(Summarized from a Congressional staff report)
NOAA Fisheries aims to distribute the Sec. 12005 funds as quickly as possible while accounting for regional variability in the size of commercial, charter, seafood processors and dealers, and aquaculture industries. NOAA Fisheries used multi-year averages of annual revenue information from the commercial fishing, charter fishing, marine shellfish and finfish aquaculture, and seafood-related businesses of coastal states, tribes, and territories to proportionately allocate the funding, taking into consideration negative impacts to subsistence, cultural, and ceremonial fisheries during the allocation process.
For commercial fishing, NOAA Fisheries generally used a five-year average of annual commercial fishing revenues as a baseline. Available multi-year averages of aquaculture revenues were also captured in the estimates of average commercial fisheries revenues.
For the west coast, average annual value-added estimates from the seafood sector (i.e., processors, dealers, and wholesalers/distributors) were calculated using regional models. Multipliers were applied to commercial fishing and aquaculture operations revenues to account for the value-add generated by these components of the seafood supply chain (e.g., processing crabs into crab meat). A multiplier was also applied to available multi-year averages of tribal and territorial commercial fishing operations to account for commercial, subsistence, cultural, and ceremonial fisheries. A five-year average of for-hire angler trip expenditures was used to calculate average annual for-hire fishing revenues.
In addition to allocating the funds proportionately based on readily available total average annual revenue data, NOAA Fisheries established a minimum and maximum funding level that each state and territory will receive ($1M and $50M, respectively).