September 24, 2013 — The Long Island fishing industry and our elected representatives long have complained about federal quotas on local fluke catches. Now they're ratcheting up the pressure to change those limits.
The federal legislation that led to using quotas to rebuild stocks of overfished species expires later this year and requires reauthorization. That presents another opportunity to change the way we manage our fisheries in general — and fluke, or summer flounder, in particular.
The current system, which puts New York's fishing industry at a severe disadvantage compared with its counterparts from other states, is based on flawed and incomplete data from the 1980s that resulted in underreporting the number of fish caught by state anglers. The quotas reflected those lowball numbers. New York's commercial fleet, for example, is allowed 7.6 percent of the total Atlantic coast fluke catch, compared with 15.7 percent for Rhode Island, 16.7 for New Jersey, 21.3 for Virginia and 27.4 for North Carolina. Recreational limits are not much better — 17.6 percent for New York, 39 percent for New Jersey.
Read the full opinion piece at Newsday