BOSTON – September 9, 2010 – Saving Seafood spoke with New Bedford Mayor Scott Lang after the scheduling hearing held in the Moakley federal courthouse in Boston. MAYOR LANG: Judge Zobel convened a scheduling meeting at the courthouse in which she laid out a calendar of events that will take place over the next four months that will lead to the disposition of the case. It involves the parties: the plaintiffs filing briefs and the government filing replies, and the plaintiffs filing replies as well. The date that is the most important is the final hearing of the case based on the briefs that are filed in all arguments on Feb 9, 2011.
As far as motions that were filed, there was a motion by the plaintiffs brought by the legal team from New Bedford to ask for depositions of key NOAA officials. The judge is going to entertain that motion, it appears, sometime in early October. The deadline for filing motions with briefs is September 23rd, and all other discovery matters are to be filed with the court by October 1st.
By the first or second week of October there will be a hearing based on the request for depositions. I think it’s important this particular case have depositions to determine whether or not the record is accurate — from the standpoint of having been assembled either as a result of an honest and comprehensive gathering of the scientific evidence and the facts that would be required in order to have the Amendment 16, the catch share system and sectors; or whether the record was driven by a bureaucratic agenda which was designed well before any of the facts came in. The system is leading to a tremendous consolidation of the fishing industry and a collapse, in essence, of the fishing infrastructure throughout the Northeast, from Maine down to the Carolinas.
My feeling is that the government has put together a record that at first blush supports the authority they are given under the Magnuson-Stevens Act of implementing regulations that support the act. When you dig into the record — with or without discovery — you find that it was based on an agenda, and the record does not support the actions they took. The actions they took are in violation of the act. I don’t believe that they were thorough. I don’t believe that they were honest in their attempt to come up with a fisheries management plan for the groundfish fisheries.
I also think that if you have key individuals under oath to explain their actions, you will find that their actions were arbitrary and capricious. So that in essence is what this lawsuit is all about. The judge understands that very well. We have a very good federal judge, and I think that she understands that our entire case is based on the fact that we think the government acted very arbitrarily and capriciously in beginning to implement this catch share system.
Everything the government has done has been after the fact; they have changed science, they have changed results, they implemented the plan well before they were ready – and the communities have suffered greatly, the people who work in the industries have suffered greatly and my feeling is this lawsuit is a way to put the government back to their responsibility of following the law.
What we saw with the way NOAA handled law enforcement and their renegade approach is they have an ‘ends justifies the means’ approach. I think you’re going to find the same thing with the regulatory aspect of what they have been doing under the law.
SAVING SEAFOOD: The people in the courtroom — both from New Bedford and Gloucester, and the observers from the fishing industry seemed pleased with the judge’s actions. They left the courtroom in a positive and upbeat mood. What part of the judge’s actions today was a win for them?
MAYOR LANG: I think the only win today was the fact that the judiciary is going to look under the hood of the apparatus that drives NOAA and NMFS. When she does, she will find that they don’t follow the law. They don’t follow what they have been mandated by Congress to do. They are to protect the fisheries but also to balance that with the needs of people who work in the industry. They have completely ignored that and I think the judge is going to find that out.
I’m glad we are here, I’m glad the case was filed. I have tremendous confidence in the judicial system, and I think that this will reel the government’s actions into an appropriate framework under the law.