Adding insult to injury, Cadrin said, the government's response also contained a number of factual errors, leading him to believe it had been hastily constructed, despite the fact that it had taken two months for a reply.

The government response claimed that the secretary cannot deviate from decisions made by the New England Fishery Management Council, an assertion Cadrin flatly rejects. "They have done that time and time again. There have also been emergency actions without peer-reviewed data many times before, so that is the source of my disappointment."

In October, under pressure from a bipartisan congressional delegation, Locke had agreed to consider revising catch limits if scientific evidence supported an increase without undermining conservation goals.

That announcement was viewed on the waterfront as a major concession and had raised hopes, but his reply, on Jan. 7, shattered those expectations. Locke's letter was accompanied by another correspondence, penned by Eric Schwaab, NOAA's assistant administrator for fisheries, which elaborated on the rationale behind the secretary's denial.

Schwaab's reply, categorized by Cadrin as "procedural and defensive," also contained some troubling elements, he said.

"It was very poorly drafted," he said. "It said that decreasing the uncertainty buffers would not allow for rebuilding stocks. But if they even knew the basis of the groundfish catch limits they would know that, for those stocks that are rebuilding, there are no buffers. We specifically laid that out in the governor's report."

This was particularly troubling, he said. "If they read our report, never mind the agency's own guidelines, they wouldn't have had such a blatant error in their reply to us."

Finding these errors has led him to conclude that the commonwealth's case for an easing of catch limits was never taken seriously, Cadrin said.

Read the complete story from The South Coast Today.