The congressional battle over NOAA's catch shares fishery management — which has raged nearly from the day the Senate confirmed Jane Lubchenco as NOAA administrator in early 2009 — has become frenzied.
Nineteen House members — 12 Republicans and seven Democrats, including Massachusetts Reps. John Tierney and Barney Frank — have sent a letter asking the House Appropriations Committee and the Subcommittee on Commerce and Science to amend a budget bill from the Senate with language barring the rollout of any new catch share programs in Atlantic waters in fiscal 2012, which began Oct. 1.
On the heels of the letter — drafted in the office of Republican Rep. Walter B. Jones of North Carolina and sent on Tuesday — a bipartisan coalition of six senators, including Sen. John Kerry, and two representatives, all except Kerry from the West Coast or Alaska, wrote Thursday to Lubchenco asking for NOAA to help its regional fishery management councils decide whether catch shares are appropriate in fisheries.
Meanwhile, the Environmental Defense Fund — which reported spending $275,000 on lobbyists through September this year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, to protect EDF's investment in virtual privatization — was zeroing in on House and Senate appropriations committees that can decide to bar the Jones amendment or give it life.
The spending bill that includes the NOAA budget which came out of the Senate this week did not include any mention of catch shares, so opponents must convince the House Appropriations Committee to add language barring new programs, then hope it survives conference reconciliation.
Read the comple article by Richard Gaines in The Gloucester Times