CHATHAM, Mass. — June 9, 2014 — Homeowners would be up in arms if a hurricane were to level this town and insurers, dealing with a finite amount of money, stipulated after the fact that only owners of homes built before 1800 would be reimbursed.
That's the way many local fishermen feel after the federal government announced a plan late last month to send each qualified fisherman $32,000 in an initial $6.3 million disbursement of the $32.8 million in fisheries disaster relief money awarded by Congress to six Northeastern states.
The National Marine Fisheries Service said 194 fishing permits qualified for the $32,000 check. But local fishermen say some fishermen own several permits, sometimes dozens, so the $6.3 million could benefit as few as 100 out of the nearly 800 who hold federal permits in Massachusetts.
"There are a whole bunch of guys out here who have been living this disaster for a number of years and they were just ignored," said Tom Dempsey, Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen's Alliance policy director and a member of the New England Fishery Management Council. "If anybody at the start of this process had stepped forward and said we need to make sure that we just take care of 100 guys in Massachusetts, everyone would have known that that's not right."
Chatham fisherman Nick Muto crewed for years on groundfish vessels, then bought into a lobster business and vessel when he realized the fishery was not recovering. He saw other fishermen make the same decision after years of catching tons of cod.
"They realized there was a disaster here before the federal government did," Muto said. But because those fishermen didn't catch any groundfish in the qualifying period used to determine eligibility for compensation, they were left out of compensation, he said.
"It's a huge disservice to guys who have been living off groundfish for their whole lifetime," Muto said.
Dempsey, Muto, and other fishermen traveled to Washington, D.C., recently to speak with staffers from the state's congressional delegation as well as members of the House Committee on Natural Resources.
The states will get a second pool of money to use at their discretion. Massachusetts will receive $8.2 million and is forming a committee to decide the best way to use the money. Dempsey and others want the state to know that a lot of fishermen were cut out of the first round and they should be considered in the second.
"There's a thousand crewmen in Massachusetts groundfishing, fishing every day, and they have lost income, some their jobs, because of the decline in fish stocks," Dempsey said. "No one goes out without crewmen. We tried to convey that Massachusetts has an opportunity and an obligation to use $8.2 million to fill those gaps for crew and active vessels who didn't quality."