WARWICK – July 23, 2010 – Faced with angry and skeptical fishermen from along the East Coast, a regional regulatory group Thursday backed off on a proposal that would have banned lobster fishing from Cape Cod to North Carolina for the next five years.
Instead, the American Lobster Management Board voted to direct its staff to do a study on the impacts of taking no action and of reducing fishing exploitation by 50 and 75 percent. The vote doesn’t mean a moratorium won’t be reconsidered, but it does mean there probably won’t be any new regulatory efforts for at least several months while the reports are prepared.
The decision came at the end of an emotional daylong meeting at the Crowne Plaza Hotel during which lobstermen took every opportunity to tell the board that its information on a lobster collapse was old and wrong.
Read the complete story from The Providence Journal.