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Obama’s salmon joke: Funny, only partially true |
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Did anyone else’s ears perk up when Obama called out federal salmon management as his favorite example of government inefficiency? I checked PolitiFact last night to see if maybe they picked up on the misstatement of who’s actually in charge of salmon. Obama said the Department of Commerce is in charge of salmon in saltwater while the Interior Department is in charge of them when they’re in freshwater. That’s never quite been the case in my experience. The National Marine Fisheries Service, a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration under the Department of Commerce, has always taken the lead on salmon management in the Northwest. NPR reports Damien Schiff from Pacific Legal Foundation saying, in fact, NMFS is legally in charge of protecting salmon from the gravel to the ocean. The Department of Commerce explicitly has legal jurisdiction over salmon listed under the Endangered Species Act. The Department of the Interior’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service works with NMFS in restoring freshwater salmon habitat and operating salmon hatcheries, which offset the impacts of dams and bolster salmon fisheries. But they aren’t really in charge. Not on the West Coast, anyway. Unless you’re talking about kokanee – the land-locked salmon. Read the complete story from Ecotrope.
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MELISSA WOOD, NATIONAL FISHERMEN: Meting out the meager
May 22, 2012 - Listening to the New England Council's Groundfish Advisory Panel talk about how that industry is going to pay for monitoring costs is kind of like trying to figure out how to pay your bills when you've just lost your job. Though monitoring is important keeping costs down is critical. As Panel Member Gary Libby pointed out, "If we had 100 percent monitoring we probably wouldn't have an industry."