Opinion

NOAA officials made the right call. That's a good, refreshing step in the right direction — with more hopefully to follow.

There was, of course, never any reason for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to add the Atlantic bluefin tuna to the list of marine creatures protected under the Federal Endangered Species Act.

Yet, given NOAA's use of data in the past, a lot of fishermen were holding their breath Friday when NOAA officials prepared to announce their decision regarding the bluefin — and the petition from an Arizona-based environmental group that had sought the "endangered" listing.

Read the complete editorial from The Gloucester Times.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sure, some of the industry people who were most egregiously impacted … got something back, but are they whole after their individual ordeals? Not hardly. What of their legal fees? Their loss of business? Their personal suffering and that of their families and their employees?

“An environment with poor internal controls, a lack of standards, contradictory regulations, and it creates a circumstance that’s ripe for exploitations. It’s what you would see in embezzlement cases, where no one’s watching the store. And if someone’s predisposed to take advantage, they do” (Gloucester mayor Carolyn Kirk in an interview with Gloucester Daily Times reporter Richard Gaines addressing the Special Master’s report on NOAA fisheries enforcement  – the interview is available at https://www.savingseafood.org/wbsm/WBSM_2011-05-26.html).

(Fishnet USA) May 28, 2011 — Much has been made of the coordinated apologies and associated media machinations of Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke and NOAA chief Jane Lubchenco for specific enforcement abuses targeting mid-Atlantic and New England fishermen and associated businesses. Ditto for the return of some fines wrongfully levied as a result of these abuses. I was left with the distinct impression that they felt that after their not quite mea culpas they would be able to move on, leaving a whole bunch of satisfied fishing industry folks in their wake.

I don’t want to rain on anybody’s parade, particularly that of the DOC/NOAA/NMFS spin masters, but they weren’t even off to a good start. Sure, some of the industry people who were most egregiously impacted by what it now appears were nothing more than agency encouraged goon squads – both on the streets and behind the desks – got something back, but are they whole after their individual ordeals? Not hardly. What of their legal fees? Their loss of business? Their personal suffering and that of their families and their employees? For a first-hand grasp of how well they have fared through the ministrations of Secretary Locke and Ms. Lubchenco, invest 27 minutes into listening to the interview of NOAA victims Larry Ciulla and Larry Yacubian by Saving Seafood’s Bob Vanasse and radio station WBSM’s Phil Paleologos (https://www.savingseafood.org/wbsm/WBSM_2011-05-19.html). I can only hope that the aggrieved fishermen and business people find what Secretary Locke and Ms. Lubchenco have offered them as inadequate as I do and have the wherewithal to seek full compensation for what they’ve suffered.

But significant as these federal agency depredations were to the 11 people and/or businesses that were singled out by the Special Master for at least partial payback, they were and are only a small part of a sordid and shameful story that continues to affect the entire domestic fishing industry and the hundreds of millions of consumers who do or should depend on it for fresh local seafood.

These out-of-control agents, attorneys and judges didn’t just arise spontaneously; they were all products of a still ongoing devolution of NOAA/NMFS from an agency primarily concerned with supporting fishermen in catching fish into one that is focused on nothing beyond protecting the fish from fishermen. It’s true that this devolution has peaked with the current leadership at NOAA/NMFS. Ms. Lubchenco is on the record (on April 7 on the website Takepart.com) with “at the global scale, probably the one thing currently having the most impact (on the oceans) is overfishing and destructive fishing gear,” and her oft-stated goal is fewer boats and fewer fishermen. But, sadly, this devolution has been going on for most of two decades.

It’s impossible to believe that the cops and robbers mentality that was behind law enforcement behavior so repugnant that it occasioned a public apology from a member of President Obama’s cabinet could have developed and so blatantly flourished in anything other than a “fishing and fishermen are bad” culture that percolated down from the leadership cadre at NOAA/NMFS. An apology and the return of a few hundreds of thousands of ill-gotten dollars out of a slush fund a couple of hundred times larger isn’t going to change that.

How many press releases in the same vein as one dated June 19, 2009 titled “NOAA Notifies Gloucester Seafood Display Auction of 10-day Sanction” by NOAA/NMFS have bombarded fishermen over the last decade (http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/mediacenter/docs/gloucester_auction_june09.pdf)? The fact is that the trumpeting of these discredited NOAA enforcement actions by NOAA/NMFS press offices, actions  judged as unacceptable by the Department of Commerce’s own Inspector General and a Special Master brought in from outside the agency, have done incalculable harm to the public perceptions of fishermen and fishing. Given the anti-fishing agency attitude necessary to allow this disgraceful situation to evolve, should we assume that this was also unintentional and spontaneous?

