September 15, 2016 — President Obama will designate a section of the Atlantic Ocean off Cape Cod on Thursday as a national monument, banning commercial fishing in the area by 2023 in an effort to protect the region’s ecosystem.
The move, which the president will formally announce at the Third Annual Our Ocean Conference in Washington, won praise Wednesday from environmental groups but drew condemnation from the fishing industry.
But on Wednesday, the Southern Georges Bank Coalition, which has representatives from local fisheries and industry groups including the Massachusetts Lobstermen’s Association, criticized the new designation off the Cape.
In a letter to Christina W. Goldfuss of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, attorneys for the coalition wrote that “millions of dollars of lost revenue are at stake” for local fisheries, and they questioned the legality of the move.
Some elected officials in Massachusetts have raised concerns about the plan, including Mayor Jon Mitchell of New Bedford, whose city is home to a commercial fishing port.
“While I believe the industry generally was in a position to manage the implications of the so-called ‘sea mount’ area of the monument, the inclusion of the ‘canyons’ area would have benefited from more industry input,” Mitchell said, adding that “these types of decisions should be subjected to the more robust regulatory processes under the Magnuson-Stevens Act, which has successfully led to the protection of sea canyons . . . without unduly burdening the commercial fishing industry.”
His concerns were echoed by Senator Edward J. Markey, who called the president’s action an “important milestone” for conservation but said he was “concerned that the impacts of this marine monument designation on the fishing community in New England were not fully minimized.”