June 27, 2016 — The following is excerpted from an opinion piece by Rep. Rob Bishop (R-UT), chairman of the House Committee on Natural Resources, published Saturday by the Boston Herald. Rep. Bishop visited New Bedford, Mass., earlier this month, where he met with Mayor Jon Mitchell, Rep. Bill Keating (D-MA), and representatives of the local commercial fishing industry. He also toured a local scallop vessel, the New Bedford harbor, the Fairhaven Shipyard, and a scallop processing company.
Some say cultural trends start on the West Coast and make their way East, but one trend moving eastward is bad news for New Englanders.
In my home state of Utah, the federal government owns 65 percent of the land. That is a problem. In the waning days of his administration, President Clinton compounded the problem by mandating the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument. With virtually no local support, he locked up 1.7 million acres of Utah, an area larger than some states.
This monument designation was an abuse of the Antiquities Act. Passed in 1906, the Antiquities Act was originally intended for presidents to quickly prevent looting of archaeological sites. The executive power exercised under the Antiquities Act has grown far beyond the original purpose.
Now [President Obama] has his sights set on New England fisheries off the coast of Cape Cod.
Earlier this month I traveled to New Bedford, the highest-grossing commercial fishing port in our country. I spoke with local seafood workers about a potential marine monument designation off the coast. Such a designation would override the current public process of established fisheries management and could be catastrophic to the 1.8 million-plus jobs that fishing creates.
Fishing leaders expressed concern over restricted access, potential job loss, and the damage to the local fishing industry that would obviously follow a marine monument designation. Instead, they want a better public process created under the House-passed Magnuson-Stevens Act, still pending renewal in the Senate.