And what about “research” such as that carried out by Professors Jon Sutinen and Dennis King and funded by Pew/Lenfest? The inescapable conclusion of their article, Rational noncompliance and the liquidation of Northeast groundfish resources is that the supposed sorry state in the New England groundfish fishery was in large part due to fishermen and those running fishing businesses breaking the law. I did a critique of Sutinen’s and King’s efforts in a column for the Saving Seafood website (http://www.fishnet-usa.com/All%20Stolpe%20Columns.htm#Law%20enforcement), but in it I hadn’t mentioned that their “special thanks” went to “the staff of the NOAA Office of Law Enforcement and NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service regional offices who provided researchers with enforcement data.” That’s not data that I or anyone else should be willing to hang a mortarboard on, but is this research going to be redone in view of the shambles that NOAA law enforcement in New England was in at the time? Is anyone at Pew or Lenfest going to correct the public record?

And how much in unnecessary and/or duplicative regulatory overkill did this institutionalized (in NOAA/NMFS and a handful of universities, ENGOs and the foundations that enabled them) “you can’t trust fishermen” myth cost those fishermen, the businesses they supported, the consumers they supplied and the U.S. taxpayers? The people who and the organizations that manufactured and perpetuated the myth all profited handsomely, and those profits came out of the holds of U.S. fishing boats and the pockets of U.S. seafood consumers.

“Fishermen and fish dealers believe that they are treated like criminals. It is an “us against them” mentality. The regulations are complex, complicated, constantly changing, and in some cases, contradictory. Fishermen are paranoid every time they come ashore to offload their catch that they will be met at the dock by a Special Agent who will look for and find a violation of some obscure or even well known regulation. They feel that the offloading of their catch is fraught with peril. Fish dealers who daily offload volumes of fish are always apprehensive that they would be charged with a violation committed by a fisherman, over whom they have little or no control or that the daily requirement of reporting substantial volumes of fish may inadvertently be in error. All of these occurrences can result in a violation, which in turn, can result in a substantial monetary penalty or permit sanction. Either may be enough to put a fisherman or fish dealer out of business. There are cases reviewed in this Report that support this conclusion. This is the plight of the regulated.”

“I have noticed in practically every case a pattern of assessing high monetary penalties in order to force a settlement of approximately half of the assessed penalty. The fisherman or fish dealer has no option but to settle because as previously pointed out in this Report and discussed later, they have no confidence that they could get a fair de novo hearing before an ALJ. The choice is simple. Settle with the Enforcement attorney for a coerced amount or run the substantial risk that the ALJ will uphold the original assessment which could force the fisherman out of business. This scenario becomes even more egregious because of the constant use of permit sanctions as a substantial bargaining chip and advantage to the Enforcement Attorneys in negotiating a settlement.” Hon. Charles B. Swartwood,_III ret., Report and recommendation of the Special Master concerning NOAA enforcement action of certain designated cases. April, 2011 – available at http://www.noaa.gov/lawenforcementupdates/specialmasterreport.pdf.

There were people in charge at NOAA/NMFS who had to know that the judges who were presiding over their in-house courts were in the position of benefiting from the penalties they assessed. They had to know that their in-house enforcement agents – and judges – were acquiring luxurious yachts, personal automobiles and exotic foreign travel much more easily and with far less oversight than should be acceptable for federal employees, that they were overseeing a force that consisted almost entirely of highly paid criminal agents who were involved almost entirely in civil violations, that data being supplied to researchers with the intention of indicting fishermen was, in the most charitable way I can phrase it, suspect. Or if they didn’t know, they were more grossly incompetent than anyone who is getting paid with public dollars has any right to be. But it was all ok at NOAA/NMFS because they were catching those bad guys who thought fish were there to be caught. In fact, if they were good enough at catching those fishermen, the NOAA enforcement people were given bonuses – sort of like bounty hunters, only with federally issued “get out of jail free” cards.

If Ms. Lubchenco and Secretary Locke are really interested in changing things at NOAA/NMFS, or if Congress is really interested in seeing that things are changed, the job has to begin with changing this increasingly pervasive agency attitude. Could you imagine the condition our agriculture industry would be in if the Department of Agriculture looked at farmers the same way the NOAA/NMFS leadership so obviously looks at fishermen? Along with importing 80% of our seafood we’d be importing 80% of everything else that we eat as well. If the Secretary of Agriculture announced that his goal was to get rid of farms and farmers do you think it would be more than a week or so before we had a new Secretary?

