April 23, 2015 — It will be at least June before scallopers get a preliminary decision from the New England Fisheries Management Council about opening some long-closed areas of Georges Bank to fishing.
The proposal is one of many contained in a new amendment to regulations that is intended to protect “essential fisheries habitat.”
Thursday the council failed to come to terms about the specifics of the plan in Georges Bank, which centers on an area on the Canadian line called the Northern Edge. On Wednesday the council approved several measures in the Gulf of Maine, delineating protected areas where certain forms of fishing gear will not be permitted.
Georges Bank was another matter. NOAA Fisheries regional administrator John Bullard had signaled his disapproval of preliminary plans on the grounds that they weren’t protective enough of habitat. And when council member John Quinn introduced an amendment to make the plan more acceptable to NOAA fisheries, the meeting collapsed into disarray.
Members complained that they were being asked to vote on something an hour and a half after seeing it for the first time. Many complained that the amendment had not been through any sort of review process to determine its impacts.
New proposals, in fact, were not supposed to be made, since existing ones have been 10 years in the making, and this is supposed to be the final vote on the entire plan.
Ultimately the council voted to ask NOAA staff for an evaluation, and pushed the matter back into the June meeting. It will not end there. Any amendments to the amendments could require another review period. And Bullard might still reject them.