February 14, 2018 — A year after the Trump administration likely broke the law by allowing overfishing of red snapper, five Gulf of Mexico states now want special power to manage the species in federal waters in 2018 and 2019.
They’re likely to get their way, too.
Unlike last year, the new plan would not allow sports anglers in Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama to exceed federal quotas, but the states would get the authority to call the shots in setting their own fishing seasons in federal waters.
Daryl Carpenter, the owner of Reel Screamers Guide Service in Grand Isle, La., and president of the Louisiana Charter Boat Association, can’t wait, saying the federal management system is broken and “has failed to come up with any type of fix.”
“It’s too dominated by non-interested groups, by your green groups who want to hug and cherish the fish,” he said. “You can get nothing done in the federal system. … I’m 100 percent in favor. The states need to take control of this and get the federal government out of our damn life.”
Critics say that ceding control to the states would be a mistake, arguing that federal officials long have led the way in rebuilding the red snapper population and remain the most qualified to do the job.
“The federal management process is the most open and transparent, no matter how frustrating,” said Shane Cantrell, executive director of the Charter Fisherman’s Association and the owner of Galveston Sea Ventures in Galveston, Texas.
All five states are pushing the idea as an experiment that would be allowed under the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976, the nation’s premier fishing law.
They want NOAA Fisheries to give them “exempted fishing permits.” Those permits allow fishing that would normally be banned under federal law, usually as pilot projects done in the name of research.
“It allows us to exempt certain fishing activities from the regulations,” said Roy Crabtree, administrator for the NOAA Fisheries Southeast Region in St. Petersburg, Fla.
“How well will it work? Well, time will tell,” Crabtree said. “But I think a lot of people will argue that we’ve had some quota overruns in the past and we’ve had a lot of dissatisfied customers, so I think we do need to try something different.”
Many state officials say that NOAA is all but certain to sign off on the exempted fishing permits, after Alabama Republican Sen. Richard Shelby got Congress to include language in a fiscal 2017 appropriations bill that directed the agency to come up with a pilot program to give states more control.
After the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council voted on Feb. 1 to approve the plans, Alabama officials said they were one step closer to taking over management of the red snapper.
Read the full story at E&E News