March 28, 2025 — U.S. Senator Jack Reed (D-Rhode Island) has reintroduced legislation to add the state of Rhode Island to the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council (MAFMC), one of the eight regional fishery councils that manages commercial fishing in the United States.
The Mid-Atlantic Council holds primary management authority over federal waters off the coasts of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia.
March 21, 2025 — Narragansett, Rhode Island, U.S.A.-based American Food Partners (AFP) has acquired seafood supplier NGC, Inc., which conducts business under the name The Town Dock, and its affiliated fleet of vessels.
The acquisition of The Town Dock, a supplier specializing in squid and calamari, reflects AFP’s “growing presence in the U.S. market,” AFP said in a press release. By adding The Town Dock, AFP now has several seafood brands in its portfolio, including SeaFresh USA and Handrigan Seafood.
March 4, 2025 — The head of squid research at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Narragansett Bay facility is among the hundreds of agency employees nationwide who are no longer on the job, according to one of NOAA’s former administrators.
Former National Marine Fisheries Service Administrator Janet Coit said Monday that about 20 employees from NOAA’s Rhode Island office and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts were recently dismissed by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Coit shared the revelation during a roundtable discussion hosted by U.S. Rep. Seth Magaziner (D-R.I.) at Save the Bay’s headquarters near the Port of Providence.
Coit, who directed the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management (DEM) from 2011 to 2021, called the firings “sudden, irrational and indiscriminate.”
“The circumstances are dire,” she said. “The impact will be felt in a cascading and ripple effect across many different coastal communities.”
NOAA began firing employees on Feb. 27 as part of the latest wave of cuts from DOGE to shrink the federal workforce. NOAA employs some 12,000 people nationally — 94 of whom work in Rhode Island, according to the latest figures available from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.
March 4, 2025 — Sharp cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will hurt Rhode Island’s economy and imperil its commercial fisheries, said U.S. Rep. Seth Magaziner.
The White House on Thursday cut around 800 people from the NOAA payroll, and intends to eliminate 30% to 50% of the agency’s staff, said Magaziner, who hosted a panel discussion in Providence to “sound the alarm.”
“As the Ocean State, it is a direct attack on our character and our quality of life,” Magaziner said. “And we need to fight back.”
March 4, 2025 — As chaos and uncertainty continue to be unleashed on federal agencies thanks to the policies of the Trump administration, the Ocean State’s blue economy is just starting to feel those downstream impacts.
While federal jobs by themselves don’t play an outsized role in the state’s economy, many functions of scientific marine research, marine resource management, and commercial fishing rely heavily on federal initiatives or funding.
The past few weeks have seen 800 probationary employees at the federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration fired without cause, and further deep cuts to agency staffing are expected by a March 13 deadline issued by the White House to its federal agency chiefs.
Many of the federal grants awarded to states, nonprofits or other nongovernmental agencies remain frozen and inaccessible, despite multiple court orders from multiple district judges to turn the funding spigot back on.
January 22, 2025 — An executive order signed by President Donald Trump aimed at reining in the expansion of offshore wind may not affect projects that are already in the development pipeline off southern New England.
The sweeping order signed on Monday temporarily halts sales of leases to offshore wind developers in federal waters and pauses permitting for projects, pending a review by the Department of the Interior and other federal government agencies.
But the order doesn’t go so far as trying to put a stop to wind farms that have already gone through the federal permitting process or are under construction.
They include Revolution Wind, the 704-megawatt project that is being built off the Rhode Island coast, or SouthCoast Wind, the proposal for up to 2,400 megawatts of capacity south of Nantucket that last month got the green light from the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which is part of the interior department.
January 22, 2025 — Gov. Dan McKee’s newly unveiled fiscal 2026 budget touts Rhode Island as a “key player” in the offshore wind sector, citing the state’s intent to buy 200 megawatts of wind-powered electricity from a wind farm planned off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard.
But Rhode Island’s utility company hasn’t actually inked the deal with the SouthCoast Wind developers. In fact, the deadline to sign the contract has been pushed back again, with negotiations between Rhode Island Energy and the wind project developer now expected to wrap up by March 31, according to an updated timeline posted on the state’s offshore wind procurement website.
When Rhode Island Energy unveiled its tentative power purchase agreement with SouthCoast Wind developers in September, it pegged Dec. 31 as the deadline to seal the deal. Then, the deadline was moved to Jan. 15.
On Thursday, Jan. 16, Rhode Island Energy again announced a delay in the contract signing.
“The revised schedule aligns with the negotiations SouthCoast Wind is concurrently having with the Massachusetts electric distribution companies,” the company stated in a post on the wind procurement website.
January 9, 2025 — The Ocean State has a new charity license plate that will support research on sustaining seafood that lives in the waters off Rhode Island.
The license plate “features eight iconic seafood species that are sustainably harvested in Rhode Island state waters and enjoyed throughout the state, region, and world,” according to the Commercial Fisheries Research Foundation, the nonprofit foundation that will benefit from plate sales.
Based in Kingston, the foundation is “a non-profit, private foundation dedicated to conducting research that assists in the achievement of sustainable fisheries through the generation of better information and effective technologies.” It was founded in 2004 by a group of fishermen and others in the industry.
January 7, 2025 — Rhode Islanders have yet another option to choose from when it comes to license plates.
The Commercial Fisheries Research Foundation (CFRF) is offering a new charity license plate that will benefit the state’s fisheries.
It will support research on the fresh, local, and sustainable seafood species in the state.
December 10, 2024 — Another attempt to halt Vineyard Wind through the courts fell short last week when a federal court dismissed an appeal by a fishermen’s organization and a Rhode Island seafood dealer.
A panel of judges with the U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s decision on Dec. 5, saying the group’s claims that the federal government mishandled the approval process for the wind farm were unfounded.
The decision is one of several that Vineyard Wind, which aims to build 62 turbines to the south of the Island, has weathered in recent years, keeping the project’s approvals from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management intact.
Seafreeze Shoreside, a Rhode Island-based seafood dealer, the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association, the Responsible Offshore Development Alliance and other groups filed the appeal after their claims were rejected by the U.S. District Court in Boston in 2023.