Saving Seafood

US advocacy group takes aim at vessel monitor funding rules

April 3, 2019 — BOSTON — While most of the thousands of attendees to the Boston seafood show were there to buy and sell fish or otherwise drum up business for their companies, Ryan Mulvey was on a “fact-finding mission” of sorts.

Mulvey, an attorney, along with a team of others from the Cause of Action Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group, spent the show speaking to fishermen about what it refers to as “overregulation” in the fishing industry. This can include issues such as requirements that fishermen bear the cost of having observers on board, the development of offshore wind farms curtailing fishing areas, cuts to quota and problems with the “reliability” of federally conducted stock assessments, he told Undercurrent News.

“We want to hear stories and we had a huge number of fishermen come up to us and tell us ‘Oh, we’re struggling so much. Every year we’re allowed to catch fewer and fewer fish and we’re making less and less money and new and heavier regulatory costs get imposed on us’,” Mulvey said.

The institute advocates for what he called “reasonable regulation that still preserves economic freedom” and has been active in litigating on behalf of fishermen suing the federal government in cases of “government overreach”, Mulvey said. It does this through legal action as well as by launching investigations through the aggressive use of public records laws like the Freedom of Information Act.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

 

Deadline for feds’ response to fishing monitor petition passes

August 15, 2017 —  A fishermen’s group says it’s still waiting to hear if the federal government responded to a petition it filed with the U.S. Supreme Court about the cost of mandated fishing monitors.

The government shifted the cost of paying for monitors from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to fishermen last year, prompting a legal battle.

The deadline for the government to respond was Monday, Aug. 14. It had not done so last week, and is not required to, said Zachary Kurz, a spokesman for the Cause of Action Institutes attorneys, who are representing the fishermen. He added that the Supreme Court doesn’t use e-file, so if the government did respond Monday, it would have been filed by hand and Cause of Action may not know if there was a response until it is served with the pleading via mail.

Attorneys with the Washington, D.C.-based Cause of Action Institute, representing fisherman David Goethel of Hampton, New Hampshire, and Northeast Fishing Sector 13, filed the petition last month with the nation’s highest court. They asked that it take up the case and recognize the need to hear the New England groundfishermen’s case based on its merits.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

 

NH fisherman takes $700-a-day mandate to have federal agent aboard to Supreme Court

July 31, 2017 — HAMPTON, N.H. — A commercial fisherman who is suing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration over its at-sea monitoring program is hopeful the U.S. Supreme Court will hear his case on its merits.

David Goethel, of Hampton, who filed his original suit against the federal government in 2015, has been joined in his efforts by the Northeast Fisheries Sector 13. They represent fishermen from Massachusetts to North Carolina.

Cause of Action Institute, a nonprofit oversight group advocating for economic freedom and individual opportunity in Washington, D.C., is funding the lawsuit. Goethel said their support is evening the playing field for small commercial fishermen who are being forced to pay about $700 per day for at-sea monitors under current regulations.

“We simply just don’t have the money to play in these arenas,” Goethel said Friday.

Lawyers submitted their petition to the Supreme Court earlier this month. It calls for the court to reverse rulings about a 30-day statute of limitations for challenges, but at its heart, Goethel is asking for the case to be heard on its merits.

Goethel said he believes it is illegal for NOAA to require commercial fishermen to pay for at-sea monitors, when NOAA mandates them. NOAA has paid for the monitors on and off in the past, when they can find the money, Goethel said.

Read the full story at the New Hampshire Union Leader

NOAA Officials May Be Deleting Their G-Chats

July 6, 2017 — The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) might illegally be destroying records of a recent meeting discussing new regulations against the fishing industry, according to a conservative legal group in Washington, D.C.

Cause of Action Institute (CoA) filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the NOAA to obtain communications during a New England Fishery Management Council meeting hashing out new rules foisted upon the country’s fishing industry. The group believes the agency is deleting Skype and Google Chat conversations that took place during the April meeting.

The NOAA General Counsel considers communications through Google Chat to be off the record and will not be recorded anyway, according to a 2012 handbook guide CoA obtained. CoA disputed the agency’s claim, and pointed to provisions within the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

The NARA, which maintains government records, states that any communications created on NOAA’s Gmail interface qualify under the Federal Records Act. CoA Institute requested e-mails, instant messaging, Google chat messages, text messages, and any Skype messages NOAA employees sent during the April 18–20, 2017 NEFMC meetings.

Read the full story at The Daily Caller

Fisherman, lawyers mull new monitoring suit

May 19,  2017 — They lost in U.S. District Court in New Hampshire last summer and failed to have that decision overturned in federal appeals court in Boston this spring.

Still, New Hampshire groundfisherman David Goethel and his legal team may not be done in their legal challenge of the federal government’s ability to shift the costs of at-sea monitoring to groundfishermen.

“We’re still assessing all of our legal options at this point,” said Julie Smith, one of the lawyers from Washington D.C.-based Cause of Action Institute that has represented Goethel and Northeast Fishing Sector 13 in the initial federal lawsuit and appeal.

Smith declined to be more specific, but clearly the options are limited:

Goethel and his lawyers could swing for the fences and petition the U.S. Supreme Court to hear their case, hoping it would overturn the April decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals upholding the judgment in the original lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Concord, New Hampshire.

Petitioning the highest court in the land with a writ of certiorari — which would compel the lower court to deliver its record for review — is not exactly a high-percentage play.

