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Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 35 Number 10
June 2008
Lobster trap transferability work proceeds
ALEXANDRIA, VA – The American Lobster Management Board of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) has agreed to have a working group review the details of its proposed lobster trap transferability program before endorsing the provisions for adoption by member states.
The board took this action during a May 5 meeting here after reviewing comments from 11 public hearings held in March and April from Maine to New York and reflecting on the complexity of the initiative.
The individual transferable trap (ITT) program is contained within Addendum XII to Amendment 3 of the interstate lobster plan (see CFN April 2008 for addendum details). Over 100 industry members attended the hearings and a dozen individuals and groups submitted written comments.
During the board meeting, it quickly became clear that one of the sticking points with the addendum had to do with the database needed to track all lobster trap allocations and transfers. The database is so fundamental to the ITT program that the program isn’t expected to be widely implemented until the database is up and running.
Several board members indicated they needed significantly more information about how the database would be funded, staffed, and maintained before they could sign off on the addendum.
Maine Commissioner George Lapointe was particularly concerned about what other programs the board would need to sacrifice to ensure adequate resources to support the database.
“I think we need to look at all of this very carefully,” he said. “We need to look at future commitments to funding in the context of everything this board is talking about.”
Database “doable”
Lobster plan coordinator Toni Kerns said the ASMFC staff was in the process of applying for funds through the Atlantic Coastal Cooperative Statistics Program (ACCSP) to build the database.
The ACCSP is made up of member partners, including ASMFC, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), and the fisheries agencies of 15 coastal states, among others. Funding requests will be reviewed and approved or disapproved during the commission’s annual meeting in October. Approved projects will receive funding in 2009.
Addendum XII also broached the idea of having lobstermen, especially those who use the trap transfer program, pay for at least part of the database maintenance costs through trap tag fees or some other vehicle.
Massachusetts board representative Dan McKiernan said that programmers from his agency – the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries (DMF) – already had talked with their counterparts at NMFS about implementing an ITT database.
Both DMF and NMFS have been involved in the Standard Atlantic Fisheries Information System (SAFIS), which is under the wing of ACCSP.
“Our guys and their guys both came to the conclusion that this (trap tag database) is pretty doable because most of these elements are already in SAFIS,” said McKiernan.
However, he added, “I’m not saying it is not a big undertaking to make this a SAFIS application.”
SAFIS “powerful”
Rhode Island Commissioner Mark Gibson said his agency currently uses SAFIS for a number of applications.
“SAFIS is a very powerful system,” he said. “It’s very valuable and it’s the way to go to maintain the (trap tag) database.”
ACCSP partners initially created SAFIS to meet the increasing need of fisheries managers to have real-time landings data.
Rhode Island first began using SAFIS in February 2003. Several other states now use the system, as does the NMFS Northeast Regional Office to track federally permitted seafood dealers. Industry members are allowed confidential access to the system so they can view their own data, as well as regulatory changes in the fishery and quota updates.
Even with the existence of SAFIS, ASMFC representative Harry Mears of NMFS emphasized that board members should not underestimate the work and money involved with creating a new database for lobster trap allocations and transfers.
“The establishment of a database, while doable, is a monumental undertaking,” he said. “We need to reflect on what would need to happen in terms of funding and priorities.”
Set a deadline
For years now, many lobstermen have wanted a way to transfer traps. Recognizing that all this additional work will result in another extended delay, Area 3 lobsterman David Spencer asked the board to charge the working group with not only estimating costs for the database, but with “being responsible for the formation of the system” under a specific deadline.
“Obviously this is a show stopper,” said Spencer. “If we don’t have a database, we don’t have transferability.”
The working group charged with refining Addendum XII will be a slightly expanded version of the Lobster Transferability Subcommittee, which held seven meetings between March 2007 and January 2008 to develop the backbone of the trap transfer program.
Col. Joe Fessenden of the Maine Bureau of Marine Patrol and a member of ASMFC’s law enforcement committee said enforcement officials had several issues they wanted to see addressed in the ITT program.
“Law enforcement should be part of the subcommittee,” he said. “We need to ensure the traceability of these tags, and we’d like to see all transfers occur prior to a new season. Those are just two issues I know we want to address.”
The board agreed to the suggestion and further decided that more industry members – maybe a subset of the advisory panel – should be involved in the working group, at least for some of the meetings.
John Davies of the Long Island Sound Lobstermen’s Association also wanted the Lobster Conservation and Management Teams (LCMTs) involved.
“The LCMTs were set up to recognize the needs of the fishermen,” he said. “If we don’t use them to help make the decisions on trap transferability when they have the most to lose, then why did we set them up?”
Davies, who said he didn’t think different states all had to be bound by the same rules, concluded, “This is important to us. Please, let us put something together.”
Permit categories
Addendum XII proposes to classify all permit holders with “assigned trap allocations” in LCMAs 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and Outer Cape Cod into one of three categories:
“State-only” for people who fish only within state waters;
“Federal-only” for those who fish only within federal waters; or
“Dual” for lobstermen who fish both state and federal waters, whether in a single area – say both the state and federal waters of Area 2 – or across multiple areas.
Addendum XII will not impact Area 1 lobstermen because they fish under trap caps instead of individual trap allocations. However, the addendum would guide Area 1 trap transfers if the area ever adopted a trap allocation and ITT program in the future.
MA wants go-ahead
Dan McKiernan said Massachusetts wanted to move forward with the state part of the ITT program, and he thought the state could address one of industry’s primary worries over Addendum XII.
“There was a lot of concern at the hearings about the boxes we were putting permit holders in – the ‘state-only’ box, the ‘federal-only’ box, the ‘dual-permit’ box. I think we can alleviate that somewhat by making it possible for the dual-permit holders to transfer traps to the state-only permit holders within the same state,” he said.
“I’d like to get buy-in on that from the board so we can proceed,” continued McKiernan. “It allows a little more flexibility. We’re only talking about a state permit holder who has a federal permit being able to transfer within the state.”
McKiernan also said Massachusetts wanted to expand Addendum XII to prevent the migration of traps into the commonwealth from other states.
Once trap transfers begin in earnest, McKiernan said, “I wouldn’t want to see an influx of traps from other states translocate to our fishery.”
Feds have reservations
NMFS’s Harry Mears had reservations about both requests. Allowing trap transfers between Massachusetts state and federal permit holders was equivalent to “jump starting” the ITT program “in the absence of federal regulations,” he said.
And while states always have the ability to be more restrictive within their own waters than rules set for federal waters, the very purpose of Addendum XII was to establish a uniform trap transfer program to monitor transfers throughout the range of the fishery, Mears said.
“We’re trying to move forward with a transferability program and close the gap. This just complicates the overall goal of having a seamless, area-wide trap transferability program,” he said.
As for the idea of preventing trap transfers between states, Mears wanted the issue to be vetted more carefully.
“As we go to our own rule-making (for federal waters), this might compromise our ability to not discriminate between federal permit holders,” he said.
These issues, as well as a list of others, were referred back to the working group for additional consideration and analysis.
Lobsterman David Spencer encouraged the working group and board to do what was necessary to fix Addendum XII but said he didn’t want to see the document go out to public hearing a second time since that would further delay the eventual implementation of the program.
“We have asked for transferability for over four years,” said Spencer. “Still, I do think doing it right the first time is a higher priority, as long as we don’t have to go to public hearing again.”
Janice M. Plante
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