Congresswoman Mary Peltola has served as the State of Alaska’s only representative in the U.S. House since 2022. She was previously a tribal judge and is the first Alaska Native person in Congress. She’s running for reelection in November and stopped by Unalaska to hear more about the community’s unique concerns.
Peltola is visiting the island to meet with constituents and local officials. The Aleutian community of around 4,500 residents had a lot to ask their representative, who spoke at a public forum Tuesday in the library and later talked with locals at the island’s Norwegian Rat Saloon. She addressed several topics, including fishing, transportation and education, among others.
Peltola sat down with KUCB’s Andy Lusk the next day to dig into those issues.
This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Andy Lusk: Folks in the Aleutians are worried about the local economy, given a rough few years in the fisheries. Stocks are migrating, returns are generally low, and prices for some species are, too. How do you plan to support this struggling industry on the federal level?
Mary Peltola: We’ve had two really important wins this Congress, and I want to make sure people understand this is the most unproductive, do-nothing Congress since the Civil War, and yet, the senators and I — who work very well together — were able to eke out some really important wins for Alaska.
Chief among them have been prying loose hundreds of millions of dollars out of the Office of Management and Budget. OMB was sitting on a lot of disaster money all the way from back to 2018. Two of those disaster years really affect Dutch Harbor: Disaster 116, which involved 2021 and 2022 [Alaska] Bering Sea crab fisheries, and Disaster 126, [which involved] 2022 and 2023 Alaska Bering Sea crab fisheries.
Each of those was about $100 million, and we have not only pried that loose, but we have a bill, the FISHES Act, which will streamline the disaster money going forward. What happens is Congress approves it, it goes through a series of steps, and then it gets hung up at OMB for a final approval. We are working through systems to eliminate that final check because it just seems to be holding things up for years and has really drastic consequences for people who are in dire situations with making payments on their boats, paying their crew. Overhead for commercial fishing is very high, as everybody here knows. So that’s one win.
Another tremendous win that we push through and will continue to work on, is the impact of Russian seafood in our market. We have been trying for years. Our senator, Dan Sullivan, has been pushing this executive order for 10 years. We were able to really shove it through with the help of this president and his administration in December.
What this does is it gets around a loophole that Russia had been using, where they were pushing their Russian seafood, marketed as Alaskan seafood, through China with their Uyghur slave labor. They are really crippling our markets by flooding the American market with extra cheap — this is a very concerted effort on the part of Russians. They have put out a lot of hatchery fish. They have been overharvesting at an unsustainable rate. They’re using inhumane labor and workforce, and it’s an overt action to really injure the Alaskan seafood market. We take that very seriously.
We’ve had meetings with Gina Raimondo, she’s the Secretary of Commerce, and we are really working with the [Biden] Administration and DOD. This is a national security issue, and it’s a serious economic issue for communities like Dutch Harbor. The longshoremen brought this up to me yesterday.
We had a large meeting on Tuesday when we flew in [with] a number of the leading organizations in the community: the city, the tribe, the village corporation, the regional corporation, the health nonprofit regional corporation. All these groups came and shared their top objectives, and chief among them is this issue with Russian seafood. That is something we take very seriously, and we’re working hard on.
AL: Earlier this year, you introduced legislation that could weaken the Bering Sea Pollock fishery, which makes up a large chunk of Alaska’s commercial fishing industry. Unalaska is, as I’m sure you’ve heard, the nation’s No. 1 fishing port by volume. I want to know what you would say to concerned residents whose livelihood relies on trawling.
MP: I am very sensitive to the people, the families, who rely on this for their family’s income. And you’ll see that [in] the two pieces of legislation that I put forward.
One is urging the council, the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council, which is very influenced by the industry, all of those board seats are filled by people who are part of the industry or very, very tied to the industry. But it’s urging the council to look at areas that should be protected from bottom trawl. There’s concern with the crab savings area being trawled. There’s concern about the Northern Bering Sea. It’s a piece of legislation that tells all eight of the national councils who allow trawling to say, let’s just put some sideboards and let’s just acknowledge that there are places where we don’t want bottom trawling happening.
Another thing it’s asking is, let’s look at definitions. What is pelagic trawl? What is midwater trawl? Can we legitimately call it a midwater trawl if 60 to 80% of the time it’s on the bottom? Should we be calling that a bottom trawl? And I think those are very reasonable, practical things that the council can do. I don’t think that those are extremely injurious, and I think that reassures the public and reassures other users that there are sideboards, that there are concerns and acknowledgement that we don’t want this to be an unsustainably managed fishery, and everybody is on board with that.
The other thing it does, I have another bill that is more of a carrot than a stick. It’s providing funding and funding sources — additional funding through NOAA, additional funding through philanthropists — to help fishermen get some of the gear that will help: salmon excluders, live cameras. I think this is very well received. It’s, again, more of a carrot than a stick, and it’s saying for the fishermen who are interested in making sure they don’t have unwanted bycatch in their nets, they are implementing tools to alleviate that, and that can only be good.
