AUGUSTA, Maine — February 19, 2014 — Changes that a legislative panel made Wednesday to a tentative agreement state fisheries officials had made with the Passamaquoddy Tribe over elver fishing mean that the agreement is “pretty much gone,” according to a tribal official.
Newell Lewey, a Passamaquoddy tribal councilor at Pleasant Point, said Wednesday evening that the decision by the Legislature’s marine resources committee to require the tribe to impose individual quotas on its licensed elver fishermen made tribal officials “quite upset.”
In trying to negotiate an agreement with the Maine Department of Marine Resources, the Passamaquoddy Tribe had indicated it did not want to limit the number of elver licenses it can issue to its members or to set individual limits on how much each fisherman could catch. The tribe had agreed that it would limit its overall catch quota to 1,650 pounds, which is the same amount it caught in 2013.
What Wednesday’s move by the marine resources committee might mean for the upcoming elver season, which is scheduled to start on March 22, remains to be seen, Lewey said.
The committee made the change to proposed legislation that would set management measures for the 2014 elver season in response to concerns raised by the state attorney general’s office. State attorneys had told legislators that provisions that were included in a tentative agreement between DMR and the tribe might not be considered legal under the equal protection clause of the state constitution.
The proposals that concerned state attorneys would have barred Passamaquoddys from using large, funnel-shaped fyke nets — a ban that tribal officials said they would not object to — and would have allowed the tribe to avoid individual catch quotas for its members. The committee voted Wednesday to allow the Passamaquoddy Tribe to issue up to six fyke net licenses for the upcoming elver season.