I've tried talking to the Secretary of Commerce and met with (NOAA chief administrator Jane) Lubchenco," the governor told perhaps 40 people, mostly fishermen, at Cruiseport Gloucester after arriving at the Jodrey Fish Pier and touring the Pigeon Cove Whole Foods Market processing plant.
He indicated that lobbying Secretary Gary Locke and Lubchenco, the influential former vice chairwoman at the Environmental Defense Fund, had not been productive.
"If I go to talk to the president," Patrick said, "he'll listen carefully," but then confer with his top fishery officials. Then, the governor speculated, the industry would be left right where it was — struggling with miniscule allocations across the board leaving most fishermen incapable of covering their costs even though the fishery is surging back from extreme levels of overfishing less than two decades ago.
"How do we pierce through that?" Patrick asked. He promised to strategize the problem for a day or so.
"Why don't we touch base on Friday, and see if we can come up with a plan?"
GLOUCESTER, Mass. – July 14, 2010 – In a tour of the waterfront and a no-holds-barred meeting Wednesday with officials and representatives of the fishing industry, Gov. Deval Patrick was given an earful about the struggle to keep America's oldest fishing port running — and challenged to use his friendship with President Obama to do something about it.
Patrick, who used the bully pulpit last December to help liberalize the scallop allocation to the primary benefit of New Bedford, the nation's No. 1 cash port, accepted the assignment and promised to develop an emergency political plan with the Gloucester community by Friday.
Discussing the dilemma facing the New England groundfish industry, Patrick tacitly acknowledged worries that his friend, the president, may be insulated from the true story by the team he appointed to head the Department of Commerce and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Read the complete story from the Gloucester Times.