State and Local

March 26, 2013 — As legislators work on a plan to provide millions of dollars to market and promote Maine lobster by adding a surcharge to licenses, some lobstermen are balking at paying for an advertising campaign that they say will take money out of their pockets without giving them much in return.

"We are being forced, extorted, in an advertising scheme that we don't benefit from," said Nelson King of East Boothbay, who has been a lobsterman for more than 50 years.

"Advertising directly benefits the dealers' market," he said, so the campaign wouldn't affect prices that lobstermen get for their catch.

Lobstermen already provide about $350,000 a year to the Maine Lobster Advisory Council's budget for promotion of Maine lobster, through a surcharge on traps.

The new proposal would change the method of funding the promotional budget by dramatically increasing surcharges on all licenses. That would allow a huge increase in the council's budget, to $4 million over three years.

In addition, the council would be reorganized and its membership would be increased from nine to 13, with 11 members appointed by the commissioner of the state Department of Marine Resources.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

March 26, 2013 — Republican U.S. Senate candidate Dan Winslow has zeroed in on two nagging statutory imperatives that, in their violation have frustrated the fishing industry — the requirement in the Magnuson-Stevens Act that government manage the wild resources to “provide for the sustained participation” of fishing communities, and the neutering over time of a 1954 act of Congress that aimed to provide a secure revenue stream for strengthening the industry.

A state representative from Norfolk, Winslow discussed National Standard 8 of the Magnuson-Stevens Act and the Saltonstall-Kennedy Act in a campaign swing Sunday through New Bedford, the co-capital with Gloucester of the New England fishing community.

“NOAA must be held accountable to National Standard 8 of the Magnuson-Stevens Act,” said Winslow, who is an attorney and a former district court judge. The standard, a directive to executive and bureaucratic administrators to “take into account the importance of fishery resources to fishing communities by utilizing economic and social data …in order to provide for tjhe sustained participation of such communities and to the extent practicable, minimize adverse economic impacts on such communities.”

Winslow also said the Saltonstall-Kennedy Act should be administered as intended when written. The law required that 30 percent of the tariff revenues from imported seafood be given in a dedicated revenue stream to NOAA, but to be spent for research and development and marketing of the domestic industry. Over the decades, the dedicated revenue stream was diverted by Congress to NOAA’s general operating budget, leaving the fishing industry high and dry. The nation now imports more than 90 percent of its seafood, the bulk of it farmed or wild caught in China.

The Northeast groundfishery, stretching from Maine to New York’s Long Island, was declared a disaster by the acting secretary of commerce last September, and the only effort to provide disaster funding for the affected communities — including Gloucester, which has lost much of its fleet and is projected to loose many more boats in the next year due to extreme cutbacks in the allowable catch, was waylaid by the House Republican leadership and the absence of any support by President Obama and the administration.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

March 25, 2013 — Omega Protein director of fishing operations and Reedville plant general manager Monty Deihl will look at Reedville’s menhaden reduction industry today, said museum education committee chairman Betty Mountjoy.

“In past lectures we looked at historical Reedville,” said Mountjoy. “Now’s the time to look at Reedville’s current major industry—the menhaden fishery and its sustainable products.”

A Reedville native, Deihl is a graduate of Northumberland High School and Randolph-Macon College. A retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel, he has masters’ in administration, aeronautical studies and industrial resource strategy.

He served numerous assignments and locations in the USAF around the world, earning a Bronze Star Medal for combat operations in Desert Storm and a Defense Superior Service Award. Before retiring from the service, he served on the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon as the U.S. Military’s senior nuclear arms control treaty negotiator.

Read the full story from the Rappahannock Record

NEW BEDFORD, Mass., — March 25, 2013 — State Rep. Dan Winslow of Norfolk spoke about his commitment to the fishing industry Sunday.

"I cared about the issue long before I ran for Senate. This is about basic compassion for fellow human beings," the Republican Senate candidate told a group of eight people at the Shawmut Diner.

"Fishermen by default are environmentalists. I think you can be pro-fisheries and pro-environment."

Winslow criticized catch limits and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration policies, and said that his commitment will be twofold: to ensure that environmental agencies that oversee the fishing industry adhere to the laws that already exist to protect fishing communities, and to keep fishing families in business through a common-sense regulatory structure based on trusted science.

"We have laws in the books that are not necessarily being followed. We don't need to reinvent the wheel," he said. "This is a regulatory, economic issue, not just a fishing industry issue."

Winslow also criticized the move to fund offshore wind energy, an industry that he said has failed in Spain.

Read the full story from the New Bedford Standard Times

PORTLAND, Maine — March 24, 2013 — Regulators have scheduled hearings in Maine and other East Coast states to gather public comment on proposed regulations for the American eel fishery.

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission says three hearings will be held next month in Maine, where fishermen each spring catch baby eels known as elvers as they swim up rivers. The fishery last year was worth $38 million, with fishermen averaging $2,000 a pound.

The proposed regulations are the result of a stock assessment that concluded the American eel population is technically depleted, likely due to a combination of overfishing, habitat loss, predation, environmental changes, disease, toxins and contaminants, food web alterations and turbine mortality.

Read the full story by the Associated Press at The Boston Globe

PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — March 22, 2013 — Hundreds of eel fishermen are lining Maine rivers for the start of eel fishing season.

