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Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 35 Number 7
March 2008
Anxiety builds over groundfish Amendment 16
PORTSMOUTH, NH – The fishing industry’s sense of trepidation about Amendment 16 to the groundfish plan escalated significantly following the Feb. 12-14 meeting of the New England Fishery Management Council here.
The council spent a long and difficult day-and-a-half debating which Amendment 16 possibilities should advance to the groundfish plan development team (PDT) for further analysis.
The deliberations covered everything from rolling closures to sector allocation caps to annual catch limits and much more.
Groundfish committee Chairman Rip Cunningham of Massachusetts urged the council to view the options in very broad terms.
“We are not making final decisions today,” he said. “Our goal is to approve a set of alternatives for further development by the committee and PDT.”
However, that didn’t seem to make things easier for fishermen or council members, who argued over many of the details.
And then toward the end of the meeting, many in the room appeared to collectively realize what could happen – really happen – to the common pool under Amendment 16.
This concern intensified as people began to grasp what would ensue if sectors could not be implemented by 2009. The result would be this: The entire groundfish fleet would be forced to fish in the common pool.
Common pool
The only options on the table for the common pool were “no action” and a hard total allowable catch (TAC) backstop that would require all fishing to cease in a stock area when a TAC was projected to be caught.
Without more alternatives, boats in the common pool would be required to work under the existing layer of days-at-sea, trip limits, and closures, in addition to being held in check by the hard TAC backstop.
“This would be a disaster,” said Maine council member Jim Odlin.
He feared fishermen would be compelled to fish all-out from day-one in a derby fishery to catch as much as possible before the fishery shut down.
At a previous meeting, the council charged the groundfish committee with incorporating measures into the common pool TAC alternative “that would avoid Olympic fishing and hard shutdowns.” But those measures had not been developed yet.
“We need another option. That’s what it boils down to,” said Rhode Island council member Dave Preble.
Sobered by the reality of where it stood, the council voted to task the groundfish committee with developing at least one if not two additional alternatives for the common pool besides the hard TAC backstop.
“These common pool measures are really important now,” said Maine council member Jim Salisbury. “It’s all we have until we can find ways to make sectors work.”
Rolling closures
That said, many of the council’s other decisions focused on sectors, and the one generating the most controversy related to whether rolling closures would apply to sectors.
Under Amendment 16, sectors are expected to be eligible for “exemptions” from certain regulations that apply to common pool vessels.
The exemptions likely would happen in one of two ways. A sector could apply for an exemption in its operations plan, or the council could grant a “universal exemption” that would automatically be instituted across-the-board for all sectors.
The council was considering “universal exemptions” from:
Trip limits for stocks allocated to sectors;
Rolling closures;
Seasonal closed areas; and
Groundfish days-at-sea restrictions.
But several council members raised immediate concerns about allowing full-scale immunity from rolling closures.
“You mean with sectors, you’re free to fish in rolling closures, and if you’re in the common pool, you’re shut down?” asked Massachusetts council member David Pierce.
“This has dramatic consequences for common pool vessels,” he said.
New Hampshire council member David Goethel added, “I think we should remove rolling closures from the list. That way, everyone plays by the same rules.”
He also said, “I’m not comfortable with anyone being in some of the rolling closures at certain times.”
Harbor porpoise factor
National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) Regional Administrator Pat Kurkul said the rolling closures also served to protect harbor porpoise, so eliminating them might pose problems in terms of marine mammal protection requirements.
“We do have some concerns about removing the rolling closures,” she said.
John Williamson of The Ocean Conservancy, who served on the Harbor Porpoise Take Reduction Team, was adamant on that point.
“You can’t separate out the rolling closures from the harbor porpoise closures,” he said. “If you’re going to be changing the system of rolling closures, you need to do that in a comprehensive plan.”
About exempting sector vessels alone from rolling closures, Williamson said, “It would be an enforcement nightmare if you had common pool vessels kept out of there but not the sector vessels.”
Industry protests
Industry members in the audience unanimously supported leaving rolling closures on the list of universal exemptions for sectors and spoke against the attempt to remove them from the list.
“If we’re going to be operating under a hard TAC, what’s the difference if I catch them in October instead of September?” asked Gloucester fisherman Joe Orlando. “I just don’t understand it.”
