OCEAN CITY, Md. — February 15, 2013 — A potential plan to effectively zone vast areas of ocean along the nation’s coastlines will not get $150 million in federal funding after the House last week voted to remove the appropriation hidden in a much-larger Hurricane Sandy relief bill.
Last week, the House took up a massive federal funding bill intended to help victims of Hurricane Sandy and discovered some unintended pork had been added to the appropriation including $150 million in federal funding to start implementing the Obama Administration’s plan to zone vast areas of ocean off the nation’s coasts for different uses. However, the House Natural Resources Committee sniffed out the rather obscure addition to the Sandy relief bill and was able to garner the votes to kill the expenditure with an amendment.
In 2010, based on recommendations of the Interagency Task Force on Ocean Policy, President Obama issued an executive order calling for a National Ocean Policy, a proposal that included a somewhat controversial “marine spatial zoning” of the seas off the nation’s coastlines including here in Ocean City and the mid-Atlantic. The president called for the creation of a National Ocean Council, an organization of stakeholders to coordinate the federal regulation of activities along the nation’s coasts including among other things recreational and commercial fishing.
A pillar of the recommendations is the creation of a plan to implement the same type of planning and zoning practices applied on land to open areas of ocean off the coast. In essence, if the plan comes to fruition, some areas of the ocean could be zoned to allow for industrial uses such as offshore drilling, shipping and alternative energy, while others could be set aside for recreational uses such as fishing and boating.
More simply put, while industrial and commercial interests currently share the ocean with recreational uses such as fishing and boating in a kind of peaceful coexistence, the president’s plan for a national ocean policy including marine spatial zoning could create a grid of sorts off the coast designating where some activities are allowed and others are not. From the outset, the plan received mixed reviews from the public and private sectors, but the ocean zoning proposal has been more conceptual than practical.
Read the full story at the Maryland Coast Dispatch