WASHINGTON — March 27, 2015 — The U.S. Senate late Thursday night passed a budget amendment calling for the federal government to fully cover the cost of dockside and at-sea monitoring of fishing vessels in fisheries where a federal disaster has been declared.
The amendment, proposed by Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and supported by Sen. Edward J. Markey, potentially could lift a huge, looming burden off the backs of fishermen in the Northeast Multispecies Groundfish fishery if it ultimately remains in the fiscal year 2016 federal budget.
Currently, the federal government bears the full cost of all at-sea monitoring in the groundfish fishery, where there is no dockside monitoring. The Department of Commerce declared an economic disaster in the fishery in 2012.
But barring the successful inclusion of the amendment in the final budget, fishermen in the groundfish fishery on Aug. 1 will be on the hook for the full cost of monitoring — to the tune of $750-to-$1,000 for each vessels with monitors aboard and an estimated total economic hit of almost $2 million in the last nine months of the 2015 fishing season.