June 12, 2019 — For more than two years, the New England Fishery Management Council has worked on an intricate groundfish monitoring amendment that could have wide-scale economic and regulatory consequences for groundfishermen.
It has been a thorny, winding path that involves a host of groundfish committees, plan development teams and assorted staff within the far-flung fisheries regulatory landscape. Now a group of groundfishermen are weighing in. And they are not pleased.
Today, the council, meeting for the second of its three days in Portland, Maine, is expected to finalize the range of alternatives for revising monitoring programs when the amendment — named Amendment 23 — goes out for public comment, probably late in the fall.
In a letter to the council, groundfishermen from across New England criticized the process for developing the amendment by framing the issue within a simple cost/benefit analysis.
They claim the process for fashioning the amendment still has not identified what the revised monitoring programs will cost the groundfish industry that ultimately will be responsible for paying for it.
“That’s an extremely important issue, since they’re the ones paying for it,” said Jackie Odell, the executive director of the Gloucester-based Northeast Seafood Coalition. “These are industry-funded programs.”