The Obama administration has rejected a challenge to the legality and fairness of the 2009 New England Fishery Management Council votes that created an unlevel playing field in the allocation of fishermen's catch shares.
The reaction to a formal complaint filed by a member of the regional council could lead to a lawsuit aimed at blocking the May 1 rollout of a radical reorganization of the groundfishery with hard catch limits, severe conservation restrictions and a new business model based on fishing cooperatives.
The dispute resurfaced after the administration announced it had approved a final rule, the so-called Amendment 16, which reinvents the way groundfishing is managed, organized and regulated.
The new system poses survival challenges to many fishermen who have expressed certainty that reduced cash flow from lower catch limits will render their jobs and businesses no longer viable.
In a letter, the new national director of the National Marine Fisheries Service found no legal fault in the decision of the council to employ different criteria in setting allocations within the groundfishery.
These effectively shift about 700 metric tons of cod and haddock, worth roughly $1 million, from the commercial sector to the recreational sector. Another disputed vote moved a smaller additional volume and value away from the general commercial sector to a small commercial cooperative based in Chatham on Cape Cod.
The letter from NMFS director Eric Schwaab to David Goethel — a member of the New England Council who voted against the unlevel playing field and filed a formal objection last August, weeks after the disputed votes — arrived within hours of the announcement by Schwaab that the new management system, more than three years in the making, had been formally and finally approved.
It introduces catch shares, hard catch limits, and tight allocations in aggressive conservation restrictions beginning May 1, unless it is short-circuited by legal action.
A court challenge to the decision by Goethel and the industry is considered likely.
"Now, we have a final rule and we have something to shoot at," said Goethel in a telephone interview with the Times.
The Gloucester-based Northeast Seafood Coalition, like Goethel, also objected to the "inequity" of the allocation.
The council decided to use catch histories from 1996 to 2006 for the mass of commercial boats, but voted to use a five-year history, based on more fruitful times, to give the recreational sector and the Cape Cod cooperative a larger share of the whole than a universally applied measure would have produced.
Read the complete story at The Gloucester Daily Times.
David Goethel's letter to the Adminstration directed to Secretary Locke on June 27, 2009
Obama Admistration response from Eric Schwaab sent ten months later on March 29, 2010