Jackie Odell Archives - Page 2 of 3

Foes, friends praise retiring NOAA official’s approach

December 26, 2017 — He’s been called a Neanderthal and the most reviled man in the region’s fishing community. At a public meeting broadcast on national TV, a fisherman once accused him to his face of lying for a living.

As the regional fisheries administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, John Bullard has drawn ire from all sides — fishermen, environmentalists, and politicians alike. His decisions have been routinely controversial, and he has rarely minced words in defending them.

Yet he has also earned widespread respect during his tenure as the region’s top fishing regulator, the rare public official willing to say what he thinks, no matter how unpopular. Earlier this year, he even publicly criticized his bosses, an offense that nearly got him fired.

As he prepares to retire from one of New England’s most influential — and thankless — government positions, Bullard, 70, has few regrets.

Read the full story at the Boston Globe

Seafood Council backs NOAA nominee

December 11, 2017 — The issue of who exactly will run NOAA for the Trump administration is gathering steam within the Beltway and without, with various special interest groups — fishing stakeholders, environmentalists, scientists, politicians et al — weighing in on the nomination of Barry Myers.

Myers, who most recently served as the chief executive officer of the private weather forecasting company AccuWeather, has been criticized in some quarters for lack of a scientific background and fears that he might begin dismantling the National Weather Service to give private weather forecasting companies an advantage.

There also has been concern that Myers would fall in line with other Trump appointees, such as EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and Energy Secretary Rick Perry, in downplaying the human role in climate change.

And what of fishing? Several stakeholders, such as the Northeast Seafood Coalition, have endorsed Myers’ candidacy, hoping that he will bring a new perspective to the ongoing battle between fishermen and NOAA Fisheries’ science team.

“In our region, NOAA science has struggled to accurately measure the abundance of fish stocks while fisheries management has been guided by management that has served the ‘weakest link’ in the complex,” NSC Executive Director Jackie Odell wrote in the coalition’s endorsement of Myers. “We believe Mr. Myers will bring a fresh and much-needed perspective and approach to strengthening the science underlying the management of our fishery, along with a commitment to achieving sustainability of not only these fish stocks, but also the fishing businesses that rely upon a well-managed fishery.”

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

Cod quotas rise, flounder sinks

December 8, 2017 — Northeast commercial groundfishermen will face a mixed sampler of annual catch limits when the 2018 fishing season opens, with significant increases to some Gulf of Maine stocks but continued declines in many of the flounder quotas.

The New England Fishery Management Council, at its meeting Wednesday in Newport, Rhode Island, approved its groundfish Framework 57, which sets the annual catch limits for 2018-2020 fishing years.

Groundfishing stakeholders applauded the 2018 increases for such stocks as Georges Bank cod, Gulf of Maine cod, Gulf of Maine haddock and pollock in 2018, but said the gains still don’t come close to closing the credibility gap they believe exists between NOAA Fisheries’ science and what fishermen are seeing on the water.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

Massachusetts: Despite Gloucester dialogue, Sector IX fishermen on ice

November 24, 2017 — In late October, about a month after the New England Fisheries Management Council insisted by vote that NOAA Fisheries hold Northeast Fishing Sector IX accountable for allowing the illegal actions of its most dominant member, Carlos Rafael, the Northeast Seafood Coalition brokered a meeting at the NOAA Fisheries office at Blackburn Industrial Park.

The Gloucester-based fishing advocate sought to bring together officials of the sector’s reconstituted board of directors with federal fishery regulators. It’s mission was to begin sifting through the rubble of the Rafael-induced damage to the fishery and begin focusing on future reforms to bring the sector into compliance with its operation plan to preclude widespread abuse from occurring again.

“We facilitated the meeting to open up a dialogue,” said Jackie Odell, executive director of the coalition. “That’s our role. We understood the severity of the charges and we certainly don’t condone Carlos’s actions. We just wanted to try communicating in a calm, reasonable manner.”

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

MASSACHUSETTS: Seafood Coalition planning gala

May 30, 2017 — The Northeast Seafood Coalition will hold its annual fundraiser in July, but with a twist: This year’s event has a specific theme tied to elevating the group’s role in improving groundfish stock assessments.

The Gloucester-based fishing advocate’s gala, set for July 27 at The Gloucester House restaurant, is flying under the banner of “Know Fish: Better Science” and will include big-money raffles, a celebrity seafood cooking demonstration, an auction, live music and a seafood buffet.

Beyond the festivities, the event will underscore the need to improve the science that serves as the foundation for the stock assessments and potentially bridge the discrepancies between what the current science shows and what the fishermen are seeing on the water.

“We decided to do a larger theme this year than just center the event around fundraising,” said Jackie Odell, NSC executive director. “We’re raising money from the event to allow us to better engage in the scientific process and better engage in the science of assessments.”

The coalition has established several levels of financial support. The event, scheduled to begin at 6 p.m., will be limited to 500 attendees.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

JACKIE ODELL: Controversy over region’s cod population

April 11, 2017 — RE “DWINDLING cod population no fluke in Mass.” (Editorial, April 5): Small family-owned fishing businesses operating in New England rely upon sound science. In recent years, reports for stocks like Gulf of Maine cod have gone from being overly optimistic to overly pessimistic, seemingly overnight. This flip-flop has justifiably created doubt and suspicion among those who participate in the fishery.

