Fishermen, seafood processors and other agencies from across Bristol Bay traveled to Seattle last month for the 2025 Pacific Marine Expo, the West Coast's largest marine trade show. They were there to talk to experts, gather resources, buy and sell merchandise, and swap business cards and industry stories.
Jeremy Kern is the port director for the Port of Bristol Bay in Naknek. The Bristol Bay Borough has hosted a booth at the expo for the last three years, but Kern has been attending for over a decade. He says it's a place to connect with fishermen who make their living out of the Port of Bristol Bay – and at the top of the fishermen's mind: taxes.
*This interview is part of a series of voices from the 2025 Pacific Marine Expo.*
Kern: Pretty much, we come down. We're more of an informative, educational kind of what the borough offers, what we do for the fishermen, and how we can help try to make their fishing seasons better. That's kind of what we're here for, just whatever they want to know. We bring our tax clerk down. We bring a public works director down. We bring port people down and just try to give them whatever information they need.
The biggest question that we get is, “Where do my taxes go?” “What do my taxes pay for?” On land, on boats. And a lot of it is going to the roads, a lot of it's going to EMS, fire, the landfill, stuff like that.
I mean, nobody likes taxes, right? But being able to educate what the tax money goes to, that helps immensely, I think. We had one gentleman here yesterday, and he asked that specific question. And one of our individuals was like, “Well, here's what it is.” And he goes, “Oh, I didn't think about that.” So the big part that we explained to him is we're a community of 700, we have to have the infrastructure of landfill, septic, all of that kind of stuff to support that population of 20,000 to 30,000 that come into the summer. That's where that tax money goes, it’s for that infrastructure to support everybody for six weeks, not to support the 700 that live there, but the DEC regulations, we have to support all that. And he was like, “Okay, I'm good with it.” And he was happy.
And “what's going on at the port?” “What are you guys doing?” “What's next?” “What are you building?”
Some of the bigger projects we're doing in the borough right now, the landfill is getting a new cell that we've developed. They're getting a bare mitigation fence that will be going in. So we're doing some stuff on some DEC requirements. We have put in for the port infrastructure development grant for the port to see what kind of funding we can get there. If we get the funding that we're reaching for, we're looking at doing some dock expansion and improving the boat ramp. We have a South Naknek facility that needs some work also, and then a shop to be able to work on the equipment, and not out in the wintertime, when we're doing most of our maintenance. So those are kind of the main things that we're looking at. There's a pathway project going on that the Naknek Native Village Council is spearheading, and we're kind of co-sponsoring with them, so that'll give us a walking path and a bike path for a lot of the highway from Naknek to King Salmon. So there's a lot of smaller projects and some big ones if we get some grant funding.
I think having a booth that just shows that we're here, you know? It shows that we care about our community. We care about the fishermen. We care about who's coming up there and making a living. And us having different departments here and different individuals here to try to help explain to the people that come up and use the community and make livelihoods up there, just, I think, it's a great thing.
