The Crab Advisory Committee met in Anchorage last week to map strategies for marketing and crew shares before the North Pacific Fishery Management Council meeting on Sept. 29.

Linda Kozak, a fisheries consultant to crab harvesters, attended the meeting and said her primary interest was the western golden king crab fishery in the Aleutian Islands.

“It’s important that the committee recognize there’s a problem with harvesters being able to have a market in the western golden king crab fishery,” Kozak said.

She pointed out that one local resident, Dick Powell, participates actively in the fishery. Kozak called Powell “a major shareholder.”

Changes in markets and processor share holdings in the fishery may address some of the marketing problems. Several potential solutions were discussed at the meeting and will now go through the council process at the NPFMC meeting.

“One of the solutions being recommended by the harvesters is to open it up to all B shares,” Kozak said. “No processor linkage required. So it wouldn’t have to match with the processor.”

She said another solution would be to remove the regional landing tag, which currently requires harvesters to deliver in the region regardless of whether there is a processor in a given place that can take their crab.

“Then they would be able to sell to the highest bidder, which would be an open and competitive market,” she said.

The committee also discussed three proposals to address crew issues based on the council’s previous motion to revise the crab program, and redesignate owner quota shares as crew quota shares. They also address the issue of crews interested in purchasing C shares.

According to the minutes of the meeting, the proposals are “intended to address exclusion of crew from (the program’s) initial allocation and negative effects of the program on crew.”

One proposal would allow more crew to enter ownership in the fishery “with minimal disruption to current participants.”

The redesignation would use voluntary transfers to introduce crew ownership, without revoking existing shares.

A second proposal would redistribute existing shares, and a third would include reallocation of shares to a management association that would manage the allocation for the benefit of crew members and include a vessel cap.

Kozak said the committee makes recommendations to the NPFMC, which in turn makes its own recommendations to the secretary of Commerce, describing it as “simply a vetting process.”

“They take input from the public, from the staff, have a thorough discussion of the issues, then they simply pass that to the council,” she said. “(They) fully outline what the issues are, so the council has a good idea. If we were to pursue this, what are the concerns, and what are the potential ups and downs?”

Mirror writer Erik Wander can be reached via e-mail at ewander@kodiakdailymirror.com.