SavingSeaFood - Embattled fisheries enforcer remains on NOAA payroll

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Embattled fisheries enforcer remains on NOAA payroll

"Each and every one of these people has to go," New Bedford Mayor Scott Lang said. "It's a renegade police force."

Lang said that if NOAA is going to promote transparency and accountability, it should practice with its own people. Rather than "acting like they have the high ground and moving forward," Lang said NOAA needs to go back and review some of the cases that the inspector general referred to.

He said that Lubchenco set the wrong tone, and a more appropriate one would have been contrition. She needed to say, "We know we have a serious issue that needs to be resolved" and "we will work to see equal justice done."

Lang and Gloucester Attorney Steve Ouellette said that it was significant that former NOAA general counsel Eldon Greenberg spoke to the gathering and urged NOAA to review some of the old cases to see whether justice can be done. But the current NOAA administration insists on "looking forward," not re-examining its own misdeeds, they said.

After the session, Lang said that he told Lubchenco that NOAA must change its way of doing business. "Either you are going to do it, Congress is going to do it or a judge is going to do it. One way or another, it's going to be done."

One day after holding a law enforcement summit meeting with the theme "effectiveness, consistency, transparency, communication," NOAA officials gave up a secret they have been guarding for months: Dale Jones, the scandalized former chief of fisheries law enforcement, is still on the NOAA payroll with no job assignment.

Until now, no one would reveal whether Jones was fired, reassigned or disciplined in any way.

"Apparently, the reward for highly questionable actions at NOAA's Office of Law Enforcement is a paid vacation," said U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass. "I am very frustrated that the follow-up response to the Office of the Inspector General Investigation on the destruction of OLE documents continues to be weak."

Until now, NOAA has resisted disclosing any information about disciplinary actions in the law enforcement office. NOAA officials haven't even spoken his name, referring only to his successor, Alan Risenhoover.

A subsequent report sheds light on the finding that 99 percent of the New England law enforcement office's expenses apart from salaries are paid from the fund, which had no oversight until recently. Attorneys have pointed out that this amounted to NOAA prosecutors penalizing fishermen without oversight and then spending the money themselves. It amounts to tens of millions of dollars.

Read the complete story from the South Coast Today [subscription site]

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