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Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 34 Number 2
October 2006
Editorial
Outreach the best way to ensure compliance
Compliance with harbor porpoise protection measures is down, which could be bad news for the porpoise and potentially terrible news for fishermen.
But rather than launch a major enforcement action and slap offenders with massive fines, the Protected Resources Division of the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) Northeast Region looked at the troubling indicators and instead decided to try a different approach – outreach and education.
It’s the best and fairest way to deal with the problem.
Over the last decade, fishing regulations have exploded into a barely comprehensible tangle of area closures, gear limits, days-at-sea call-ins, days-at-sea counting, quotas, fishing vessel trip reports, bycatch allowances, minimum fish sizes, permit requirements, possession limits, safety requirements, and more.
It’s gotten to the point where many fishermen live their lives in fear of making a mistake. That fear is well founded. The way the enforcement investigative process works, it literally can take years for charges of failing to properly renew a permit or file accurate trip reports to catch up with you. And during all that time, the error can be repeated again and again, resulting in astronomical fines.
As maritime attorney Stephen Ouellette recently put it, “You make a mistake and there’s a good possibility you will be put out of business.”
To be absolutely clear, we do not in any way condone intentional illegal actions by anyone. The fishing industry is a competitive business and we all know a few fishermen who have spent their careers snaking their way around the rules. Though the guy who cheats may not see himself this way, he basically is stealing money right out of the pocket of the guy fishing legally beside him.
And the guys who cheat lead fishery managers and environmentalists to believe that the rules don’t work. So they come up with more and more restrictions that everyone has to bear.
But the reality is that complying with today’s fishing regulations can be difficult even for the most honest men on the water. So regulators, enforcers, and prosecutors have a choice. Do they come down with the hammer or do they first try to help people sort things out?
Over the last few years the NMFS Northeast Regional Office at times has tried the latter approach. The agency hired Marla Trollan, the region’s first outreach coordinator, who worked with Commercial Fisheries News to develop special pull-out sections in CFN that answered frequently asked questions when new management regimes came online. Trollan, who recently moved on to start a brand new outreach program for the US Forest Service, always – with the help of many staffers – aimed to lay out complex rules in straightforward language and to build bridges between the agency and people in the industry.
Numerous fishermen have also related positive experiences dealing with the region’s VMS office, which is operated by the NMFS Office for Law Enforcement, where patient staffers have worked with them to figure out where and when it’s OK to go fishing and which code to punch into their VMS unit.
And now the Protected Resources Division is holding its series of port meetings.
These meetings are an opportunity not only for fishermen to refamiliarize themselves with the harbor porpoise rules but also to show NMFS that giving industry a hand in navigating today’s maze of rules is the most effective way to ensure compliance.
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