The fact that some local and state political officials will not be lending their in-person support to this morning’s Gloucester rally in support of New England’s and the East Coast’s fishermen may, in some ways, seem disappointing.
After all, one of the key points the fishermen and their allies at today’s demonstration is that the catch shares program — and the general commitment by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, through policy and enforcement by the National Marine Fisheries Service, to drive even more fishermen and their boats out of the business — takes a significant economic toll on communities these pols are sworn to serve.
But even if Mayor Carolyn Kirk and local state lawmakers are wary of endorsing this grass-roots effort, the most important thing is certainly not for them to speak, but to hear the fishermen’s call. And that goes double for federal lawmakers, notably local Congressman John Tierney, Sen. John Kerry and interim U.S. Sen. Paul Kirk, who must now take up the demonstrators’ bullhorn and push legislatively for at least a delay in converting to a catch-share regulatory format, and a demand that NMFS rectify its admitted errors before even a single fishermen’s 2010 catch is wrongly cut back through the agency’s data gathering and processing incompetence.