Citing "demoralizing" restrictions placed last week on the thriving East Coast scallop fishery and "moral issues" of environmentalists he concedes he can’t fathom, Congressman Barney Frank has pledged a major effort to modify the Magnuson-Stevens Act, under which the nation’s fisheries are regulated.
Frank’s frustration, expressed in a telephone interview Wednesday, came in the aftermath of the November meeting of the New England Fishery Management Council a week earlier, and builds on a recent, lengthy letter of complaints he sent to Jane Lubchenco, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which regulates fisheries.
"The scallop industry is a great success," Frank told the Gloucester Times. "It’s very discouraging, totally demoralizing for the success to be followed up with draconian restrictions."
The council also voted to reconsider the length of the seven-year rebuilding timetable for yellowtail flounder, a species that is taken as bycatch by the scallopers and is also a valued groundfish.
Patricia Kurkul, the Gloucester-based regional administrator of NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service, opposed lengthening the rebuilding timetable for yellowtail, and last month, during a peaceful protest of NOAA and NMFS policies at the regional offices in Gloucester’s Blackburn Industrial Park, Kurkul advised protesters in a private meeting that she sympathized but was handcuffed by Magnuson-Stevens, and advised them to get the law changed.
Scallops are the most valued and successful stock on the East Coast, and are responsible for New Bedford’s ranking as the nation’s No. 1 cash value port.
Read the complete story at The Gloucester Daily Times.