February 12, 2005
Saturday

If I remember correctly the Ward Cove property was obtained indirectly when the Borough used Economic Development funds obtained by Ted Stevens to help Ketchikan recover from the downturn in the timber industry. The Borough should use the property for economic development.

The Cold Storage is an economic development project that makes sense. It will be a facility that can be used locally by fishermen, tourist oriented operations, and most importantly, creative enterprises producing new value-added seafood or other products requiring refrigeration(not all frozen products are seafood ie. bait, fertilizer, and blocks of ice). It is about spiced, sliced, diced, iced, pickled, caked, smoked, dried, blended, mashed, smacked, packed, and whatever else can be done to locally harvested items. The problem with the current cold storage facilities is that their freezer space is dedicated to the companies that own them. The freezer space is too limited and so is the range of products. The cold storage project is not about competing with existing facilites for a piece of the pie. It is about making more pies of different flavors and creating more pie eaters. It is about allowing fishermen a place to store their catch during the fishing season, and enabling them to process their catch during the off season. It is about niche marketing and creativity. It is not about getting a better commodity price from Japan and elsewhere. It is small scale as opposed to large scale. It is about my friends and neighbors controlling their own destiny and getting the most value from a limited resource. It is about creating year-around jobs in Ketchikan.

Bill Tatsuda
Ketchikan, AK - USA

 

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