As for a potential dichotomy between common pool and sector boats, Orlando said, “If there’s a hard TAC on the common pool, they can go in there too. I have no problem with that.”
Maggie Raymond of Associated Fisheries of Maine said, “For people to join a sector, they need some kind of realistic expectation that they can fish in those areas.”
Furthermore, she said, “There are exemptions to the seasonal closures on Georges Bank for hook boats and no one seemed to think that was a problem for enforcement.”
Several industry members argued that rolling closures were actually counterproductive.
“There are better ways to handle spawning fish,” said Vito Giacalone of the Northeast Seafood Coalition. “The biggest waste and discards we have is when you starve a fleet and then open an area again.”
Giacalone further argued, “You keep talking about selling sectors for efficiency yet you keep putting on inefficiencies with input controls.”
He said that taking away fishermen’s ability to fish in rolling closures was a sure way to kill sectors.
Close vote
After listening to all these pros and cons, the council considered a motion that would remove rolling closures from the list of universal exemptions but not prevent individual sectors from applying for an exemption.
The motion passed 9-8, but not before Goethel urged the council to vote it down.
“If you pass this motion, every sector will apply for an exemption from the rolling closures,” he said. “All you’re doing now is passing the decision to (NMFS). You haven’t solved the problem.”
Next, the council took up a motion to have the PDT re-examine and modify rolling closures “with the purpose of protecting spawning cod and allowing fishermen to regain access to areas currently closed.”
Pierce, who made this motion, said he couldn’t support a universal exemption, but maybe the PDT would find that rolling closures in, for example, October and November, weren’t necessary.
“I can’t say which closures should stay in place,” he said.
Groundfish plan coordinator Tom Nies said rolling closures did, in fact, provide fishing mortality reductions on cod and other species, and if the council removed them, it would need to compensate in some other way.
“There are trade-offs here,” he said.
Rhode Island council member Frank Blount backed that up.
In Amendment 13, he said, “What came off the table was cuts in days-at-sea. The only option left to the council was closures.”
So if the council changed course and started opening up rolling closures, Blount said, “Days-at-sea are going to go down dramatically.”
The motion to further analyze rolling closures failed 4-to-11 with one abstention.
Carry over, ACE cap
The council also debated whether or not sectors could “carry over” up to 10% of their “annual catch entitlements,” known as ACE, into the next fishing year. ACE essentially is the sector’s collective TAC.
Some supported the carry-over for safety reasons and administrative practicality.
Massachusetts council member Rodney Avila said, “It allows fishermen to fish responsibly. They won’t go out for that last 6% if they can carry it over into the next year.”
Others strongly opposed it, including Connecticut council member Sally McGee.
“With a 10% carry-over, it’s never clear when you balance the books,” she said.
In the end, the alternative remained in the document for further analysis. So did an option to not cap the share of each stock a sector could be allocated, which also generated concern.
Maggie Raymond encouraged the council to leave all of these options on the table for the time being.
“These are just alternatives,” she said. “We don’t have all the answers. But if you don’t advance these proposals, we will never have the answers to how these sector provisions will work.”
“Just ridiculous”
The whole discussion proved to be too much for New Hampshire fisherman Carl Bouchard.
“Think about the poor fishermen who are sitting here trying to decide if they should join a sector,” he said. “We have no idea what the rules will be. This is just ridiculous to the average fisherman.”
Jim Odlin expressed his own frustration.
“This council is unwilling to let us go from an input-control system to output controls,” he said. “It seems like we want both layers. We need to get away from that or this will fail.”
Input controls include measures such as days-at-sea and closures, while a hard TAC is an example of an output control.
Avila also raised concern about the numerous restrictions the council was putting on sectors.
“We went down the sector road to make it easier for the industry,” he said. “Now we’re just piling it on.”
Keep at it
Sensing the level of discouragement in the room as the council was packing up, Connecticut council member Sally McGee urged everyone to do “a reality check” on the day’s decisions.
“We did not kill sectors today,” she said. “We only eliminated rolling closures from the list of universal exemptions.”
McGee continued, “There is still significant opportunity for us to use this sector approach. There’s been a lot of work done by industry. We can’t give up on this and we can’t look to (NMFS) to pull the plug at any moment. We need to focus on the work here.”
The council will select final alternatives for the Amendment 16 public hearing document at its June meeting.
Janice M. Plante
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