Two U.S. senators and three congressmen who represent the state’s fishing communities have asked NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco for an investigation into allegations of "excessive penalties and retaliatory actions" by Gloucester-based federal fishery law enforcers against unnamed interests.
The letter to Dr. Lubchenco noted "the agency has collected total fines exceeding $400,000 twelve times between 1989 and 2008" with six of those times coming in the "past 10 years when fishing capacity dropped steeply." And it observed that "a fine of tens of thousands of dollars could easliy bankrupt fishermen struggling to survive."