Ask a farmer if the federal government is on his or her side and I’ll bet dollars to donuts that you’ll get an unqualified yes as an answer. What are the odds of getting the same answer from a fisherman?

But we’ve got someone in charge of NOAA, the parent agency of the National Marine Fisheries Service, who has publicly acknowledged that fishermen are on her hit list. And we’ve got someone in charge of the Department of Commerce, her boss, who is willing to apologize to a handful of fishermen when a bunch of his fish cops get caught with their hands in the cookie jar up to their waists, but has yet to say anything on the record about Ms. Lubchenco’s “get rid of fishermen” fixation. And need I write yet again that we’ve reached the point of no overfishing and rebounding stocks with all of those boats and all of those fishermen that she’s committed to getting rid of?

So how much do you think the in-house attitude towards fishermen has changed at NOAA/NMFS? Using a Titanic analogy, something that I try to do at least once a year and that’s become increasingly easy of late, we’ve heard the captain and first mate telling us that they are shifting crew from job to job, messing with the paperwork that keeps everything running about the way it has been, and giving new fake books to the orchestra, but their ship is still unsinkable. They would be telling us this on April 16, 1912.* 

“It had the tone of a renegade law enforcement agency that felt it was above the law…. That’s a complete breakdown in checks and balances that we have in our responsibility as government officials in protecting the public but also in protecting the accused…. They used their enforcement power as an adhesion type of relationship where they would lay out what they thought the penalty would be and if you don’t comply with what we’ve indicated, it’s going to be a lot tougher on you. They completely took due process out of law enforcement…. It was completely Un-American.” (New Bedford mayor Scott Lang in the same interview with Gloucester Daily Times reporter Richard Gaines referenced above).

___________________________________________

*The Titanic sunk on April 15

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bob Zales II is a charter fishing captain and has been nominated to serve on the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council.

The Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council Science & Statistical Committee was presented information to consider adding the recreational 1 million pounds of red snapper that was not harvested in 2010 to the 2011 quota.

Due to how the request was framed by the National Marine Fishery Service and the updated presentation was not provided to the SSC until the day of the meeting, the SSC made an initial recommendation that the 2011 acceptable biological catch (ABC) not be changed until the standard assessment of 2012 is completed.

That's because there is no new science to determine the status of the stock as it relates to the impact of the Deepwater Horizon spill, and due to what is required now of the newly implemented Acceptable Biological Catch Control Rule and the way the request from the Gulf Council was worded. We still have only 48 days for red snapper this year.

This article is partially re-published with permission from Seafood.com News, a subscription news service.

 

 

 

 

 

The Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council Science & Statistical Committee was presented information to consider adding the recreational 1 million pounds of red snapper that was not harvested in 2010 to the 2011 quota.

Due to how the request was framed by the National Marine Fishery Service and the updated presentation was not provided to the SSC until the day of the meeting, the SSC made an initial recommendation that the 2011 acceptable biological catch (ABC) not be changed until the standard assessment of 2012 is completed.

That’s because there is no new science to determine the status of the stock as it relates to the impact of the Deepwater Horizon spill, and due to what is required now of the newly implemented Acceptable Biological Catch Control Rule and the way the request from the Gulf Council was worded. We still have only 48 days for red snapper this year.

Read the complete opinion piece from The Destin Log.

 

 

 

 

 

The Page 1 editorial, headlined "NOAA's hollow actions only show need for criminal probe," was the first we had presented in more than two years, and one of the very few Page 1 editorials presenting in the Times in at least the last decade. And printing it on the front page was certainly not taken lightly.

But, speaking the night before with our publisher, Al Getler, and with other editors, all agreed that the subject matter — a supposed "apology" on Tuesday, but otherwise a maddening lack of accountability on the part of leaders of the U.S. Commerce Department and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — was indeed worthy of Page 1 editorial attention.

Now, we had already planned our Thursday lead news story around the new 226-page investigative report on NOAA enforcement wrongdoing. So you might wonder, why wouldn't we simply run the news story on Page 1, and keep the editorial in its usual position? Why would your community's newspaper do that?

Because, in this case, we felt that our own outrage — as a newspaper, as an institution within this community, and indeed as a part of this community — was a message we felt the need to convey to our government leaders and our own readers in a very special way.

Yes, we could have held the editorial — which, beyond the outrage, urged our federal lawmakers to commission an independent investigation of this whole sordid affair to hold the perpetrators of these crimes accountable — to this Opinion page. In that sense, it would have echoed the call for criminal prosecution we had essentially urged in the past.

