January 13, 2015 — It was good to see U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Edward J. Markey give high priority last week to the Massachusetts and Northeast groundfishing crisis.
Penning a letter to NOAA Administrator Kathryn Sullivan, the date of the correspondence shows that Massachusetts two senators didn’t even wait until the first session of the new Congress convened last Tuesday, Jan. 6. The Warren-Markey letter was written and sent the day before, on Jan. 5, and we can only hope that sends Sullivan and other NOAA officials a message regarding the urgency of fishermen’s plight.
More importantly, however, was the letter’s content. In posing their questions to Sullivan, Warren and Markey targeted the issues at the very core of the current dispute over the latest NOAA regulatory actions. Those are questions over the validity of the science that has led to the new area closures decreed by NOAA northeast administrator John Bullard in November, and the timing and justification for carrying out the unscheduled stock assessment that produced the controversial data in the first place.
”It is our understanding that the stock assessment update was unscheduled and was conducted outside of the established procedure for conducting such updates,” Warren and Markey wrote. “What factors caused NOAA to initiate the unscheduled stock assessment update? Why did NOAA choose to conduct this update in a way that did not follow the normal procedure for stock assessment updates?”
The senators also questioned why the results of the updated cod assessment were released before the data had been fully peer-reviewed — and the challenged why NOAA didn’t release the full draft report until two weeks after the results were reported.
Read the full editorial piece from the Gloucester Daily Times