Embracing technology and innovation can only be good when it’s helping us with issues like this. So I think those are two good pieces of legislation that are a good starting point for a healthy conversation.
AL: When you’re working on legislation, how do you strike a balance between economic and environmental concerns in a state sensitive to changes in both?
MP: It’s many robust conversations. It’s not putting in legislation before you’ve talked to interested parties and a diverse group of interested parties, which we have done.
There’s criticism that I put this bill in this year in May. Well, we also recognize that this is a very inactive Congress that does not have an agenda of getting things done. So we really recognize that we could put in a bill and, especially as a minority member of a Congress, as a freshman — we’re really teeing these bills up for the 119th Congress, which is the next one.
The criticism was that I put these bills in so late that they weren’t going to go anywhere. We knew they weren’t going to go anywhere from day one, and why not use that time to have these ideas vetted by interested parties? I think that is really critical: showing people what the plan is, and then getting their feedback in a way where they can really have time to process it.
It takes me a long time to process things. I usually have to sleep on it or review it numerous times, and we did that. All the different user groups, all the different interested parties, we looked at this and, you know, I got criticism — “why don’t you just put in a bill that would ban trawling?” Well, I want to be taken seriously. I want my legislation to be taken seriously. I want Alaskans to take me seriously. So I want to come at it from a much more reasonable, practical approach.
AL: And you’re hoping that momentum on these bills from the current Congress will roll over into the 119th.
MP: There honestly isn’t momentum. So I will take the finished product that we came out with, after talking with many different Alaskans, and submit it in the 119th Congress — assuming it doesn’t go anywhere here in the lame duck, once the election’s over.
AL: I want to move into what we spoke about earlier, which is Russian and Chinese involvement in the Bering Sea. There’s growing concern about Russian and Chinese involvement in the Arctic, and we’ve recently seen a pattern of increased foreign vessel traffic in the Aleutians. Is this increased foreign military activity a concern to you, and how do you plan to protect the region and its resources?
MP: It’s absolutely a concern to me, and I’ve been hearing from the Coast Guard for the last couple of years that we do have warships that belong to Russia and China doing drills, doing practice formations in our waters. And this is a tremendous concern.
We’ve heard from the Coast Guard that they are meeting presence with presence. I’m very pleased to see the presence of more Navy ships. I think it’s real important that we have a broad recognition of the strategic role that Alaska plays and the strategic role that Dutch Harbor plays in particular as a national and international port.
We are investing in this place and across Alaska, and again, the senators and I have made substantial progress in investing in Alaska and making sure that people understand our strategic relevance and that we are being bolstered and not forgotten.
AL: There were a few topics that came up at the public meeting yesterday: education, the road in King Cove. I would love to get into all of that.
MP: On the Izembek road, we have been in real serious talks with the administration, we are seeing good movement. We’re hearing good signs that they are getting a better understanding of the importance — how important this is to the people of Cold Bay, how important it is to the region — and we are very hopeful that we will be getting good news very shortly.
I just want to make sure people know that we are hopeful, that we are working on this, we’re leaning in on this. This is an administration [that has] not listened to us on everything, but they are receptive on many things and we have made substantial wins with this administration and our bipartisan delegation.
I’m hoping it remains bipartisan. I think there’s a lot of strength in having a bipartisan delegation, and I think having Alaskans advocate for Alaskans, using our kind of language and our kind of passion is really important. So this is something that I’m excited about and really hopeful that we’re going to get some good news here in the next few days and weeks.
AL: I wanted to hear about the good news. That means the needle is pointing towards a road, possibly?
MP: We will see. I don’t want to jinx anything, and I don’t want to get out ahead of myself, but I have reasons to be optimistic.
AL: What other issues did locals bring up to you that you’re interested in learning more about?
MP: We were able to hear from Dawn Johnson at the clinic, and she explained that there are many instances where people who are here using the port do have medical services and emergency medical services, and the formula that is being used for this clinic, it does not receive emergency reimbursements, and that is something that we should be very seriously looking at and getting a fix for that.
Every community in Alaska should have access to emergency services. There are many instances that people can recall from top of mind of life and death instances here in Dutch Harbor Unalaska where people’s lives have been saved in large part because of the work done here on the ground.
And of course, education is an issue. Outmigration is an issue. These are things that I think a lot about. I have seven kids and I want my kids to stay here. I want my kids, my grandkids, to be raised here. I think that is a universal feeling among Alaskans, and we are losing too many Alaskans to the lower 48. We’re not attracting enough people from the lower 48 here.
We just need more people in Alaska to be filling every job. Every job, every sector is short on folks, and we are working hard to find career tracks and career pipelines that may not be the college track, [like] skilled trades. Every single sector in Alaska is short on people, and we have got to find ways to make Alaska more attractive to our kids and to young people from the Lower 48.
