Anger between New England fishermen and their federal regulators at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would be far worse if a major headquarters of NOAA’s fishing management division weren’t in Gloucester, a location where local fishermen and federal officials can at least talk directly to each other.
But Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski, chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee’s subcommittee on commerce and science, is pushing to close the Northeast regional fisheries office in Gloucester. The committee has approved her plan to move the regional headquarters, which services the waters from Maine to North Carolina, from Gloucester to Silver Spring, Md. Mikulski’s main criticism about NOAA seems to be that her constituency does not “get calls back” from an office so far away.
There is no evidence that the proposal would save money, or that it would change federal policies in any meaningful way. But the new building in Gloucester is the agency’s largest regional facility; it is not easily replaced. Massachusetts’s fishing industry is six times larger than Maryland’s, and Mikulski’s proposal would merely shift the pain of dealing with absent regulators from her state to those in New England: Maryland, after all, is hardly a central location between North Carolina and Maine. Jobs would be lost here in the process.
Read the complete editorial by The Boston Globe.