November 10, 2015 — The following is an excerpt from a story originally published today by Greenwire:
The head of a company that receives millions of dollars from the federal government to provide at-sea watchdogs has a long history of advocating for the strict regulations that now benefit his company.
Andrew Rosenberg wears many hats. He heads up the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. He is an unpaid affiliate professor of natural resources and the environment at the University of New Hampshire. He is a biologist with expertise in fisheries, once serving as the Northeast regional administrator for the National Marine Fisheries Service.
And he is the president of MRAG Americas, a consulting company that earns most of its gross revenue from NMFS.
Today, about 64 percent of the company’s gross revenue comes from providing at-sea monitors and observers to NMFS, an agency under the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Most of that — 55 percent — comes from being the sole provider of observers for the Northeast Fisheries Observer Program (NEFOP). Those observers collect data on bycatch, or fish and mammals caught unintentionally.
But MRAG has become a sort of boogeyman among New England fishermen who face paying for the separate At-Sea Monitoring Program. MRAG is one of three companies NOAA pays for those monitors, who are put on fishing boats to ensure groundfish fishermen stay within their quotas.
In an industry with long memories, Rosenberg is known for his time at NOAA. Fishermen who remember him as a government official now bristle at the thought of paying his company for watchdogs they find unnecessary.
“It seems strange that somebody who was an assistant administrator for NOAA quits the government and turns around and has a multimillion-dollar contract for observers,” David Goethel, the operator of a 44-foot trawler called the Ellen Diane, said in a recent interview. “Fishermen think that it’s wrong.”
Rosenberg left NOAA in 2000 and bought into MRAG in 2006. He became president of the company in 2007. In a recent interview, he emphasized the time lapse between the two jobs — and denied that his company benefited from his NOAA contacts.
The contracting process was “very difficult and very rigid,” he said. The observer program is also not very profitable, he said, thanks to the costs of training and the unpredictability of how many observers will be used.
“It was a very long, drawn-out process, and in fact that’s caused us a lot of problems,” Rosenberg said, citing competition that brought down the contract’s worth. “So if I got a benefit from the inside track, it wasn’t obvious.”
Read the full story from Greenwire