AUGUSTA, Maine — March 18, 2014 — Maine’s elver season will start two weeks late to give the state time to implement an emergency law enacted Tuesday by lawmakers that gives it more authority over the industry.
The legislation, sponsored by Rep. Walter Kumiega, D-Deer Isle, House chairman of the Legislature’s Marine Resources Committee, passed unanimously in the House and Senate. It was a quick, quiet passage for the bill after a tenuous few months that saw Maine Indian tribes calling it discriminatory.
By Tuesday, tension had cooled on the issue of the glassy, baby American eels, a delicacy in Japan, where the domestic elver market tanked after a 2011 tsunami, driving up prices from $25 per pound toward $2,000 per pound in Maine, one of two American states that allow elver fishing.
The law allows the Maine Department of Marine Resources to establish an annual weight quota for the elver harvest, allocating individual quotas to harvesters of the eels.
After concern over the fishery’s health was expressed by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, the department agreed earlier this year to slash Maine’s total 2014 elver catch by 35 percent from last year’s, to nearly 11,750 pounds. Another law passed this year allows a swipe-card system for fishermen that will yield daily reporting data and make illegal harvesting more difficult, according to the commission.
Peter Steele, a spokesman for Gov. Paul LePage, said the department was pushing the season back from its normal start date of March 22 to April 5 in order to implement elements of the new laws. The limit is expected to affect the catch more than the length of the season.
Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald