March 31, 2015 — NOAA has been bearing the cost of all at-sea monitoring in the groundfishing fishery where there is no dockside monitoring, yet the federal government has been looking to pawn off the cost of its monitors onto the working fishermen since the program began — and that is no run-of-the-mill cost.
The Senate’s passage of the amendment, in fact, doesn’t mean the funding is safely secure in the next fiscal year’s budget. That will only be the case if the amendment holds up through the final budget when it is reconciled for any differences between versions from the Senate and the House. If it doesn’t, fishermen in Gloucester and across the region will be ion the hook for the monitoring beginning Aug. 1, and that would cost each vessel owner $750 to $1,000 per day for each vessel with an observer aboard. That would come to an estimated economic hit of almost $2 million in the last nine months of the 2015 fishing season, which begins May 1.
Vito Giacalone, policy director with the Gloucester-based Northeast Seafood Coalition, said that “would just bankrupt the fleet.”
“Obviously,” he said, “we support the amendment.” And so do we.
Read the full editorial at the Gloucester Daily Times