Saving Seafood

NEW YORK: In Tony Hamptons, Homeowners and Fishermen Fight Over a Beach

June 28, 2021 — A fight over access to a Hamptons beach is intensifying this summer, pitting wealthy homeowners seeking a serene oceanfront view against residents and local fishermen who want to drive trucks onto the sand.

People brought dozens of trucks onto the beach Sunday morning in violation of a court order prohibiting people from driving on a roughly 4,000-foot oceanfront stretch of East Hampton known locally as Truck Beach. Protesters drove the length of the beach displaying American flags during the roughly hour-and-a-half event. One protester carried a sign that read, “Support our local fishermen.”

Police took names of those coming onto the beach, but didn’t cite or arrest anyone, according to Daniel Rodgers, a lawyer for the fishermen. East Hampton town police didn’t respond to a request for comment. Protesters vowed more protests throughout the summer.

“We’ve caught a lot of fish on that beach, and I’m not going to stop doing it now because somebody doesn’t want to look at trucks,” said Danny Lester, a fisherman whose family for generations has worked the waters off this far southeastern part of Long Island, about 100 miles east of New York City. “If they stop us at the entrance and lock us up, so be it. We’re going down there, come hell or high water.”

Read the full story at The Wall Street Journal

New York State petitions feds demanding more equitable fluke quota

March 23, 2018 — New York State on Friday filed a petition with the federal government to demand a more equitable distribution of the commercial fluke quota, saying current rules put “unreasonable limits” on the state industry.

The petition, filed with a U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is a first step, officials said, toward changing a decades-old quota that leaves New York fishermen with just 7.6 percent of a catchable annual allocation for fluke up and down the East Coast. Other states such as North Carolina and Virginia get more than 20 percent each of the coastal quota, and often travel to New York waters to catch it.

Local fishermen who have complained of the low quota for decades had been expecting a lawsuit, after state officials visiting Long Island in November vowed to make good on Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo promised litigation in a visit to Montauk in 2013.

But delays by an interstate fisheries commission addressing quota inequities until the fall forced the state to file the petition as a necessary first step toward litigation, officials said.

“Quite frankly, we lost patience,” Basil Seggos, commissioner of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, said in an interview. His staff worked with New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman’s office to file the petition.

“The stringent limits on commercial landings of [fluke] in New York ports have made [fluke] fishing no longer an economically viable choice” for New York fishermen, because the “limited revenue generated by a trip often cannot offset the costs, including fuel, time, and vessel wear-and-tear.”

One longtime critic of the governor’s protections for commercial fishermen called the petition effort “weak.”

Daniel Rodgers, a Southampton lawyer and director for New York Fish, a fishermen’s advocacy group, expressed concern that the petition will only further delay action that fishermen need now.

Read the full story at Newsday