Saving Seafood

US legislators push for fisheries disaster relief in federal spending bill

April 28, 2017 — Congressional and White House negotiators made progress Tuesday on a must-pass spending bill to keep the federal government open days ahead of a deadline as President Donald Trump indicated that U.S. funding for a border wall with Mexico could wait until September.

“We’re moving forward on reaching an agreement on a bipartisan basis,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) said, adding that he hoped that an agreement to fund the government through September can be reached in the next few days.

But a big stumbling block remains, involving a Democratic demand for money for insurance companies that help low-income people afford health policies under former President Barack Obama’s health law, or that Trump abandon a threat to use the payments as a bargaining chip. Trump’s apparent flexibility on the U.S.-Mexico wall issue, however, seemed to steer the Capitol Hill talks on the catchall spending measure in a positive direction.

Arriving in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, California 2nd District Congressman Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael) said he will not be leveraged into supporting “bad policies” such as funding for a border wall, increased military spending and cuts to Affordable Care Act insurance subsidies.

“I am not going to vote for a government funding bill that includes overreaching poison pill provisions,” Huffman told the Times-Standard. “If we have a clean government funding bill, I will support it. But I am not going to be bullied into supporting bad policies in a sort of hijacking exercise with government funding.”

Huffman and a bipartisan group of 16 other legislators are urging congressional appropriation committees to include fisheries disaster funding in the spending bill for fishing fleets in Alaska, Washington, Oregon and California, which includes the California crab fleet and the Yurok Tribe salmon fishing fleet.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Eureka Times-Standard

Trump order could put marine monument back in play

April 28, 2017 — President Donald Trump’s new executive order calling for a review of national monument designations under the Antiquities Act could have implications for a marine monument created by President Barack Obama last year in a sweeping area off Cape Cod.

Obama last September announced the creation of the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument in a 4,913 square mile area about 150 miles southeast of Cape Cod. At the time, Gov. Charlie Baker said he was “deeply disappointed” by the designation of the first deep-sea marine national monument in the Atlantic Ocean, a move the governor viewed as undermining Massachusetts fishermen.

According to the Interior Department, Trump’s order does not strip any monument designation and also does not “loosen any environmental or conservation regulations on any land or marine areas.” It calls for the review of all declarations made since Jan. 1, 1996 that cover more than 100,000 acres or where the Interior secretary determines that the designation “was made without adequate public outreach and coordination with relevant stakeholders.”

The Northeast Canyons and Seamounts area includes three underwater canyons and four underwater mountains that are habitats for protected species, including sea turtles and endangered whales. Local critics of Obama’s September 2016 marine monument designation said it was made without sufficient public input.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

Targeted monuments are on land, in sea

April 28, 2017 — President Trump’s call to review 24 national monuments established by three former presidents puts in limbo protections on large swaths of land that are home to ancient cliff dwellings, towering sequoias, deep canyons and ocean habitats where seals, whales and sea turtles roam.

Trump and other critics say presidents have lost sight of the original purpose of the law created by President Theodore Roosevelt that was designed to protect particular historical or archaeological sites rather than wide expanses. Here’s a quick look at five of the monuments on the list:

Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument:

Designated by President Barack Obama in September 2016, the Atlantic Ocean’s first marine national monument consists of nearly 5,000 square miles of underwater canyons and mountains off the New England coast. The designation was widely praised by environmentalists as a way to protect important species and habitat for whales and sea turtles while reducing the toll of climate change.

The designation closed the area to commercial fishermen.

Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument:

This remote monument northwest of Hawaii’s main islands was created by President George W. Bush in 2006 and was quadrupled in size last year by President Obama. The nearly 583,000-square-mile safe zone for tuna, the endangered Hawaiian monk seal and thousands of other species is the world’s largest marine protected area, more than twice the size of Texas.

Obama pointed to the zone’s diverse ecology and cultural significance to Native Hawaiian and early Polynesian culture as reasons for expanding the monument.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Portland Press Herald

Trump orders review of national monuments, vows to ‘end these abuses and return control to the people’

April 27, 2017 — The following is an excerpt of a story published in the Washington Post on April 26:

President Trump signed an executive order Wednesday instructing Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to review any national monument created since Jan. 1, 1996, that spans at least 100,000 acres in a move he said would “end another egregious use of government power.”

