June 25, 2017 — Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross has appointed Chris Oliver as the new Assistant Administrator for NOAA Fisheries, with blessings from the White House, a broad swath of fisheries stakeholders, and an enthusiastic group of local stakeholders.
Some five dozen fishing organizations, companies and advocates have been pleased with the outcome of the process that selected Mr. Oliver from among three candidates.
Mr. Oliver’s explicit responsibility will be oversight of management and conservation of the nation’s fisheries — commercial and recreational — inside the coastal fisheries habitat found within the 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone established by the United Nations.
According to NOAA, while executive director of the Alaska-based North Pacific Fisheries Management Council, he “led the way on several cutting edge management initiatives,” including developing the programs that regulate fishery quota, fishing cooperatives and catch share programs such as we see in the Northeast, the Alaska fishery’s onboard observer program, bycatch reduction programs, habitat protection, allocation programs, and community development programs. This familiarity will leaves us more certain that the progress made in management of the challenging multispecies fishery can continue. It is far from perfect, but the moves toward fleet collaboration and consideration of fishing communities could stand to continue in the Northeast.
“I understand how important stakeholder involvement, transparency, and best available science are to making the right policy decisions and I plan to ensure those tenets of the Magnuson-Stevens Act are applied across the board while I am leading the agency,” he was quoted as saying by the NOAA press release that announced his appointment last Monday. “I intend to rely heavily upon the regional expertise of the eight fishery management Councils and the associated NOAA Fisheries Regions and Science Centers, and to ensure they have the resources necessary to effectively tackle region-specific issues.”
A federal budget has yet to be passed, and the Trump administration has already signaled it wants to see cuts at NOAA, particularly on weather and climate research, but not necessarily on fisheries (perhaps ignorant of the return on investment climate data delivers for fisheries industry and management alike). Mr. Oliver, as he was quoted above, wants to see the resources available to remedy “region-specific issues.” The list for the Northeast council and the Greater Atlantic Region includes untangling the influence of Carlos Rafael upon the groundfish fishery, besides trying to manage a multi-species fishery in a dynamic ecosystem in some of the fastest rising ocean temperatures on Earth.
Read the full opinion piece at the New Bedford Standard-Times