December 10, 2014 — It's been 11 months now since Congress allocated $75 million in federal disaster funds to help ease the effects of the economic disaster that has befallen fisheries around the nation, with more than $30 million targeted to aid the Northeast groundfishery, and $14.9 million of it headed for Massachusetts.
Yet, nearly a year later, even the second phase of the three-pronged aid distribution remains in limbo, still not in the hands of the fishermen, shoreside businesses, crew workers and others who not only need the money, but are entitled to it.
So it's good to see Massachusetts' two senators — Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey — and New Bedford-based congressman William Keating press federal Department of Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker to accelerate the release of $8.3 million to the Massachusetts Department of Marine Fisheries for its disbursement to the fishermen and others on this disaster's front lines.
And it's high time that they also looked into a next phase of allocation to provide a more fitting level of assistance to an industry that is not only caught in the existing "economic disaster" first declared in 2012, but in a worsening crisis given the fact that, in the Northeast and specifically affecting Gloucester, new landing limits clamped on the industry beginning last spring, and now a set of inshore closures decreed by NOAA's Northeast administrator, John Bullard, have plunged the industry into a more dire state than it faced two years ago — even with the first round of federal aid.
Read the full editorial from The Gloucester Daily Times