The sweeping review — which Trump predicted would “end these abuses and return control to the people, the people of all of the states, the people of the United States” — could prompt changes to areas designated not only by former president Barack Obama but also by George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

The review will also examine major marine areas that Bush and Obama put off limits. That includes Hawaii’s Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument, which Bush designated in 2006 and Obama quadrupled in size a decade later.

James L. Connaughton, who chaired the Council on Environmental Quality under Bush, said that Bush criticized “the flawed process” that led to Clinton’s designation of Grand Staircase-Escalante and that his deputies solicited local input once he took office.

Although Connaughton defended the Antiquities Act as “one of the best balances between the two branches,” he said Obama had overreached in his expansion of Papahanaumokuakea and the creation of a controversial marine monument off New England’s coast.

“They fell short on the process and the substance underlying the justification for them,” Connaughton said of Obama administration officials. “As a result, it’s created legitimate criticism, which undermines the support for subsequent designations.”

Read the full story at the Washington Post

Trump review of national monuments includes New England Coral Canyons

Apri 27, 2017 — President Donald Trump’s latest executive order threatens newly won protections for an underwater national monument located 150 miles off the coast of Cape Cod.

With a stroke of a pen Wednesday, Trump ordered the Interior Department to review a number of monuments created by former President Obama under the Antiquities Act and identify ones that can be rescinded or resized as part of a push to open up more federal lands to drilling, mining and other development.

One of the monuments Obama created is the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, also known as the New England Coral Canyons and Seamounts area.

It is a massive undersea area where the continental shelf drops off into the deep waters of the Atlantic Ocean, In those deep waters, four extinct underwater volcanoes, called seamounts, provide habitat for a number of cold-water corals that are hundreds, and some thousands, of years old.

The ecosystem provides a breeding and feeding ground for a number of fish and other marine animals, including whales.

In an executive order signed on Sept. 15, Obama said, “These canyons and seamounts, and the ecosystem they compose, have long been of intense scientific interest.”

Read the full story at The Connecticut Mirror

Environmentalists vow to fight Trump on Maine monument

April 26, 2017 — President Trump on Wednesday will issue a sweeping executive order to review as many as 40 national monument designations made by his three predecessors, an unprecedented move that could curtail or rescind their protected status.

It was unclear which areas would come under review, but the list could include monuments designated last year by President Barack Obama, including thousands of acres of pristine woods in northern Maine and sensitive marine habitats in the submerged canyons and mountains off Cape Cod.

Environmental groups immediately questioned the president’s legal authority to reverse a previous president’s designation, but the Trump administration has suggested that some of the restrictions on mining, logging, and other commercial and recreational activities have gone too far.

“The review is long overdue,” US Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said at a White House news conference.

“No one can say definitely one way or another whether a president can undo an earlier president’s designation, because the issue has never been litigated,” said New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell, who has opposed Obama’s closing of 5,000 square miles of seabed to fishing by designating the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, about 130 miles off Cape Cod.

Mitchell said there is precedent for presidents to change the boundaries and activities within a national monument. President Woodrow Wilson reduced by half the size of the Mount Olympus National Monument in Washington, created by President Theodore Roosevelt.

“Intuitively, one would assume that if the president can establish a monument, the president can undo an earlier establishment,” he said.

Andrew Minkiewicz, an attorney at the Fisheries Survival Fund in Washington, D.C., said the president wouldn’t have to rescind Obama’s designation to address the concerns of the fishing industry.

“With the stroke of a pen, he could just say there’s no longer a ban on commercial fishing,” he said.

Read the full story at the Boston Globe

Trump Targets National Monuments, Including Papahanaumokuakea

April 26, 2017 — President Donald Trump is ordering a review of the designations for more than two dozen national monuments, including ecologically rich marine preserves in the Pacific such as Papahanaumokuakea, Marianas Trench and the Pacific Remote Islands.

Through an executive order he is expected to sign Wednesday, Trump will instruct Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke to engage in a sweeping review of many national monuments created by presidential proclamation since 1996.

The Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, which was dramatically enlarged by President Barack Obama last summer despite the opposition of the local fishing industry, would be included in the review. Opponents of Obama’s decision have taken their complaints to Washington.

In a Tuesday press briefing held at the White House and by telephone with reporters around the country, Zinke said he has been asked to evaluate the monuments created in the past 20 years that encompass more than 100,000 acres to see whether local communities should be given additional input into their scope and restrictions.

He said he would look specifically at monuments that have been made off-limits to what he called “traditional uses,” such as farming, ranching, timber harvesting, mining, oil and gas exploration, motorized recreation and fishing. An important criteria would be whether jobs were created or eliminated by the monuments, he said.

Zinke estimated 24-40 monuments were likely to come under review.

Read the full story at the Honolulu Civil Beat 

Congress working to prevent government shutdown; fishery disaster funds up in the air

April 26, 2017 — Congressional and White House negotiators made progress Tuesday on a must-pass spending bill to keep the federal government open days ahead of a deadline as President Donald Trump indicated that U.S. funding for a border wall with Mexico could wait until September.

“We’re moving forward on reaching an agreement on a bipartisan basis,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) said, adding that he hoped that an agreement to fund the government through September can be reached in the next few days.

But a big stumbling block remains, involving a Democratic demand for money for insurance companies that help low-income people afford health policies under former President Barack Obama’s health law, or that Trump abandon a threat to use the payments as a bargaining chip. Trump’s apparent flexibility on the U.S.-Mexico wall issue, however, seemed to steer the Capitol Hill talks on the catchall spending measure in a positive direction.

Arriving in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, California 2nd District Congressman Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael) said he will not be leveraged into supporting “bad policies” such as funding for a border wall, increased military spending and cuts to Affordable Care Act insurance subsidies.

“I am not going to vote for a government funding bill that includes overreaching poison pill provisions,” Huffman told the Times-Standard. “If we have a clean government funding bill, I will support it. But I am not going to be bullied into supporting bad policies in a sort of hijacking exercise with government funding.”

Read the full story at the Eureka Times-Standard

Seafood groups praise Trump’s “Buy American” executive order

April 25, 2017 — President Donald Trump’s 18 April “Buy American, Hire American” Executive Order has been positively received by some U.S. seafood trade groups, who say it will help the domestic seafood industry.

Representatives of industry groups in Alaska and the U.S. states on the Gulf of Mexico said the executive order will help them create jobs for Americans.

“In order to promote economic and national security and to help stimulate economic growth, create good jobs at decent wages, strengthen our middle class, and support the American manufacturing and defense industrial bases, it shall be the policy of the executive branch to maximize…through terms and conditions of federal financial assistance awards and federal procurements, the use of goods, products, and materials produced in the United States,” the order states.

In addition, the federal government must “rigorously enforce and administer the laws governing entry into the United States of workers from abroad,” including section 212(a)(5) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, according to the order.

C. David Veal, executive director of the American Shrimp Processors Association in Biloxi, Mississippi, said Trump had helped protect U.S. fishing communities with his executive order.

“We appreciate this effort and the Trump Administration’s ongoing efforts to restore the competitive position of the country. This is the strongest effort by any administration to ensure that U.S. laws designed to promote the purchase of domestically produced products are effectively enforced,” Veal said.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource.com

Trump to review Maine monument designation, may expand offshore drilling

April 24, 2017 — President Trump will sign executive orders this week aimed at expanding offshore oil drilling and reviewing national monument designations made by his predecessors, continuing the Republican’s assault on President Obama’s environmental legacy.

The orders could expand oil drilling in the Arctic and Atlantic oceans and upend public lands protections put in place in Utah, Maine, and other states. The Antiquities Act of 1906 authorizes the president to declare federal lands of historic or scientific value to be ‘‘national monuments’’ and restrict how the lands can be used.

Administration officials on Monday confirmed the expected moves. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to freely discuss the president’s upcoming actions.

Obama used his power under the Antiquities Act to permanently preserve more land and water using national monument designations than any other president. The land is generally off limits to timber harvesting, mining and pipelines, and commercial development.

Read the full story at the Boston Globe