Finding good employees for remote site work is always a challenge in rural Alaska, aggravating enough to make some managers move everything to Anchorage. But full-time year-round work remains the ideal, and one agency is giving it another shot.
A federal fisheries agency office is reopening in Unalaska as soon as three enforcement officers are hired and trained, according to Kevin Heck, acting deputy special agent in charge in Anchorage.
In recent years, the National Marine Fisheries Service's Office of Law Enforcement has been flying in agents from around the state for short tours of temporary duty lasting between a week and a month, Heck said Monday.
But the agency now wants to try keeping agents in the Aleutians port full time and wants to "recruit and retain quality people to staff the office," Heck said. Office space has already been rented in the FTS building near the airport, down the hall from where the last enforcement office was located.
The local enforcement office was closed because of difficulties in finding employees who wanted to stay in Unalaska, he said. The office was open in the 1990s and 2000s.
The return of a local office and employee housing is due to a change in administration at the top level in Washington, D.C., said Heck, noting that almost all the key players were not working for the agency when the decision was made to close the office in Unalaska.
The new federal fisheries enforcement office could mean good news for the Unalaska City School District, already facing declining student enrollment and looking at the loss of more students.
"Families are allowed by all means," Heck said.
Heck said NMFS will pay for agents' families to move to Unalaska, but only if the new agents are already working for the federal government. He noted that NMFS's policy toward family members is different from the local office of the Coast Guard, which does not consider Unalaska a family duty station. City officials have asked the Coast Guard to change that policy.
Unlike state troopers, NMFS does not have its own vessel, though the agents will sometimes ride on other agencies' ships, including Coast Guard and state vessels.
But mostly, the agents will work in the port, not at sea, policing various fisheries, especially halibut and sablefish, Heck said.
The reopened enforcement office will give the agency two offices in the same building. The second-floor fisheries management office did not close and is staffed by a biologist.
This story first appeared in The Bristol Bay Times/Dutch Harbor Fisherman and is republished here with permission.