Saving Seafood

STEVE URBON: Working Waterfront Festival hits the big time

September 13, 2015 — It was a proud moment indeed last week when the Working Waterfront Festival, now in its 12th year, was named one of the top 100 festivals in the U.S. and Canada by the American Bus Association.

Don’t tell me you never heard of the American Bus Association. I have it from an authority, Dagny Ashley, the city’s tourism and marketing director, that this is the biggest organization like it in the nation, and serves as a sort of clearinghouse for events and destinations across the land.

How it works is that the group holds what is basically an annual convention called a marketplace, drawing some 3,500 participants like Ashley, who get 7-minute appointments to pitch their event to representatives of huge tour bus companies. The contestants are then judged against each other and those who don’t measure up will get the hook.

Sort of a tourism Gong Show, if you can remember the Gong Show.

Laura Orleans, the organizer of the festival, said it made the Top 100 about a decade ago, but a lot has changed since then. There has been such progress on so many things about tourism that the festival once again was competitive with the best in the country.

Read the full opinion piece at the New Bedford Standard-Times

 

 

STEVE URBON: Groundfish Industry Taking Another Hit With Addition of At-Sea-Monitors

NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — September 6, 2015 — So this is how it looks. The gradual collapse of the New England groundfish industry continued last week as about two dozen people jammed into a meeting room of the state’s Division of Marine Fisheries office in the former voc-tech school on Purchase Street to argue about the distribution of disaster relief money allocated by Congress.

The discussion was about the so-called “Bin 3” money, the third piece allocated in the disaster relief bill that Congress approved to mitigate the effects of the collapse of the groundfish industry in New England.

Richie Canastra, president of the BASE seafood auction, pleaded with the fishermen and cooperative managers from New Bedford, Chatham and Scituate for civility and derided NOAA Fisheries for “throwing them under the bus” in the wake of failed regulatory policies that continue to heap regulatory costs on the back of the fishing industry.

Canastra, late in the two-hour meeting, pleaded with his colleagues in the industry to think about where the industry will go from here once it decides how to allocate the remaining $6 million of federal disaster relief money approved by Congress three years ago.

Read the full opinion piece from the New Bedford Standard-Times