High prices are expected when the season kicks off Friday. For the next 10 weeks, fishermen will catch the tiny translucent eels, known as elvers, in nets as they swim up coastal rivers and streams.

The eels are shipped to Asia, where they are raised in ponds and sold when they reach market size.

Last year’s harvest was valued at $38 million, making it Maine’s second most-valuable fishery behind lobsters. Fishermen received $2,000 a pound on average for their catch.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Boston Globe

March 22, 2013 — A $56,000 state grant designated to improve fish runs in the First Herring Brook is only the most recent initiative to bring the fish back to Scituate, but by no means will it be the last.

The herring, an important feeder fish to those higher on the food chain and an ecological marker of how well an area is doing, has dwindled in recent years as water consumption increases and there is less of a brook for the fish to spawn in.

The problem is one Scituate officials, alongside those at the North and South River Watershed Association, have been working on for some time.

“We’re continuing to work with the town to manage the flows over the ladder and during the right biological seasons. This grant just awarded was to further that work,” said Samantha Woods, executive director for the NSRWA.

According to Woods, the town has had a longstanding issue with water usage, especially as the town’s reservoirs weren’t initially intended to have such a high demand.

To circumvent the problem, the town has since implemented a water ban during the summer months, started in 2011, focused on irrigation systems. Though it has angered some neighbors, the initiative has helped restore hundreds of thousands of gallons of water to the brook already, Woods said.

The town has also begun looking for leaks throughout the system to further tightening things up.

“We’re making strides in terms of conserving the water,” Woods said. “The summertime is a particular issue. There is no fish returning because we weren’t running the ladders with the right flows, or at all [for the fish to leave the reservoirs] in the fall.”

Read the full story at the Boston Globe

AUGUSTA, Maine — March 20, 2013 — The Maine Department of Marine Resources is hoping to get approval from the Legislature to develop a statewide management plan for rockweed, kelp, Irish moss and other commercially harvested seaweed species. The proposal, however, also would eliminate the rockweed management plan for Cobscook Bay.

When it comes to regulating how seaweed is commercially harvested on Maine’s coast, legislators were urged Wednesday not to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

The baby in this case is a rockweed management plan for Cobscook Bay that was adopted in 2009.

The Maine Department of Marine Resources is hoping to get approval from the Legislature to develop a statewide management plan for rockweed, kelp, Irish moss and other commercially harvested seaweed species. The proposal, however, also would eliminate the rockweed management plan for Cobscook Bay.

The Legislature’s Marine Resources Committee held a public hearing Wednesday on the bill, LD 585, that would give DMR such approval. For nearly four hours, people supportive of DMR’s efforts and others more skeptical of the bill’s provisions testified about Maine’s seaweed industry and their perspectives on regulating seaweed harvesting.

Many facts were disputed during the hearing — such as whether lobster use rockweed as habitat and whether rockweed plants can live for centuries — but many who expressed reservations about the bill cited a section in it that would repeal the existing rockweed management plan for Cobscook Bay.

DMR Commissioner Patrick Keliher told the committee that language in the bill calls for repeal of the Cobscook Bay plan, but not until 90 days after the second regular session of the 126th Legislature ends in 2014. He said the department would present its statewide seaweed management plan to the committee no later than Jan. 31, 2014, and would implement that plan before the Cobscook Bay plan was repealed.

Read the full story at The Bangor Daily News

March 19, 2013 — A Massachusetts law since 1997 has allowed wholesale lobster dealers to process lobsters into frozen shell-on tails for distribution outside the state, but not for in-state sale and use.

Now, a bill to eliminate the anomaly and allow Massachusetts lobsters that are processed into frozen shell-on tails and parts to be sold and used here  is before the Legislature’s and Joint Natural Resources Committee. And it has the support of the Massachusetts Lobstermen’s Association, with a clear economic rationale for letting Massachusetts shell-on products to be served and eaten where they’re caught.

“It will definitely help us dealers,” said Vince Mortillaro, of Mortillaro Lobster Co., 60 Commercial St.

Gloucester is the state’s No. 1 port in lobster landings, with 3.1 million pounds worth $11.7 million in 2011. New Bedford, which dominates the scallop fishery, was second to Gloucester in lobster landings with 1.3 million pounds and $5.78 million in ex vessel value landed.

The bill would put Massachusetts on a legally level playing field with Maine, which authorized the production and in-state sale of lobster parts in 2009.

“We believe that by allowing the in-state sale of this product we can increase local demand and production and thereby improve the price per pound paid to our Massachusetts commercial lobstermen,” said William A. Adler, executive director of the Massachusetts Lobstermen’s Association

A Dec. 31 report by the state Division of Marine Fisheries on the issue notes that the global lobster market has been moving with increasing speed in recent years away from whole live lobsters and toward processed lobster products — a trend that has been driven by the health of the stock and long-term growth and chronic surplus an in the size of the harvests. Canadian boats landings up 22 percent to 138 million pounds from 2007-2011 and domestic landings up 36 percent to 126 million pounds over the same period.

The way Canada manages its lobster stocks — based on temporal-spacial closures — opens the most productive areas in the spring and early summer, just as supply and demand in American markets are peaking, which — as in 2012 — left domestic prices very low, which was good for consumers but bad for the boats and the processors.

Read the full story from the Gloucester Times