Saving Seafood

US Company Indicted for Illegally Smuggling Valuable Eels

May 4, 2022 — The federal government has indicted a seafood distributor and eight of its employees and associates on charges of smuggling valuable eels.

The company, American Eel Depot of Totowa, New Jersey, is the biggest importer and wholesale distributor of eel meat in the country. The Justice Department said on April 29 that the defendants in the case conspired to unlawfully smuggle large numbers of baby European eels out of Europe to a factory in China.

Read the full story at U.S. News & World Report

 

Orsted will use NJ Wind Port to build offshore wind farm

April 28, 2022 — Orsted, the Danish wind power developer, signed an agreement Thursday with New Jersey officials to use a state-financed manufacturing port to build the components of the state’s first offshore wind farm.

Gov. Phil Murphy announced the agreement during an international wind energy conference in Atlantic City, from whose coast the project’s turbines should be visible on the distant horizon.

Orsted, which is partnering with Newark-based PSEG to build the project, will lease the New Jersey Wind Port in Salem County for two years starting in April 2024. Murphy did not reveal how much the developers will pay for the lease. The parties signed the letter of intent Thursday, but binding agreements are to be submitted to the New Jersey Economic Development Authority by June.

The pact marks the first return on the state’s investment of up to $500 million in the wind port, designed to help the state attract companies interested in building wind power projects here as it seeks to become the East Coast hub of the offshore wind industry.

Read the full story at AP News

Survey conflicts test relations between wind, fishing industries

April 27, 2022 — The federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and offshore wind energy developers are pledging to do better by commercial fishermen – with fisheries studies, scout boats to head off survey conflicts with fishing gear, and bringing on highly experienced and respected fishermen as industry liaisons.

Incidents of survey boats towing through fixed gear in Mid-Atlantic waters are putting those processes to the test. Conch and black sea bass trap fishermen who have had gear damaged off the Delmarva coast and New Jersey brought their complaints to the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council.

At an April 5 briefing Amanda Lefton, director of the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, and wind developers Ørsted and Atlantic Shores updated the regional fishery management council on plans for two adjacent turbine projects off Atlantic City and Long Beach Island, N.J. – and BOEM’s recent $4.37 billion sale of New York Bight wind leases that could become even bigger arrays farther out on the continental shelf.

Then they heard from fishermen who have seen their conch and black sea bass gear dragged and damaged by survey vessels working on wind leases off New Jersey and the Delmarva peninsula.

New Jersey captain Joe Wagner Jr. told the council how he lost 157 bass traps in 2021 during a survey around the Ørsted Ocean Wind project area.

“The only reason I got somewhat of a payment (compensation) is because I caught their vessel at 3 o’clock in the morning pulling three of my high flyers behind their boat,” said Wagner.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Biden named in North Atlantic commercial fishing ban lawsuit filed by fishermen

April 14, 2022 — Fishermen in Massachusetts and New Jersey are challenging a Biden administration proclamation in court.

The fishermen have filed a lawsuit, Fehily et al. v. Biden et al., in U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey alleging the proclamation that bans commercial fishing in the North Atlantic Ocean, primarily the Georges Bank area, saying it harms their ability to earn a living.

“The creation of the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument violated the core requirements of the Antiquities Act to limit protections to specific monuments,” Pacific Legal Foundation attorney Frank Garrison said in a news release. “Most fundamentally, the Act gives the president authority to create monuments on federally owned or controlled land. The ocean is not land. Presidential action that goes beyond laws passed by Congress undermines the democratic process and the Constitution’s separation of powers.”

Read the full story at The Center Square

Fishermen from Mass., N.J., sue federal government to block ban on fishing near Gulf of Maine

April 13, 2022 — Two fishermen, one from Massachusetts and one from New Jersey, filed a lawsuit Tuesday challenging a Biden administration ban on commercial fishing in the Georges Bank area of the North Atlantic Ocean.

David T. Malley of Massachusetts and Patrick Fehily of New Jersey are commercial fisherman who work near the Gulf of Maine, within the roughly 5,000 square miles that President Biden designated in October as the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, according to court documents.

Malley, a fisherman for more than 50 years, and Fehily, a fisherman for more than a decade, name Biden, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, and Secretary of Interior Deb Haaland as defendants in the suit, filed in US District Court in New Jersey, according to court documents.

