October 9, 2018 — Republican Peter Tedeschi, the convenience store magnate and Republican candidate for congress in the Massachusetts 9th District, staged a small rally on the waterfront next to the fishing family sculpture Saturday and took aim at incumbent William Keating for what Tedeschi says are deficiencies in Democrat Keating’s job performance.
About 20 supporters either arrived with him on a district-wide tour, or came out locally to hear him.
He told The Standard-Times in an interview that mirrored his prepared comments, “I don’t believe that the fishermen down here and the fishing industry are getting adequate support from our current congressman. And that manifests itself in several ways.”
One, Tedeschi said, was that Keating had an opportunity to support the reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Act. It’s an important act that basically dictates quotas, geographic fishing, what species fishermen are going to catch, and how much they’re going to be able to catch.
“Right now it’s sort of based on an arbitrary 10 year period,” he said. “We want to have it based on data. … So we had an opportunity to support that and he voted against it,” Tedeschi said. “If you’re going to support the fishing industry he should have supported reauthorization and he voted against it.”
He also took aim at the Monuments Act. The Monuments Act essentially put 5,000 square miles of fertile fishing areas off-limits.
“President Obama signed that into law unilaterally without a hearing, period. I would like to see that repealed so our commercial fishermen can start fishing in those regions, ” he said.