Read the complete opinion piece from The Gloucester Times.

 

 

 

 

 

Something is "very wrong," as Teri Shore of Turtle Island Restoration Network wrote last week in The Palm Beach Post ("Turtle-deadly Florida fishery not worthy of eco-friendly label"), but it is not with Day Boat Seafood of Lake Park, the Marine Stewardship Council or our commercial fishermen.

Turtle Island Restoration states that our fleet captures 63 loggerhead and 78 leatherback turtles on a yearly basis but fails to inform the public of all the facts. While we acknowledge rare captures, to the best of our knowledge none of the observed interactions resulted in a single documented death of a turtle, and these numbers refer to the whole zone. In addition, capture numbers are extrapolated using numerical formulas and do not apply to our specific fleet .

Finally, we held two workshops where Day Boat Seafood requested feedback from all concerned organizations, including Turtle Island. While many organizations participated with constructive suggestions to minimize impact and improve this process, Turtle Island has chosen to condemn an entire fishery. The impact to turtles from recreational boating, coastal development and habitat loss is the real issue. Additionally, other by-catch was looked at and represents a very small percentage of our production.

Read the complete commentary from The Palm Beach Post.

 

 

 

 

 

The bottom line is this: Falsifying affidavits, breaking into businesses, shredding documents that are part of a federal investigation, covering up aspects of a publicly-commissioned investigation, and misusing revenues from regulatory fines — excessive or otherwise — area full-fledged criminal actions. That’s why Congress must commission an independent investigation.

Locke conceded a new investigative report — for which he  commissioned retired judge Charles B. Swartwood III — shows that National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration enforcement agents “overstepped their bounds.”

Do you think? The report notes that agents falsified an affidavit for a search warrant, then later executed a “warrantless” entry — usually called an illegal break-in — at the Gloucester seafood auction.

Yet Locke says none of the agents involved in those actions or then-NOAA police chief Dale Jones will be punished for their actions. Locke believes those actions were carried out due to improper training. Baloney. The actions of agent-in-charge Andrew Cohen & Co. sound as if they were really trained all too well for a federal policing force agents once bragged was “accountable to no one.”

Read the complete editorial from The Gloucester Times.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The National Marine Fisheries Service report on commercial fishing revenues — hailing an increase in gross revenues as a sign that its new regulatory system is helping fishermen, even it fails to account for a penny of fishermen's increased costs — might be considered laughable if it weren't so painfully obvious that it's no mistake.

After all, in his report summary, NMFS chief Eric Schwaab, the former Maryland fish and gamer who's now caddy to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrator Jane Lubchenco, failed to even note a disclaimer in his own report — that the preliminary figures showing purported revenue gains over nine months of fishing under the catch shares format did not include any expense data that can shed light on fishermen's net revenues at all.

That's right; this glowing report, actually picked up by some news agencies as if it were credible, did not touch upon the costs fishermen have had to ante up for sector management while working in those cooperatives. And it didn't factor in the millions fishermen have had to shell out to lease additional quota to be able to make a living under the tightly limited catch.

Given those factors, Schwaab's report isn't worth the paper on which it's printed. That, however, isn't even the most serious issue raised by this bogus report.

Read the complete editorial from The Gloucester Times.

 

 

 

 

 

"We've had an outbreak of common sense, I hope it's contagious."  –David Goethel

That comment from New Hampshire fishermen and New England Fishery Management Council member David Goethel pretty much captures our own reaction to — and sense of wonderment over — the National Marine Fisheries Service move to drop a dangerous and reckless mandate for dockside monitors to access the "holds" of off-loaded fishing boats to ensure there's no hidden fish stashed away to beat the NOAA quota system.

And it stands even moreso as our response to the comment by Gloucester-based NMFS spokeswoman Maggie Mooney-Seus, who indicated the agency is "considering eliminating dockside monitoring entirely." Indeed, that is the only logical step the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's fisheries service should take, unless a boat is somehow flagged as showing some probable cause that would warrant such a search.

Read the complete editorial from The Gloucester Times.

 

 

 

 

 

Conservation Law Foundation, with a caveat, suggests Sectors have done well.  In an as-yet unpublished response, Saving Seafood suggests it's too soon to tell and CLT's criticism of those who warned disaster was on the horizon ignores the fact that NOAA's correct actions moved the horizon. WASHINGTON — May 11, 2011 — Editor's Note: The following assessment of the first year of Sectors appeared today on the Conservation Law Foundation's recently-inaugurated blog "Talking Fish".  The post cites a February 2010 Saving Seafood article as evidence that those who forecast doom and gloom for the Sector system were off-base.  Saving Seafood Executive Director Bob Vanasse submitted a response to the post an hour after it was published, but it did not clear CLT's editorial approval process by posting time, so we reproduce his comments here and link our readers to the CLT blog.

