June 13, 2014 — No, $32,000 isn't going to solve all the problems of the owner of a boat that earns its money by catching groundfish in the Northeast. But it isn't going to hurt "¦ unless you catch less than 5,000 of groundfish per year, you need it now or you're like most crewmen.
While the federal "bucket" of funds — $11 million — for fisheries disaster relief has left, as they said in the old days, somewhat to be desired, there will be opportunities in the Northeast in general and Massachusetts in particular to make amends with the other two "buckets."
In Massachusetts, a Division of Marine Fisheries task force will be making decisions on how to disburse the $8.2 million (the Bay State's share of the second bucket) among those affected by the disaster declared by the secretary of Commerce in September 2012.
And in Gloucester, at the Northeast regional office of the National Marine Fisheries Service, sits another $11 million currently earmarked for permit buybacks.
The Northeast got 44 percent of the $75 million in disaster relief funds based on economic data that counted those smaller boats and the crew members affected by harsh catch limits imposed by federal regulators, right alongside the big boats. Taxpaying crewmen whose annual fishing income went, for example, from tens of thousands of dollars in 2010 to zero in 2012 fed that information to the government when the decisions were being made. So did all the boats that failed to bring in less than 5,000 pounds of groundfish in any year of the past four.
Read the full story from The New Bedford Standard-Times