Saving Seafood

MAINE: Rep. Lydia Blume submits bill to help scallop, urchin fisheries

August 24, 2016 — AUGUSTA, Maine — Rep. Lydia Blume, D-York, is proposing legislation to require license holders in the scallop and urchin fisheries to own and operate their own vessels. Owner-operator provisions help to increase stewardship in a fishery and help to ensure that the fishery’s revenues stay in local communities.

“Maine’s lobster fishery has an owner-operator requirement, and this is one of the reasons why it is looked upon as a textbook example of a sustainable fishery,” said Blume. “We should try to replicate what works with lobster in harvesting other species.”

Entrance to both the scallop and urchin fisheries is now closed, but there are several factors, like the rebuilding of stocks and increased dockside prices, that are increasing pressure to open them to new license holders.

“Implementing measures like owner-operator requirements should be done before opening the fisheries,” Blume said. “We need to act to sustain the Maine marine economy through encouraging good stewardship of these valuable and precious resources.”

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

MAINE: Legislature to consider fisheries bills on “emergency” basis

December 9, 2015 — The Legislature will take up bills dealing with the lobster and elver fisheries when it returns to work next month, but new licensing rules for the scallop industry will likely have to wait.

Last month, the Legislative Council approved two bills proposed by Rep. Walter Kumiega (D-Deer Isle) for consideration by the full Legislature when it returns to work in January. The council has to green-light any new bills that lawmakers want to introduce during the Legislature’s second session.

Kumiega, House chairman of the Legislature’s Marine Resources Committee, will offer a bill that would, he said, “provide increased flexibility and promote maximum utilization of the elver quota by Maine’s elver harvesters,” if enacted.

Current law calls for a 48-hour fishing closure each week to provide an opportunity for juvenile eels to pass upstream on their seasonal journey from the sea to their spawning areas in Maine’s streams, lakes and ponds. The closed period is now set by statute and runs from Friday at noon to Sunday at noon. Kumiega’s bill would give DMR flexibility to set the 48-hour weekly closed period by rule prior to the start of the season based on the timing of the tidal cycle.

DMR would consult with industry members to determine which weekly 48-hour period would have the least impact on harvesting opportunity by setting the closed period when the tides are the least advantageous to harvesting.

The high price of elvers in recent years has made the fishery second only to lobster in terms of the value of the fishery in Maine.

Read the full story from The Ellsworth American