Opinion: The $70 million engine most Alaskans aren’t talking about

Many statewide candidates talk about putting Alaskans first, ahead of Outsiders. The problem is most of them are just putting some Alaskans ahead of others. We need more candidates in the mold of Ted Stevens and Don Young, leaders who weren’t willing to divide us, urban versus rural, just to win an election. Ironically, neither the Indiana-born Stevens nor California-native Young were originally from Alaska. It makes you wonder how our state’s most honored and beloved politicians would fare in today’s electoral environment.

This “me-first” populism dominates modern Alaska issue campaigns, too. It’s no accident that Outside groups promote “trawl bycatch” as the root of all evil when it comes to today’s fish wars: No one trusts science anymore (thanks, Joe Biden), and the pollock fleet has demonstrable ties to Seattle, making trawlers easy targets.

Of course, pollock and seafood are no different than Alaska’s other natural resource industries — all of which rely on capital and labor from Outside. If your flight back to Alaska happens during a shift change, you’ll share the plane with plenty of Lower 48-based roughnecks and miners, not just fishery workers.

But are the pollock trawlers really all that “Outside”? Stevens and Young didn’t think so. They had a clear vision for the Bering Sea’s role in Alaska’s economic future. Their legislative genius was to create mechanisms that “Alaskanized” our state’s natural resource wealth. They gave land to the regional Native corporations, which used their oil, minerals and timber to develop local economies and workforces and pay dividends to Alaskans.

Stevens and Young tackled seafood in a two-step move: First, they claimed the Bering Sea away from the Soviet and Japanese fleets and made it available for American fishermen (yes, most of them were in Seattle at the time). But the Seattle fleets delivered their catch to processors in Alaska, creating jobs on shore. Then Stevens and Young created the Western Alaska Community Development Quota program so Western Alaska villages could build wealth and eventually buy up the Seattle fleets, especially the large factory trawlers.

Today, those villages control more than a third of the Bering Sea pollock fleet and major elements of the crab, cod and flatfish fleets. Unless we let Outside groups shut it down, the Alaskanization of the Bering Sea will continue, just like Uncle Ted and Don intended.

CDQ is the rural economic engine few know about, but we should all be talking about. The program generates more than $70 million annually for economic development and social programs in 65 Bering Sea villages — including in the very poorest parts of Alaska. In many villages, the local CDQ group is the largest or the only private sector employer. And unlike government programs, CDQ doesn’t rely on federal largesse — it’s off-budget and self-sustaining, costing taxpayers nothing over the last 35 years.

CDQ groups fund a wide variety of programs, doing things government programs cannot do in places other businesses would never invest: They buy fish, creating markets for local fishermen; they give out heating oil in late winter, when other supplies run low; they provide scholarships and job training where few others do; and they operate local companies, including boat builders and mechanic/welder shops, putting local employment ahead of profits. That’s real economic activity that never leaves the state, despite what you read on social media.

Unfortunately, the attacks on trawl might just pull down CDQ, too, because most CDQ revenue comes from the pollock factory ships. Anti-development “charitable” foundations are the real outsiders in this debate. They have poured more than $30 million into Bering Sea policy fights since 2021, hoping to put another resource industry scalp on their wall. Disclosures are shady at best, but a lot of that money goes to Washington, D.C.-based New Venture Fund (aka SalmonState) and myopic Native groups that aren’t part of CDQ.

With that much chum in the water, other Alaska groups are taking up the anti-trawl crusade and pivoting from their traditional causes, like Kenai River habitat conservation or public lands access. Be sure to thank them if rural Alaska loses thousands of jobs and the cost of everything goes up because we don’t backhaul seafood out of Alaska anymore. If the outside interests and their allies win and pollock trawling gets shut down, the Stevens-Young vision for Alaska’s seafood industry dies, too, along with tens of millions spent annually across the state and hundreds of millions invested by Alaskans in the fishing industry.

Rick Whitbeck is a veteran of resource development advocacy and a 40-year Alaskan by choice. He currently serves as the director of strategic engagement for CVRF, a CDQ organization for 20 Y-K area villages. The views here are his own and not his employer’s.

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