The plant, located near the remote Western Alaska village of Platinum, belongs to Coastal Villages Region Fund, one of state's community development quota companies.
It was built at a reported cost of $35 million and began operations in the summer of 2009.
Deckboss asked Coastal Villages about its plans for the plant this year and received the following reply from Angie Pinsonneault, director of business development.
Every year we evaluate a number of factors in deciding whether, when, and for how long to open the plant. We are in the midst of that process now. No decisions have been made yet.
9 comments:
Coastal Villages also sold their tenders. They are out of the processing game.
But they have a great piece of real estate in Anchorage to sell to the State Legislature...
This one is on Morgan Crowe.
Absolutely heartbreaking, not only for the Fishermen, but for all the people they employed from the Villages.
I think CVRF has lost its focus on Economic Development and what that means for their communities. How can their People Propel programs, etc. do any good and be effective if the fishermen do not have a way to sell their fish? This is just a big money grab to further non-regional interests. I don't think Morgan Crow knows the basics of what the CDQ program stands for...it is not to give Crow a big bonus, but to give back to the communities. Please quit playing politics Mr. Crow, so you can justify your inflated salary and bonuses.
Given the amount of shear salmon volume that they run through that plant every year, basically from the Kuskokwim River, they probably lose over a dollar per pound, just due to their high cost of operation and debt service.
They have a much smaller facility in Quinhagak, that works really well, which can't handle big volumes, but they certainly could have duplicated that footprint for a fraction of the cost of the new facility, and perhaps reached profitability.
Silver Bay in Naknek spent the equivalent amount of money to build their facility and last year ran 27 million round pounds through it. I would guess that the CVRF platinum plant ran around 10% of those volumes. Even if the plant was completely debt free, it would be tough to operate it on volumes of 2-3 million pounds per year.
The overall question is that they should have known all of this well before breaking ground. Yet they proceeded. It's one hell of a way to launder money back into the community. I guess we'll have to wait to hear from Morgan Crowe on all of this. He'll be right back, he's at the bank cashing his bonus check.
What a mess most of the CDQ's are. With few exceptions it's all become bloated bureaucracy that does little to fulfill the original intent.
Mark Ervice
Homer
How come there are zero pics of Morgan Crow on the internet?
"The executive director of the Y-K Delta’s non-profit CDQ group, Coastal Villages Region Fund, makes more money than any other CDQ president. In fact, Morgan Crow makes more money than most of the State’s largest for-profit corporation CEOs."
http://kyuk.org/cvrfs-executive-pay-is-unmatched/
Go Platinum Plant!!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XJqycWtpDc
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