Read the full story at The Boston Globe

NEW JERSEY: Fishermen say Ørsted boats destroying traps

April 11, 2022 — Several commercial fishermen claim survey boats hired by wind turbine developer Ørsted inadvertently cut their lines causing their lobster and conch traps to be lost in the ocean. At issue: being reimbursed from Ørsted for the lost gear and income

Lobster fisherman Joe Wagner, a second-generation fisherman of lobster, sea bass and conch, said last year he lost 157 lobster traps to Ørsted, which is partnering with PSEG on the Ocean Wind 1 project that aims to bring up to 99 massive wind turbines to an area 15 miles off the coast of Cape May and Atlantic counties.

“They only paid me for a handful of them because they say it wasn’t their boats,” he said.

Wagner said Ørsted made that claim based on tracking data of the survey boats. He said he caught the survey boats frequently turning off their tracking devices.

Last year his father lost 100 lobster pots to Ørsted survey boats, Wagner asserted, again with Ørsted claiming their boats were not to blame. The cost of lobster pots is $180 to $220 each with a possible two-year delay to receive all the replacements due to supply chain issues, he said.

He said Ørsted sends a weekly email to fishermen with a photo of their leased areas stating “our vessels might be in your area” but doesn’t give exact coordinates.

Read the full story at Ocean City Sentinel

 

10 fisheries in N.J. may have wrongly received millions in COVID money, state watchdog says

March 25, 2022 — In its first report detailing the waste, fraud and abuse of the distribution of federal COVID funds, a state watchdog agency said nearly $2.4 million in CARES Act funding may have been improperly paid out to fisheries in New Jersey.

The Office of the State Comptroller (OSC), which is tasked with tracking the distribution of federal COVID funding, said 10 marine fisheries in New Jersey received more money than they lost because of the pandemic in 2020.

Guidelines for the program, administered by the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), require that fisheries could not be made “more than whole,” meaning fisheries could not receive more funds than their actual losses in 2020.

“Our report finds that DEP did not take adequate steps to address red flags and protect federal recovery funds from being misspent,” said Kevin Walsh, acting state comptroller. “Getting COVID funding out quickly was important, but more should have been done to protect the funds from fraud, waste, and abuse.”

Read the full story at NJ.com

New Jersey opens covid-19 assistance program for seafood processors

March 23, 2022 — New Jersey is using $826,807 from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to reimburse the state’s seafood processors for covid-19-related costs that hit them in 2020 and 2021.

The NJ Seafood Processor Covid-19 Assistance Program is funded through USDA Seafood Processors Pandemic Response and Safety Block Grant Program, and follows the federal protocol for qualifying businesses for aid.

Eligible activities for reimbursement include:

• Workplace safety measures;

• Retrofit of facilities for worker and consumer safety;

• Market pivots;

• Medical costs associated with providing or purchasing COVID-19 testing.

The state Department of Environmental Protection’s Marine Fisheries Administration is working with the state health and agriculture departments to provide reimbursement to processors, including processing vessels and dealers, for pandemic-related costs between Jan. 27, 2020 and Dec. 31, 2021.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

 

New Jersey sets $3.3 million for offshore wind environment studies

March 18, 2022 — Amid growing concern about the environmental impact of offshore wind development, New Jersey’s environment and energy planners are putting up $3.3 million for studies on how building wind turbine arrays may affect wildlife and fisheries.

The state Department of Environmental Protection and Board of Public Utilities on Wednesday announced funding for studies and said they will soon release shortly a request for proposals. The agencies will also join the Regional Wildlife Science Entity, formed last year with Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts and New York to coordinate monitoring and research of wildlife and marine ecosystems.

Dubbed the Offshore Wind Research & Monitoring Initiative (RMI), the New Jersey interagency effort has three areas of research, to be funded by wind developers Atlantic Shores Offshore Wind, LLC, and Ørsted’s Ocean Wind II project with each committing $10,000 per megawatt of planned project capacity – about $26 million in all for long-term research and ecological monitoring.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

 

How an Offshore Wind Farm Would Come Onshore in Ocean City, NJ

March 10, 2022 — One of the world’s largest offshore wind developers, Denmark-based Ørsted, wants to bring 1,100 megawatts of electricity onshore from a wind farm in the Atlantic Ocean using a transmission line that would run through Ocean City, New Jersey.

That is not sitting well with some people in and around the small, but well-known Jersey Shore community, where many families across the Philadelphia region visit in the summer. Look no further than Kate Winslet’s detective from “Mare of Easttown” for proof of Ocean City’s popularity.

Still, it’s becoming increasingly likely that Ørsted’s Ocean Wind 1 project about 15-20 miles off Atlantic and Cape May counties will connect to the region’s power grid with an underground transmission line that comes onshore at an Ocean City beach. It would then run through the community to a decommissioned coal power plant in nearby Upper Township.

Read the full story at NBC Philadelphia