Education Fund
Dear Editor: We need an Alaskan Educational Permanent Fund. This would work like the Alaskan College Savings Plan. Many of us set aside half of our children’s PFD for the ACSP and kick in some of our own loot. The AEPF would accumulate voluntary contributions, a nick on oil tax, a shavings from fish tax and so on. The fund should lean toward extracurriculars – you know, the essential part of education that lawmakers always want to slash in favor of math, on five paragraph essays and similar non-essentials.
Personally, I would permanently assign my PFD to the AEPF. What the heck. It would be tax deductible and would make my creditors wait only a little longer. Unlike the College S. Plan, the AEPF would never pay out the funds to the contributor or beneficiaries. The properly constituted board of directors would rule on disbursements to schools.
The confiscation of PFD dividends will never be politically palatable. Any elected folk who want to fall on that sword will be missed. Let’s at least form an additional mechanism for accumulating voluntary and tax derived contributions for the schools.
John Welsh, Sitka
EDITOR’S NOTE: Due to a misunderstanding, an error was made in Dave Richey’s letter to the editor in Friday’s Sentinel. The corrected text is below.
Mark-Select Fishing
Dear Editor: The Alaskan commercial troll fleet is under siege. We cite the the gut-punch of the treaty cuts and the bewildering push to impose mark-select fishing (MSF) upon the troll fleet by the previous administration. Treaty negotiations were conducted in secrecy, and they produced an outcome that trollers strongly oppose. We welcome the new administration, headed by Commissioner Vincent-Lang, who will be visiting Sitka on Tuesday, and we hope to establish a productive relationship built on mutual trust and good faith going forward.
The latest iteration of the Pacific Salmon Treaty is grossly unjust to trollers and must not be allowed to stand for 10 years. Trollers strongly recommend that it be renegotiated promptly. The $22 million in mitigation funds is viewed as a short-term stop-gap measure; mitigation is decidedly not the way trollers wish to proceed in future. What trollers want from treaty is simple: the opportunity to catch our fair share of abundance-based kings that we are legally entitled to. The previous administration (and even our treaty representatives) got rolled at treaty largely because they bought into the blinkered view that “Alaskans were catching British Columbia and Washington and Oregon’s fish.” But ask yourself: Where do these king salmon spend the vast majority of their lives getting big and fat and healthy but right here in Alaskan waters? Wait till we send our treaty neighbors the bill for 25 years of grazing fees.
If the treaty cannot be ratified unless the mitigation issue is resolved, then I and many trollers suggest refusing the mitigation money and insisting upon the treaty being renegotiated as soon as possible (with new troll treaty representatives who share the confidence of the troll fleet). Alaskan trollers should not be forced to go cap-in-hand panhandling for crumbs when our very livelihood is being stolen. Trollers should be granted the right and dignity of harvesting the very treaty stocks we have helped to rebuild at great personal sacrifice over the years. That’s the fairest approach.
If the treaty cannot be revisited because of decisions that have already been made, and if trollers are stuck with accepting mitigation money or go without recompense of any kind, then I propose that trollers ask for direct payment of mitigation funds, shared equally fleet-wide amongst all participating trollers, in the amount proportional to our 80% stake in treaty losses (sportfishers receiving the other 20 percent disbursed however they choose). As the largest stakeholder, by far, commercial trollers should be empowered to make determinative decisions on how the proportional share of funds are disbursed on our behalf. It is our ox that has been repeatedly gored, and we should stand polite but firm (and certainly not apologetic) about making that abundantly clear.
Trollers oppose ...
Dave Richey, Sitka
