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Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 36 Number 3
November 2009
Scallop industry split over permit stacking, leasing
PLYMOUTH, MA – Limited-access scallopers up and down the Atlantic seaboard are bitterly divided over whether vessel owners should be allowed to stack two permits onto one boat and/or lease days-at-sea and access-area trips among each other.
The New England Fishery Management Council is proposing both options under Amendment 15 to the federal scallop plan and has identified them as “preferred alternatives” in the public hearing document.
This decision, made at the council’s Sept. 22-24 meeting here, greatly troubled Harriet Didriksen, who owns a single vessel that fishes out of New Bedford.
“I don’t want to see stacking or leasing or any of it,” she said. “The issue is not how many boats you need to catch the resource. The point is how many people can you employ when no one is being hurt.”
Amendment 15 states that excess capacity currently exists in the limited-access scallop fishery, meaning “the capacity of individual vessels and the fleet as a whole is greater than what is needed to harvest sustainable levels of catch.”
The proposals in the amendment are intended to address this excess capacity and “provide more flexibility for efficient utilization of the resource,” the document states.
Limited-access scallopers now fish roughly 80 days per year – about half in open areas and half through allocated access-area trips. That means vessels spend approximately 285 days per year tied to the dock.
Inefficient, expensive
Jeff Pike, representing the Scallop Capacity Reduction Coalition, which strongly supports stacking and leasing, said sitting at the dock for three-quarters of the year was making vessels inefficient and expensive to maintain. He also said that excess capacity in the fishery was “undeniable.”
Other stacking/leasing supporters argued that the forced downtime also was hard on crewmembers who wanted steadier employment without hopping from boat to boat.
“We have captains and crew members asking for more work right now,” said Ron Enoksen of Eastern Fisheries in New Bedford, which owns multiple vessels and supports stacking.
The intensely felt back-and-forth between supporters and opponents during the council meeting showed the entrenched positions most scallopers have held on the stacking and leasing issue since the council’s scallop committee began work on Amendment 15 almost two years ago.
Since then, proposals have evolved and numerous options have been eliminated, but the debate has continued to escalate.
Maine council member Mary Beth Tooley summed it up.
“The scallop committee spent a lot of time listening to the public on this issue and there are a lot of divergent opinions,” she said.
“Adjustments” involved
The council has indicated its intent to tightly control stacking and leasing if the measures go forward.
First, Amendment 15 proposes to limit the number of permits that can be stacked on a vessel to two, so only one additional permit could be stacked onto any boat.
Furthermore, a two-pronged adjustment would be applied – a “fishing power adjustment” to address differences between horsepower and length of the two stacking boats, and then a separate fishing mortality adjustment. Combined, these two adjustments are expected to make permit stacking “conservation neutral” and reduce the possibility of increases in catch due to stacking.
Fishing power adjustments would be based on a formula and are proposed for open-area days-at-sea only. They would not apply to access-area trips, which are controlled by trip limits regardless of vessel size and horsepower.
A fishing power adjustment would be made only when a “smaller permit” was placed on a bigger vessel – for example, when a permit for a 52' boat with 450 hp was stacked on top of an 80' vessel with 1,000 hp. In this case, the number of days-at-sea stacked onto the larger boat would be reduced by a certain number according to the formula.
The formula only works one way, meaning that if a larger permit were stacked onto a smaller boat – say the 80' permit was stacked onto the 52' boat – the number of days-at-sea stacked onto the smaller vessel would not be increased. Fishing power adjustments would not apply to boats of similar sizes when stacking permits.
The second part of the two-pronged adjustment, the fishing mortality adjustment, which also will be made in the form of days-at-sea, would apply to all vessels that participate in stacking. The council will solicit comments on mortality adjustments ranging from 5% to 11%.
The public hearing document will contain many other proposals, including some related to vessel upgrading restrictions and days-at-sea carryover measures for vessels that stack permits.
De-stacking
One of the most controversial proposals, outside of whether or not vessels should be allowed to stack at all, is whether boats should be allowed to de-stack. Under the council’s proposal, only the scallop permit could be de-stacked. A boat would not be able to retrieve other permits that had gone away when the two boats merged permits.
Supporters argue that de-stacking is essential. What if two separate owners stack permits onto one boat and then one person dies, for example? Or what if five years down the road, a vessel owner who stacked a permit decides he truly made a mistake?
“The decision to stack is huge, and part of that decision will involve whether you can de-stack at some future point,” said Pike.
Scallopers do not intend to de-stack routinely and may only do it once or twice – if that – in a lifetime, said Pike, but the provision is essential to lessen risk.
“Our goal is to reduce capacity and have a program that’s favorable enough for owners to do this,” he said.
Attorney Stephen Ouellette, representing 37 single boat owners and 14 others who own two-to-five vessels, opposed de-stacking.
“If the desire is to reduce capacity, you really don’t decrease capacity if you leave the potential for an owner to freely come back and put a second vessel on the water just by splitting the permits,” he said.
National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) Northeast Regional Administrator Pat Kurkul expressed her own concerns.
“This is very complex and it does create some tracking issues for the agency,” she said.
New Hampshire council member David Goethel also questioned the logistics.
“This is an enormous administrative burden,” he said. “Either you stack or you don’t stack but you can’t go back and forth.”
In the end, the council voted to include two options in the public hearing document – one to allow de-stacking and one to prohibit it.
Stacking “preferred”
The council is not expected to send Amendment 15 out to public hearing until March or April, but it acted back in June and then again in September to finalize details for a wide range of alternatives so that staffers and the scallop plan development team would have time to fully analyze each of the proposals over the following six months.
After fine-tuning the stacking and leasing alternatives, the council then discussed whether it should pick “preferred” alternatives.
Goethel was opposed to doing so.
“When we send a preferred alternative out to the public, it sends a message to the public that the council is very serious about doing something,” he said. “There’s a huge number of people who will be affected by this who we haven’t heard from, and I really want to hear from them.”
Harriet Didriksen agreed.
“By having a preferred alternative, it defeats the purpose of your public hearing. It’s discouraging to go if you think the council has already made up its mind,” she said.
Kurkul argued just the opposite.
“We identified a problem in this fishery. I think the right thing to do is to put it out to the public and say, ‘This is the problem we identified and these are the solutions we identified.’ I don’t think we should throw it up in the air and see where it lands,” she said.
Jeff Pike also urged the council to identify stacking and leasing as “preferred.”
“We’ve spent almost two years on this. With all the bells and whistles we’ve put in, there are many safeguards in this document now,” he said.
Will it reduce capacity?
Pike also stressed that the package as a whole would, indeed, reduce capacity.
“If an owner has 10 vessels and he goes down to five, how can you say that is not capacity reduction?” he asked.
Eddie Welch of the fishing vessel Westport, a stacking opponent, disagreed.
“I’m kind of offended by calling this capacity reduction,” he said. “It’s just going to tilt the bounds of this whole fishery. People like myself are not going to be competitive anymore.”
Jim Kendall of New Bedford Seafood Consulting spent 32 years scalloping. He told of how some people had started off as cooks and worked their way up to become engineers and then deckhands. Then they might become captains and, next, part owners or owners.
“You won’t see that happen again if this goes down,” he said. “It will never revert back, so don’t use that as a way of calming people’s fears.”
New Bedford vessel owner Ray Starvish had a different take.
“This is a voluntary program. No one is forced to do this,” he said. “Everything that’s put into this program is frameworkable, so if we do make mistakes, we can change them.”
Janice M. Plante
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