Where thousands of seabirds flew, a Kodiak commissioner counted 30

Driving from Kodiak to Ouzinkie, Commissioner Delgado counted about 30 seabirds where thousands once filled the sky. He offered that number Wednesday as the Kodiak Island Borough began writing the plan that will guide its land-use decisions for the next two decades — an argument, from a Native commissioner, that the borough can't plan its future without reckoning with what's happening to its land and waters.

Delgado said the region holds more than 7,000 years of Indigenous knowledge that should shape the plan, and he tied his concern directly to the fisheries that sustain the islands. "When we have no fish," he said, "a lot of our livelihood has been changed because of it." The collapse he described — vanishing seabirds, struggling salmon — is, to him, the context any twenty-year plan has to start from.

Community Development Director Chris French acknowledged the concern and noted that environmental and cultural questions get their own chapters in the plan. But he framed the document's lens plainly: "As a Comprehensive Plan, that focus is always on how it relates to development," French said — a reminder that Plan 2045 is, at its core, a blueprint for how and where Kodiak grows.

The commission is only at the beginning, working through the plan's opening chapter, with the review set to continue in August.