December 8, 2015 — A U.S. House of Representatives committee held a rare field hearing in Riverhead yesterday, the first time in recent memory such a committee has formally met on the East End.
A three-member panel of the House Committee on Natural Resources convened the hearing to discuss the federal policies that currently regulate the region’s fishing grounds, probing the policies’ basis in science, fishery conditions and economic impacts on the local economy with testimony and questioning of several invited witnesses.
The committee members who conducted the hearing, hosted by Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-Shirley), heard testimony for two hours yesterday at the Suffolk County Community College Culinary Arts Institute on East Main Street.
They also discussed alternatives to what some on the four-member panel characterized as oppressive regulation that could potentially damage the region’s fishing industry.
“In my part of the world, there’s a saying that if you have no farms, you have no food,” said committee chairman Rob Bishop, a Republican congressman from Utah. “The same can be said that if you have no boating access, you have no fish.”
Bishop claimed that federal agencies like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have “ignored state and local laws, input and science” in their regulatory decisions.