August 30, 2021 — With the blue economy being essential to the city’s legacy and future, candidates provided insight on how they would strike a balance between the competing interests of fishermen, development, wildlife, preservation and recreation.
“To say that the fishing industry is dead could not be further from the truth,” Harvey said, explaining that fish processing is one of the city’s largest employers as far as he knows.
Harvey said the mayor’s job is to use his or her soap box to pressure Congress for intelligent regulations and to lure more boats to Gloucester.
As his grandparents came to Gloucester from Sicily to fish, Verga knows the importance of the waterfront.
“It is something that is not going away,” he said. “It is not dead, it is different than from what it once was.”
Verga emphasized that Gloucester should be looking at employment opportunities on the waterfront other than fishing, such as lobstering.
“Gloucester has struggled with its blue economy for many, many years,” Russell said. “Unfortunately, there are two competing faces here in the city and we need to be unified.”
This means, as he said, that downtown and the harbor and the fisheries can coexist.
“We need to protect the heritage that we have in the harbor and we need to invest in working with downtown so we can coexist,” Russell said.
Romeo Theken said that everyone has been coexisting for years.
“We are almost 400 years old,” she said, explaining that tourists want to see a working waterfront.
In addition to listing the multiple ocean-front specific companies that work in collaboration with the rest of the city, Romeo Theken noted that she had reinvigorated the city fisheries commission.
She added that fishermen are environmentalists.
Pollard, who has a commercial fishing license and fishes part-time, would like to see additional dockage implemented in the city.
Sclafani said that “if you were to make the fatal mistake of rezoning the Gloucester fishing industry’s infrastructure, that infrastructure would just disappear.”
He added that the future of fishing is fish farms.
“I looked at a female lobster that has thousand a little babies under her,” he said. “If you could separate them, 30,000 from birth, pretty sure you could feed the world with lobster.”
