NEW BEDFORD — The clash between federal regulators and the fishing industry in the Northeast has perhaps never been as serious or as high-profile as it is today.
A year has been spent battling over sharply restricted catch shares and sector management, which is deliberately shrinking the fleet, driving boats out of business. And fisheries law enforcement officials are on the griddle for vindictive and selective conduct along with misuse of seized assets. Fishermen have organized and their representatives in Congress have done likewise.
The friction has become so serious that U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., declared that he was publicly at odds with the leader of his own party, President Barack Obama.
This story is far from over. The question is, what comes next?
* Will harsh fishing regulation catch fire as a national story?
* Will Commerce Seccretary Gary Locke, who brushed off an appeal from Gov. Deval Patrick, be forced back to the table by William Daley, the former Commerce Secretary and friend of scallopers who is now White House chief of staff?
* Will the federal courts side with the fishing community and its lawsuit against NOAA and Locke?
* Will the fishing community stay organized and stay energized, or will it be worn down into final acceptance of a new reality?
In the spring of 2009, perhaps it was naive of Gov. Deval Patrick to ask Dr. Jane Lubchenco, the new head of NOAA, for $3.2 million to conduct an independent assessment of the groundfish stocks off New England. He wanted the scientific evidence to support an appeal to NOAA for easing painful catch restrictions that fishermen believed to be unnecessary.
She had other plans for her department's money: priming the pump of catch shares and sector management. There would be no independent study by the UMass School for Marine Science and Technology of groundfish stocks off New England. Government science, as flawed as it might be, would continue to steer fisheries policy.
That year ended with the first skirmish in what has today become a full-blown legal, scientific and political confrontation between the fishing industry, primarily in the Northeast, and a federal agency that its own overseers discovered was running out of control. Now, anything might happen.
The UMass/SMAST dean emeritus, Dr. Brian Rothschild, who chairs the mayor's fishery advisory council, said on Friday, "This is egregious. If you take a step back, like you were arriving from Mars, and you came down and looked at this you wouldn't believe the dysfunction. Here you have a major government entity acting like the (Massachusetts) Parole Department. The obvious corruption in the enforcement part and the seeming total disconnect from Congress and people in the industry is a huge story."
Read the complete story from The Standard-Times.