Dear "Talking Fish":

Coincidentally, I spoke this morning with a senior NOAA representative discussing this very topic, the economic ramifications of Sector management.  NOAA's social science groups are currently studying the economic and social consequences of the first year of Sector Management.  At Saving Seafood, we have been trying since last summer to get solid numbers on net, not gross, revenues under Sector Management.  Neither NOAA's study, nor the reconciled reports, nor net numbers are yet available, so while we can all hope that the results will be good, the Conservation Law Foundation's declaration of success is premature.

You state that, the "groundfish fleet now has the option to join a sector", and your linked definition of "sectors" defines them as "voluntary".  As Richie Canastra pointed out at the Standard-Times forum in New Bedford last fall, joining sectors was not truly voluntary, as fishermen were presented with something between a Hobson's Choice and a Morton's Fork.  In Richie's words, it was like Stalin's collectivization of farms; you didn't have to agree to collectivize, but your option was Siberia.

At a Washington's Birthday meeting with Senator Kerry in New Bedford, a fishermen from the South Shore who chose to stay in the common pool described his experience in terms that could be justifiably defined as "economic Siberia," and noted that as a result he intended "reluctantly" to join a Sector for the upcoming year.

Obviously, regulation is not a voluntary process; by definition citizens are compelled to adhere to laws and regulations.  However, to declare actions "voluntary" when in many cases they were actually coerced as a result of how the options were designed is not an honest assessment.

Finally, you cite our Feb. 17, 2010 story "Sector Management promises benefits, faces obstacles, and raises concerns" by Jonathan Hemmerdinger as an inaccurate prediction that catch limits might be exceeded.  In fact, the primary example cited in that story as a species most likely to cause  a widespread shutdown was pollock.  During the past fishing year, NOAA found its original pollock allocation to be inappropriately low, and increased it sixfold.  As the NOAA chart you reproduced indicates, approximately 33% of the eventually-authorized pollock allocation was caught.  But without the in-season increase — which those who were quoted in February 2010 had no way of knowing would happen — their predictions would have been accurate.

Respectfully,

Bob Vanasse

Executive Director
Saving Seafood
1025 Thomas Jefferson Street, N.W.
Suite 420 East
Washington, DC 20007

The original "Talking Fish" post follows:

By Talking Fish on May 11, 2011

When the most recent changes to fishing management for the cod, haddock and flounder we love to eat were being finalized in New England during the fall of 2009, things did not look so good: 80 percent of these groundfish stocks were overfished, subject to overfishing, or both. Revenues for fishermen had plummeted 50 percent during the fifteen years of management under the old system, called days-at-sea. And consolidation cut the fleet in half between 1994 and 2007.

Now, one year has passed since the new plan called Amendment 16 brought a different type of management to the region. It introduced legally required science-based Annual Catch Limits (ACL) to prevent overfishing as part of a program to allow fishermen more freedom in running their business operations. The groundfish fleet now has the option to join a sector – essentially a fishing cooperative that receives a portion of the annual catch limit based on the historic landings of its members. Seventeen sectors were formed and most of the fishery joined this new program and operated within the annual catch quotas.

It is still early to be evaluating the overall performance of sectors, but early indications are good. From a conservation point of view, the system is already achieving its goals. Based on reports that cover the entire first year (May 1, 2010 through April 30, 2011), sectors did not exceed any of the catch limits, despite predictions to the contrary.

By contrast, catch limits in the common pool topped the 90 percent mark on two stocks, and fishing on another two went over the science-based catch limit. Since the bulk of the fishery is now in sectors, the combined picture of the fishery still looks good, and none of the overall ACLs were exceeded.

Of course, challenges lie ahead. Continued progress on making catch monitoring both more effective and more affordable is essential. Regulators should encourage the introduction of new, selective gear technologies that target healthy stocks with incentives for innovations. Preserving fleet diversity and ensuring that there are opportunities for younger fishermen to enter the fishery is also crucial for the future of New England’s communities and fisheries. Permit banks are in development already to address some of these concerns.

Still, the numbers we have seen so far are great news for the sector program and bode well for the future as fish populations rebuild. Furthermore, fishing within the science-based limits is bringing an end to overfishing, which is the primary goal of our nation’s fishing law, the Magnuson-Stevens Act.

Read the original post from Talking Fish.