April 8, 2014 — Environmentalists prevailed in one of two rulings on commercial fishing in New England, with a federal judge rejecting a regulation that effectively allowed fishermen to exceed their annual catch limit.
In the first of two of related decisions, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg in Washington, D.C., dismissed the Conservation Law Foundation's claims that the New England Fishery Management Council and other federal agencies violated their own statutes with a decision that abandoned environmental protection in favor of short-term commercial gains.
The dispute between the Boston-based environmentalists and the federal agencies began in 2013, after the council sought to amend its earlier reduction in the allowable annual catch for local fishermen.
The agency's intent in adopting that restriction was to prevent devastating overfishing in the region, but it soon came to believe that the regulation might be overly burdensome on the local fishing industry.
To ease that burden, the council proposed "Framework 48," an adjustment that would allow local fishermen to apply for permission to enter areas that had previously been closed to commercial fishing, subject to certain limitations.
The Conservation Law Foundation sued the council, the U.S. Department of Commerce, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Marine Fisheries Service, claiming the action violated the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (MSA), and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).
In the case of the former, the environmentalists argued that the agencies should have used a more formal process to open the protected areas to commercial fishing.
They also argued that the NEPA requires the defendants to produce a more detailed environmental analysis before they implemented Framework 48.