Further contributing to this skepticism has been the remarkable abundance of codfish observed by both commercial and recreational fishermen on the water over the past three years, as environmental conditions and oceanographic cycles have shifted. Today, fishermen spend more time avoiding these fish than catching them.

The Gulf of Maine cod stock, assessed to be reportedly near collapse, is instead becoming more and more difficult to avoid across a wide region. This is the case for many fish stocks in New England, not just cod. Many in the fishery today are left with questions about the limitations of the data sets, models, and processes that are used to assess stocks today.

Read the full opinion piece at the Boston Globe

National Marine Monument off New England coast?

September 12, 2016 — The third installment of the Our Ocean forum will convene in Washington, D.C., this week and the betting window is open on whether the Obama administration will use the event to announce the designation of new National Marine Monuments.

No one — neither conservationists nor fishing stakeholders — claims to know exactly what will happen when the two-day, international event opens Thursday. But it has not escaped anyone’s attention that the Obama administration has used the same forum in the past to make similar announcements.

[In March], in a victory for fishing stakeholders, the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality removed Cashes Ledge, which sits about 80 miles off of Gloucester, from consideration as a possible site for a new National Marine Monument.

The Obama administration’s decision not to use the Antiquities Act to designate any portion of Cashes Ledge as a monument validated fishing stakeholders and others who characterized the proposal — which originated with the Conservation Law Foundation, the Natural Resources Defense Council and Pew Charitable Trusts — as an end-run around the existing fisheries management system and wholly unnecessary given the existing protections already afforded the area.

Cashes Ledge currently is closed to commercial fishing.

In the wake of that defeat, conservationists redoubled their lobbying efforts, urging Obama to invoke the 1906 Antiquities Act to unilaterally designate a number of potential sites, including canyons and seamounts off southern New England and off the coast of Monterey, California, as Maritime National Monuments.

“All eyes are on the canyons and seamounts,” said Jackie Odell, executive director of the Gloucester-based Northeast Seafood Coalition.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

In Shift, NOAA Says Fish Fleets Will Be Reimbursed For Monitoring Costs

June 24, 2016 — Deviating from plans that had caused an uproar, federal fishing regulators plan to announce Thursday that some of the fishing industry’s costs for groundfish monitoring will be reimbursed this year.

The at-sea monitoring program places regulators onboard vessels and in March the federal government started shifting the cost for the monitoring onto the fishing industry, according to Northeast Seafood Coalition Executive Director Jackie Odell.

“The fishery’s just not in a profitable place to be taking on this additional burden,” Odell told the News Service. She said, “There are some boats that are going out, but it’s a mixed bag.”

A memo dated Thursday from a National Marine Fisheries Service official sent to congressional offices and obtained by the News Service said the federal regulators anticipate federal funds can cover at-sea monitoring for about 85 percent of the days at sea for the current fishing year. The memo cautioned that the agency does not “expect this situation to recur in future fishing years.”

“Beginning July 1, groundfish fishermen will be reimbursed for their at-sea monitoring costs through an arrangement with the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission,” the federal memo stated. “The arrangement will last until funds are expended, and is not expected to cover costs for the entire year or be repeated in the future.”

Read the full story from the State House News Service at WBUR

US offers fishermen help in paying monitors

June 24, 2016 — Over the past year, the region’s groundfishermen have argued that the federal government was jeopardizing their livelihoods by forcing them to pay for a controversial program that requires government-trained monitors to observe their catch.

On Thursday, after months of heated debates with fishermen, officials from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that they have found money to cover most of the observer costs for the rest of the fishing year.

NOAA officials said that a contractor they hired to place observers aboard fishing vessels failed to do so for about one-third of the total number of days that they were expected to accompany fishermen to sea. As a result, NOAA has enough money to cover an estimated 85 percent of the rest of the so-called at-sea monitoring program.

“That’s an estimate because it depends on how much fishing occurs over the year,” said Samuel D. Rauch, deputy assistant administrator for regulatory programs at NOAA Fisheries.

Groups representing groundfishermen, who have been required since March to pay hundreds of dollars every time an observer accompanies them to sea, have argued that the costs were too much to bear and would put many of them out of business. NOAA estimates it costs $710 every time an observer joins them, though most fishermen have negotiated lower fees.

But many groundfishermen, who catch cod, flounder, and other bottom-dwelling fish, have already been suffering from major quota cuts. NOAA last year, for example, cut the region’s cod quota by 75 percent.

“This will definitely lessen the economic burden on small, family-owned fishing businesses, and will allow time to address many logistical issues that have surfaced since industry payments began,” said Jackie Odell, executive director of the Northeast Seafood Coalition, an advocacy group for groundfishermen in Gloucester.

Read the full story at the Boston Globe

SALEM NEWS: A small victory for at-sea monitoring

May 9, 2016 — New England fishermen got some good news last week when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced plans to scale back the amount of on-board monitoring required of the commercial fleet. However, there is still work to be done.

Late last week, NOAA said it will cut monitoring to 14 percent of all vessel trips for the season that began May 1. That’s down from about 24 percent of trips in 2015.

“Fishermen appreciate the changes and the evolution of the at-sea monitoring program,” Jackie Odell, executive director of the Gloucester-based Northeast Seafood Coalition, told reporter Sean Horgan. “We think what they’ve done is prudent and responsible.”

Read the full opinion piece at The Salem News