On January 7, 2011, the federal government rejected an emergency request by Governor Deval Patrick and the Massachusetts congressional delegation to raise the catch limits on key fish in New England waters, a blow to an already staggered fishing industry.
The governor, working with Representative Barney Frank, had made the appeal in the fall, arguing that a new regimen of catch standards were too strict and cumbersome and created an "economic disaster" for fishermen in the state.
In November, they submitted a study by the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth that urged regulators to alter how they estimate the maximum catch of a particular fish. The report estimated the new rules had already cost the industry $40 million in direct losses.
US Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, however, said he could only change the limits if new scientific research suggested more fish could be caught without endangering their overall stocks. The UMass study, Locke said, did not provide a compelling scientific argument.
"The report does not present new scientific data that would justify increasing the catch limits,'' he wrote in letters to Frank and Patrick. "Rather, it presents alternative methods for evaluating the scientific data used to determine the current catch limits. These alternative methods were previously considered and rejected."
Bay State lawmakers criticized the decision.
Read the complete story from The Boston Globe.