State and Local

This video was released by the Charlie Baker 2010 committee.

On December 2, 2009, Paul Diodati, the Director of the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries wrote to NOAA Fisheries Northeast Regional Administrator Patricia Kurkul regarding "the furor created by the New England Fishery Management Council's recent decision to allocate far fewer days to the limited access sea scallop fishery…"

Director Diodati observed that the Council unintentionally failed to use Plan Development Team and Science and Statistical Committee advice. He asked Regional Administrator Kurkul to "take appropriate steps to account for the PDT and SSC analyses of uncertainty" and asked that the decision of the Council be adjusted to F = 0.24, placing the probability of overfishing at less than 20%.

Read Director Diodati's letter to Regional Administrator Kurkul.

Representatives of several federal agencies reviewing ways to speed ecosystem restoration efforts in Louisiana and Mississippi got an earful of advice from coastal residents on Monday during the first of three days of meetings in the two states.

The Louisiana-Mississippi Gulf Coast Ecosystem Working Group was created in part to prioritize ecosystem restoration projects that are awaiting construction in Louisiana, said Nancy Sutley, working group co-chair and chairwoman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

But the panel of senior agency officials also is working on ways to get other agencies to add their expertise to water resource projects that often are designed and built only by the Army Corps of Engineers.

Read the complete story at The Times-Picayune.

Four months after putting in a request for a federal fishery disaster declaration with the U.S. Department of Commerce, the state of Alaska is still waiting for an answer. Closures to the Yukon River king salmon fishery this summer shut off crucial income opportunities for fishermen, and also impacted their ability to fish for food. An answer from Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke is expected soon, but approval of the request doesn’t itself guarantee financial relief to the families that need it.

The process of declaring a disaster can take from several weeks to a number of months, according to Gaylen Tromble, chief of the Domestic Fisheries Division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association. Fisheries disaster assistance is administered by NOAA through the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Department of Commerce. Once a determination is made, NOAA acts as a conduit between any money set aside by Congress for relief and the state. No congressional appropriation is currently in place for Yukon River fisheries disaster assistance; however, congressional delegates often wait for a declaration to be made before moving forward with requests for financial relief, Tromble said.

Already saddled with few jobs and a high cost of living, Yukon River fishermen received a triple blow this summer. In May, a huge spring flood sent water and ice crashing through many communities, damaging boats, homes and in some communities, city infrastructure. Fishing for king salmon — the most prized and valuable catch — was shut down to ensure enough of the fish made it across the border into Canada, thus meeting U.S. treaty obligations. And another typically abundant but far less valuable fish, chum salmon, saw its lowest run in nearly 14 years, forcing a closure on it and also deeply curtailing access to silver salmon traveling upriver at the same time. To make matters worse, all of this came after the 2008 fishing season, which was also a terrible year for king salmon.

Read the complete story at The Alaska Dispatch.

The state’s fishing industry lost an important ally with the death of U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy in August. But commercial fishermen would find a sympathetic audience with at least one of the politicians campaigning to fill Kennedy’s seat.

Martha Coakley doesn’t deal much with fishing in her current role as the state’s attorney general. But when she met today with Patriot Ledger editors, she expressed some frustration with the overly aggressive approach that the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration has taken with enforcing federal fishing rules.

The truth is, though, that the substantive relief for the industry would need to happen in Congress. That’s where U.S. Rep. Barney Frank has been trying unsuccessfully to institute more reasonable timetables for the rebuilding of depleted groundfish stocks. Without a change in federal law, the noose around the New England fishing industry will probably continue to tighten for the foreseeable future.

Read the complete story at Wicked Local.

Ending a historic freedom to fish the seas for the pleasure of it, Massachusetts’ 500,000 saltwater anglers will be required to buy state licenses for $10 in 2011, as a result of a bill signed yesterday by Gov. Deval Patrick.

The legislation creating a registry of saltwater fishermen passed unanimously through the Legislature last week, stimulated by a federal requirement for a functional registry in each coastal state to improve data collection and knowledge.

But the federal government did not require a license fee.

The Recreational Fishing Alliance, a national organization of recreational fishermen, criticized the decision of the state to impose one.

"While RFA can appreciate the need for additional state funding," said Jim Hutchinson Jr., the organization’s managing director, "using the federal mandate for data collection to legislate buy-in on a saltwater license is misrepresentation of federal intent."

Read the complete story at The Gloucester Daily Times.

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Earlier this month, Rhode Island Governor Donald Carcieri vetoes a similar bill stating "I understand that Congress frequently imposes mandates on the states, However, the Tenth Amendment also provides ‘[t]he posers not delegated to the United States Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.’ Mandating that all persons seeking to cast a fishing line into Narragansett Bay for purposes of recreational fishing should be required to pay an annual licensing fee and register with the government is excessively intrusive."

Read Gov. Carcieri’s veto letter.

Saltwater fishermen will be required to purchase a $10 permit starting in 2011 now that Gov. Deval Patrick has signed legislation establishing a saltwater fishing registry.

Proceeds from the licenses will benefit state marine fisheries programs that improve public access and resource management, according to a news release from the governor’s office.

“Many stakeholders have worked together to protect the state’s interests in designing this legislation,” Governor Patrick said. “I thank the legislators and recreational fishing organizations who crafted this measure and were instrumental in its passage.”

The legislation comes in light of federal regulations, passed in 2006, requiring the creation of a national recreational saltwater fishing registry. The amendement to the Magnuson-Stevens Act charged National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration with creating the registry, which scientists could access to improve recreational fishing data and fisheries management.

Read the complete story at The South Coast Today.

Over the past two years, recreational saltwater fishermen such as Patrick Paquette of Hyannis have been trekking up to Beacon Hill to work with legislators to draft a bill establishing the first-ever license fee for their hobby in Massachusetts.

That legislation, putting in place a recommended $10 annual fee, passed the House and Senate without opposition this week and now sits on Gov. Deval Patrick’s desk awaiting his signature.

For Paquette, the bill is the best that could be made of a bad situation.

"As much as fishermen are not going to like buying a state license, I hope that they will realize it could have been a lot worse," Paquette said.

Read the complete story at The South Coast Today.

A state development financing agency has agreed to extend $100,000 in subsidized loans to Gloucester seafood businesses hurt financially by this summer’s drinking water crisis.

The loans, administered through the Gloucester Revolving Loan Fund with capital from MassDevelopment, had been a goal of state Rep. Ann-Margaret Ferrante since the city suffered through 20 days of a boil water order, starting in August.

Money for the loans comes from a fund with a $145,000 balance that typically finances real estate and business equipment investments throughout Cape Ann.

Ferrante’s effort, which included a bill still pending in the Legislature, convinced MassDevelopment to get behind seafood-related enterprises in Gloucester that had to either limit operations or ship in clean water during the boil order.

Read the complete story at The Gloucester Daily Times.

Mt. Auburn Associates, a consulting firm working off a $150,000 state seaport advisory grant to advise the city on economic development opportunities in Gloucester Harbor, has obviously been listening to those who work there.

That is good, in a way. But so far, virtually all of what it is telling city officials, they could have heard for free from those same people who have attended hearings and spoken out about harbor and waterfront issues in the past.

The fishing industry, for example, is obviously a shadow of what it once was, largely due to federal regulation. As Gloucester’s own Vito Calomo of the Massachusetts Fisheries Recovery Commission puts it, "They won’t let us fish."

Read the complete story at The Gloucester Daily Times.