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Work, Fish, Hope: Money

Adrian Wagner
/
KYUK

Coastal Villages Region Fund has shut down all onshore fish processing operations of its Coastal Villages Seafood subsidiary. The corporation receives a Community Development Quota of offshore fisheries and is meant to use its income to infuse Alaska’s southwest coastal villages with economic growth. But the sudden shutdown of all onshore processing capacity in the area leaves a situation in which it’s not clear who is benefiting: the region, or CVRF executives and non-Alaskans.

The CVRF region covers 20 communities along the coast of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. Its service area stretches from Platinum to Scammon Bay. According to its 2014 annual report, CVRF paid out less than five million dollars to employees in all 20 villages. In comparison, the corporation’s top 10 executives combined received close to three million dollars.

The year before in the 2013 annual report, CVRF Executive Director Morgen Crow received a $475,000 salary and a $415,000 bonus. Crow's bonus is not listed for 2014. 

When KYUK asked Crow if his salary was ethical, he said, “I don’t think that you can sit there and accuse me of anything whatsoever to do with ethics. You have no idea about the work that I do. I make money, and I have made money all my life, and I expect to be paid fairly, and I expect to be paid competitively. And I expect that in return for that, I shall perform at the top and all my staff will, too."

Crow is the highest paid CEO of any CDQ group. To that Crow said, “We have a different business model here at Coastal Villages. It doesn’t compare with some of the other CDQ groups.”

It is true that Crow has had to make difficult decisions.  The onshore processing enterprise has lost money for years while fishing quotas have shrunk due to conservation measures. The CVRF halibut quota was cut in half not long ago, and salmon fisheries have been severely restricted as runs have declined. CVRF said it was losing six million dollars a year from Coastal Village Seafood's salmon fisheries program alone.

A former board member pointed out that there's another way that money is not making its way to the region. In an email obtained by KYUK, an employee list from August 2015 showed that of CVRF employees making 20,000 dollars a year or more, most came from out of state. Of CVRF’s 227 employees at that time, only 39 came from the Coastal Villages region. Over half, 125 employees, came from Washington. 39 came from Anchorage and 22 from California. The remainder came from either other states or other areas of Alaska. 

CVRF does pay money to operate Community Support Centers in each village, which are intended to connect rural Alaskans with regional opportunities. The centers help provide scholarships for school or training, equipment loans, and job placement assistance— often with CVRF’s pollock fleet. Due to the high number of CVRF employees who live outside the region, it’s hard to understand how the program has been fostering regional employment. Now that CVRF has decided not to open its Kuskokwim fisheries program this year, there are even more people in the region looking for work.

As for their old jobs, when KYUK asked if and how CVRF will be contributing to the development of commercial fishing in these areas, Crow said, “Well the truth is, we just might not.”

CDQ groups are not bound by law to develop onshore fisheries, even though the communities in their coverage areas might want them. According to federal guidelines, CVRF is only an engine for economic growth, and its board of directors has the latitude to choose how it interprets what economic growth means.