A grand total of 16,619 limited permits have been issued to commercial fishermen. By the end of 2021, 13,796 of these permits remained in place. The net reduction of 3,071 permits was a result of cancellations. AS 16.43.250 required that CFEC develop hardship ranking systems, often called “point systems” to allocate permits and to determine point levels at which a person would experience only minor economic hardship if excluded from an initial permit allocation. Permanent permits issued to persons classified at minor economic hardship level are non-transferable. Over half of the cancelled permits were non-transferable.
There are many reasons why permits have been cancelled. While the circumstances for each permit cancellation was unique, the below reasons help provide general explanations why they occurred.
Table 9-01 tabulates the frequency at which cancellation of permits occurred among both transferable and nontransferable permits.
Table 9-02 provides an overview of permit cancellation counts by permit type. Please note that because adjudicating issuance of permits can take some time, some permits are issued well after the initial limitation.
Table 9-03 further refines these counts to include the year in which the permits were cancelled for each permit type, as well as inclusion of residency of permit holders. Recall that permits can be transferred to an individual with a different resident type then it was initially issued to; permit holders will also sometimes migrate to a different domicile which can also change their residency status.