The Supreme Court, according to the website of the federal court system, accepts only 100 to 150 of the more than 7,000 cases it is asked to review each year.

Read the full story at The Gloucester Times 

Information Demanded on U.S. Fishery Council

November 3, 2016 — WASHINGTON — A nonprofit backed by Koch brothers money sued the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Tuesday for information on how it selects members of the New England Fishery Management Council, which regulates fishing off the coasts of five states.

“There is danger for politicization in how members are actually chosen,” the Cause of Action Institute says in its federal complaint against the NOAA, a branch of the Department of Commerce.

The Cause of Action Institute describes itself in the lawsuit as “a nonprofit strategic oversight group committed to ensuring that government decision-making is open, honest, and fair.” It generally opposes government regulation, particularly in the energy industry.

The Los Angeles Times described it last year as “a small group of lawyers funded by the Koch network.” Its then-director Daniel Epstein formerly worked as an attorney for the Charles Koch Foundation, and by 2013 most of Cause of Action’s funding came from the Donors Trust, “a nonprofit group through which the Kochs and their allies distribute tens of millions of dollars without needing to disclose the source of the funds,” the Times reported in its Feb. 7, 2015 article.

In its July 13 FOIA request, Cause of Action sought information on how the Secretary of Commerce and NOAA select members in the New England Fishery Management Council, which regulates fishing off the coasts of Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut.

“The records at issue in this case, which include records of communication between high-ranking agency officials, will permit the public to understand how the most recent round of membership selection for the NEFMC was handled, and whether that process was at all tinged by political considerations or other untoward government action,” the complaint states.

Cause of Action claims that NOAA has never disclosed information about how it selects members of the eight regional regulatory councils operating under the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, and that the membership might not accurately represent the fishing industry.

The complaint cites environmental studies professor Thomas A. Okey of the University of Victoria in British Columbia, who suggested in a 2003 paper that representation in the industry is “generally skewed towards the larger corporate interests that support larger sized vessels, whereas the small-scale vessel fleets that are the traditional core of coastal communities (and more likely to have conservation interests) are often less represented.”

Cause of Action says the secretary of commerce and National Marine Fisheries Service-supervised councils wield “significant independent power.”

“They propose Fishery Management Plans, amendments, and framework adjustments; they conduct hearings; and they determine annual catch limits. The FMCs even have the ability to constrain the Secretary of Commerce,” the complaint states, abbreviating Fishery Management Council.

Read the full story at Courthouse News Service

East Coast fishermen spar with federal government over cost of at-sea monitors

July 14, 2016 — Every year, the federal government spends millions monitoring New England commercial fishermen to ensure they ply their timeless maritime trade in accordance with the law.

Now, a judge is set to rule on who should foot the bill for the on-board monitors: the government or the fishing boat owners. The East Coast fishermen say sticking them with the bill would be the “death knell” for their  industry and is illegal on the part of the federal government.

Fishermen of important New England food species such as cod and haddock will have to start paying the cost of at-sea monitors soon under new rules. Monitors — third-party workers hired to observe fishermen’s compliance with federal regulations — collect data to help determine future fishing quotas and can cost about $18,000 a year, or $710 per voyage.

The Cause of Action Institute, a legal watchdog representing a group of East Coast fishermen, sued the federal government in December in U.S. District Court in Concord, N.H., seeking to block the transfer of payments from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to the fishermen.

“It is unlawful for NOAA to force struggling fishermen to pay for their own at-sea monitors,” said former federal judge Alfred Lechner, the institute’s president and CEO. “The significant costs of these regulations should be the responsibility of the government.”

The lawsuit was filed against the Department of Commerce on behalf of David Goethel, owner and operator of F/V Ellen Diane, a 44-foot trawler based in Hampton, N.H., and Northeast Fishery Sector 13, a nonprofit representing fishermen from Massachusetts to North Carolina.

It called the transfer of payments the “death knell for much of what remains of a once-thriving ground fish industry that has been decimated by burdensome federal overreach.”

“Fishing is my passion and it’s how I’ve made a living, but right now, I’m extremely fearful that I won’t be able to do what I love and provide for my family if I’m forced to pay out of pocket for at-sea monitors,” Goethel said when the suit was filed last December.

Read the full story at Fox News

No ruling yet in at-sea monitoring lawsuit

May 17, 2016 — There still has been no decision in the federal lawsuit brought by New Hampshire fisherman David Goethel and his Northeast Fishing Sector 13 to bar NOAA Fisheries from making permit holders pay for at-sea monitoring.

The last significant acts of the case, which was filed Dec. 9 in U.S. District Court in Concord, New Hampshire, occurred in early March, when both sides filed motions for summary judgment with U.S. District Court Judge Joseph Laplante.

Laplante took those motions for summary judgment under advisement. Then, except for a few incidents of legal housekeeping, there has been nothing but judicial silence.

Neither side in the dispute agreed to speak on the record Monday regarding the extensive delay or what it could mean to the case’s ultimate outcome.

“We believe that the hearing went well,” Alfred Lechner Jr., president and chief executive officer of Cause of Action Institute — which is providing legal guidance to Goethel in the case — said in a statement. “Our clients were provided the opportunity to tell their story and outline how these regulations impact their business and are making it difficult for fishermen in New England to earn a living. The judge listened to what they had to say.”

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times