DANVERS, Mass. — February 26, 2014 — Tuesday morning had morphed into afternoon and then on toward the evening — not that anybody attending the New England Fisheries Management Council meeting inside the artificial gloaming of the DoubleTree Hotel’s grand ballroom had the slightest idea of what time it was.
In that regard, the ballroom was like a Las Vegas casino, where the world barely intruded and everybody kept playing until all their chips were gone.
In the case of the long-suffering council, and its tedious journey toward developing rules for habitat that effectively will determine where Northeast fishermen will be allowed to fish beginning sometime in the winter of 2015, the chips were motions — followed by subsequent amendments and substitute motions they spawned.
Consider: the first of two days of council meetings here began at 9:30 a.m., and the first real piece of business — voting the preferred habitat alternative for the western portion of the Gulf of Maine — didn’t occur until 4:30 p.m., a process that made your average death march through a Red Sox-Yankees game seem like time-lapse photography.
Just prior to the vote on the final motion on the western Gulf of Maine preferred habitat alternative, council chairman Terry Stockwell bravely said he hoped to muster preferred alternatives for all three regions of the Gulf of Maine before adjourning for the day. He did not seem optimistic.
Status quo
The three hours it took to approve the preferred alternative for the western portion of the Gulf of Maine largely preserved the status quo in terms of managed habitat areas. Nothing new was opened, except a new deep-water, deep-muddy bottomed area near Jeffreys Ledge the council opened for Gulf of Maine shrimpers (which, to date, are not even having a season this year), and nothing new was closed.
The choice of the status quo in the western Gulf of Maine left fishing advocacy groups out in the cold.
The Gloucester-based New England Seafood Coalition, along with the Associated Fisheries of Maine and the Fisheries Survival Fund, had pushed hard for an alternative that would have reduced the closed area near Stellwagen Bank, known as Stellwagen Large, by half.
Vice-chairman John Quinn got things going right after lunch by basically encapsulating the preferred alternatives of the fishing industry into one motion — an act that threw the proceedings into reverse before they ever started forward.
Council member Matthew McKenzie from Connecticut accused Quinn of trying to hijack the proceedings.
Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times