December 11, 2015 — A lawyer representing fishermen suing the federal government over a forthcoming requirement that they pay for the cost of bringing at-sea observers on their boats estimates that “more than half” of the US east coast groundfishermen will go out of business if the new rule takes effect.
Speaking to reporters on Dec. 10 about a lawsuit filed that day against the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the US Department of Commerce, attorney Stephen Schwartz estimated that the rule change would “basically destroy the industry overnight”.
“That’s the fishermen with downstream effects on the crews, on buyers and sellers of seafood, on restaurants with kind of rippling effects throughout the entire economy of New England,” he said.
Schwartz works for Cause of Action, a non-profit Washington, D.C.-based legal advocacy group that is representing New Hampshire groundfisherman
David Goethel as well as the non-profit industry group Sector XIII filed suit in federal court alleging that a NOAA requirement that groundfishermen begin paying for the cost of at-sea observers on Jan. 1 — a cost that NOAA has previously borne itself — violates existing federal laws including the Magnuson-Stevens Act.
According to Sector XIII manager John Haran, the at-sea observer funding rule will accelerate the decline of the east coast groundfish industry, which has already been in decline for years, he said.
Goethel, who operates a small dayboat from New Hampshire waters, agreed.
“We can not afford to pay for this. It’s that’s simple. I would ask everybody on the call, could you afford to pay $710 to pay for someone to ride to work with you everyday. We can’t either,” Goethel said.
Haran added fishermen are not clear why the cost for the at-sea observers is so high.
“The actual observer, the person on the boat gets paid between $15 and $20 per hour. How they get to $710 from there is one of the great mysteries of this whole program,” he said. “The fishermen are expected to pay for the observers’ training, for observer company overhead, for observer company profit even though we don’t know what that profit is.”
NOAA has defended the program arguing that it needs the information provided by the observers, but doesn’t have the resources to fund it itself.
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