WASHINGTON — March 19, 2013 — The plight of New England's groundfishing fleet was once again a topic on Capitol Hill on Tuesday as a Massachusetts senator questioned a federal official about how his agency is spending money that's intended to help fishermen.
New England's groundfishing industry is bracing for deep cuts in the allowable catch this year to protect what regulators say are dwindling populations of Gulf of Maine cod and other groundfish. The cuts have intensified the debate over the science behind catch limits and focused more attention on the always-tenuous relationship between fishermen and regulators.
Much of Tuesday's Senate subcommittee hearing on fisheries management in the U.S. focused on concerns in New York over management of the recreational summer flounder or fluke fishery.
But Sen. William "Mo" Cowan, D-Mass., pressed a top Department of Commerce official on the use of federal dollars by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Cowan said that, according to his calculations, just $8 million of the $113 million available in 2010 through the Saltonstall-Kennedy Act program went to fisheries. That decades-old program uses fees on imported fish to provide grants or development projects to benefit the U.S. fishing industry.
The remaining $105 million – 93 percent of the total – paid for NOAA's operations, said Cowan. "In Massachusetts, $8 million is nothing to sneeze at but $113 million is real money – money that we need for a 300-year-old industry that is dying, in large part because of its relationship (with) and the actions of NOAA, including the failure to distribute this kind of money to our fishing industry," Cowan said.
Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald