Amendment 16, a controversial rewrite of the rules of commercial fishing in the Northeast, was approved Friday by NOAA's Fisheries Service and will take effect May 1.
"I've been dealing with fisheries for 25 years. This is, in my estimation, one of the darkest hours this industry has ever seen," said Gloucester fishing industry attorney Stephen Ouellette.
The amendment restructures much of the fishing industry into 17 new cooperatives called "sectors." Sectors will have the ability to decide for themselves how to develop rules for taking and allocating their allowed catch to the various members.
Robert Lane of Bourne, a former owner of two draggers out of New Bedford, said he quit the business after a brief experience in a sector in Maine.
The sector system, he said, "I think is going to collapse of its own weight with all the paperwork managing the thing," he said.
"The quotas force you into groups, and it's a huge amount of work trying to manage it that way," he said.
Pat Kurkel, the northeast regional administrator for the National Marine Fisheries Service, has been a defender of the amendment and the science behind it, saying that "the real issue is that we've just been unable to eliminate overfishing." The existing system should have been changed years ago, she told reporters at the rally.
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