Community Applies Again for Grant to Fund Fisheries Research Project

Kayla Desroches/KMXT

The Kodiak Island Borough and City of Kodiak are applying for a grant to fund community fisheries research. The assembly is leading the grant application process and it’s seeking funds through NOAA’s Saltonstall-Kennedy grant program, which supports fisheries projects.

The community applied for the Saltonstall-Kennedy grant last year, but failed to win that funding. Now, armed with the reviewers’ feedback, they’ll try again to get funding for a research project which would look at how commercial fisheries management affects the local economy.

At the Kodiak Island Borough Assembly work session last week, Assemblyman Scott Smiley said the reviews were clear and one judge did not see the study as unique.

“The second reviewer claimed that this was redundant because Alaska Science Center was doing a project that was the same thing for all of Alaska, and this would just be a second-hand kind of a view of the same thing. I’m not sure that the other two reviewers bought that idea at all, but I think you need to have some help on writing this given the reviews.”

According to the meeting packet, if the project wins funding, the Kodiak Fisheries Work Group and Alaska-based research firm McDowell Group will gather fisheries data and build a predictive model for how management measures affect fisheries in the borough.

The application currently requests a funding amount of almost $193,000. Pre-proposals are due September 20, and if the borough is successful in that round, it will go forward to the next step of the application process.