NOAA’s inspector general Thursday validated the complaints of fishermen in the Northeast with a scathing report citing arbitrary, heavy-handed and often unfair enforcement of the fisheries laws.
In a report prompted by complaints last year from the state’s congressional delegation, the inspector general described an agency that lacks organization, guidelines and oversight, in which criminal investigators handle non-criminal infractions, dealing out heavy fines without consistency and without review.
The investigators interviewed 255 people, but fisheries sources speaking off the record for fear of retribution said that many fishermen likewise fearing retribution were too fearful to talk to investigators.
Larry Yacubian, a former New Bedford fisherman now running small passenger boats on the Florida coast, was driven out of business after a dispute over an alleged closed area violation in 1998.
Yacubian said he believes he was singled out by a vindictive official at NOAA on a questionable accusation. The boat tracking system operating with one satellite was highly inaccurate in the days before global positioning systems, he said.
But he said the judicial process “makes Georgia traffic court look like the Supreme Court,” and it stripped him of all of his commercial fishing licenses permanently. The process itself stretched out over seven years, he said.
“Amazingly enough,” he said, “you would tell people what was going on and they would look at you like you had three heads. It was sort of like dealing with a bad cop,” he said.
Yacubian said that last year he met a Rhode Island day-fisherman who was assessed $1.5 million in fines because of late activity reports, which he would file in bunches every two weeks. Yet late reports are extremely common, Yacubian said, and other fishermen were given a pass.
Marc Agger, a former New Bedford fisherman who now operates a fish processing plant in New York, said that an oversight involving a shark fishing license led to an assessment against him for $4.5 million and put him out of fishing. The fine has been negotiated down to $1 million, but he said he has no way to pay it and expects NOAA to seize his family’s home before long.