Eight Alaska fishery disaster requests are past the deadline federal law sets

Eight Alaska fishing communities are waiting on federal disaster relief that the law says should already have been decided. The deadlines have passed, and no decision has come.

The money is real and the need is documented: when a fishery collapses, the state or a tribe can ask the federal government to declare a disaster, which unlocks relief for the people the failure hit hardest. But that relief is gated behind a single federal determination, and until it is issued there is no payment to a permit holder, a deckhand or a processor. For eight Alaska requests, that decision is overdue.

These are not deadlines the agency set for itself. Under a 2022 federal law, the Secretary of Commerce must complete the review within 120 days of receiving a complete request. NOAA Fisheries lists twelve pending Alaska disaster requests; of those far enough along to have a legal due date, eight are past it. The oldest, covering a North Alaska Peninsula salmon fishery from 2023, is more than sixteen months overdue. The rest cover 2024 fishery failures across the state, from Kotzebue to Kodiak to Prince William Sound to Cook Inlet, their deadlines now weeks or months gone.

The true wait is even longer than those dates suggest. The 120-day clock does not start when a community files, but only once NOAA decides the request is complete, and the gap between the two can run a year or more. Several Alaska requests have no completeness date at all, meaning their clock has not started.

The system does deliver when it moves. An earlier round of disaster requests produced about $123.6 million for Alaska and West Coast recipients, including relief for the Bering Sea snow crab collapse, with the money reaching Alaska this year. The twelve requests now pending have not cleared even the first step.