalization, he can just start a Google search on it and have the results come to his e-mail. And it will be world-wide, not just North American. But search other similar words too, like revitalization, and anything else in Roget"s Thesaurus.

I've found some awesome "association" concepts around the world this way. The Kodiak Daily Mirror writer, and all stakeholders, should want the best framework possible. Just ask the right questions. When I was championing the seafood development association concept in the early '90s, an aide who had worked in a cannery one summer wrote the bill to get it going. You can guess how far that went.