SavingSeaFood - Gloucester Fishing Community Preservation Fund shared $2 million with Boston and South Shore to comply with Massachusetts state environmental agency requirements

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Gloucester Fishing Community Preservation Fund shared $2 million with Boston and South Shore to comply with Massachusetts state environmental agency requirements

The Gloucester Fishing Community Preservation Fund — the permit bank funded with $12 million to mitigate the siting of liquified natural gas terminals in fish-rich waters just off this city's shores — has granted about $2 million in cash and permits to two other permit banks associated with fishing business sectors in Boston and the South Shore.

The Gloucester permit bank "received initial funding under a (state environmental policy act) certificate which included a requirement to address the interest of fishing ports south of Gloucester," the 501(c)3 reported in its financial statements for 2009 and 2010.

"In accordance with this provision, the Gloucester Fishing Community Preservation Fund was to acquire up to $1 million in permits in each of the following two component areas: Boston (and) Scituate, Marshfield, Green Harbor, and Plymouth (South Shore)."

However, the only "requirement" written into the two similar "certificates" by then-Secretary of Environmental Affairs Robert W. Golledge Jr. was a single clause in a sentence.

In that sentence — found in both certificates, one for each LNG facility, written days apart in December 2006 — the state asked that the "non-profit" that the city of Gloucester intended to create to receive $12 million ($6 million from each LNG company) in mitigation funding submit to the state "formal materials regarding ... the ability of the proposed nonprofit to address the interests of similarly affected groundfishermen who homeport south of the North Shore."

Read the complete story from The Gloucester Times.

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