Saving Seafood

36 years after first Chesapeake Bay Agreement, its restoration is still a pipe dream

January 17, 2020 — December 9 marked the 36th anniversary of the signing of the first Bay Agreement at George Mason University in Virginia.

As a state senator serving on the Chesapeake Bay Commission, I joined 700 Bay enthusiasts as witnesses. The one-page Chesapeake Bay Agreement was signed by Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania’s governors, DC’s mayor, and the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, all of whom solemnly pledged to restore the Bay. I was also a member of a workgroup that recommended legislative actions for each signer that would aid the Bay’s restoration, including a phosphate detergent ban that I sponsored and was enacted in 1985.

All of the attendees — elected federal and state politicians, scientists, administrators and environmental leaders — were optimistic that the herculean task ahead would lead to the Chesapeake’s restoration. The optimism was fueled by the display of bipartisanship that led to President Ronald Reagan declaring in his 1984 State of the Union address, “Though this is a time of budget constraints, I have requested for EPA one of the largest percentage budget increases of any agency. We will begin the long, necessary effort to clean up a productive recreational area and a special national resource — the Chesapeake Bay.” The formal Bay Program under the EPA was established with $10 million in funding.

Read the full story at the Bay Journal

Trump’s offshore drilling proposal has a cost besides potential oil spills

February 23, 2018 — The Trump administration’s effort to open almost all of the U.S. outer continental shelf to drilling has rattled coastal communities fearful of oil-drenched beaches like those they saw after the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

There’s another cost, though, of high-volume offshore oil and natural gas leasing borne by the public, even if nothing is spilled. A new analysis Thursday says that the federal government — and therefore U.S. taxpayers —  isn’t getting its money’s worth from oil and gas companies pumping publicly owned fossil fuels from the seabed in the Gulf of Mexico.

By law, the government is supposed to get “fair market value” for leasing offshore tracts of oil and gas. But the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), a government watchdog group, found that companies rarely compete for leases.

As a result, the federal government got less than 3 percent per acre in its most recent lease sales, in August of last year, than it did before 1983, a new POGO analysis found. The findings suggest that for years the government has gotten short-changed when it comes to oil and gas lease sales. As the Trump administration tries to expand offshore drilling, the problem may only get worse.

Here’s the rub: That marked decline isn’t really the result because of President Trump’s policies. It stems all the way back to the Reagan administration.

Read the full analysis at the Washington Post

 

 

Trump’s Supreme Court Nominee Skeptical Of Federal Agency Power

March 17, 2017 — At most Supreme Court confirmation hearings, questions focus on hot-button social issues — abortion, affirmative action, same-sex marriage — and the hearings next week on Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch will be no exception.

But senators are also likely to spend a lot of time examining the nominee’s views on federal regulations — of the environment, health and safety laws for workers, and laws on consumer rights and business.

In question is a doctrine that Gorsuch has criticized but that also once helped his mother.

The Chevron doctrine

The Chevron decision is perhaps the most cited case in American law. Decided unanimously in 1984, it established a general rule of deferring to an agency’s reasonable interpretation of a statute.

The idea is that in passing a law, Congress sets out broad provisions and tells agencies that have considerable expertise to establish rules for carrying out the law’s mandates. In short, the agency is to fill in the details.

The Chevron case stems from the Reagan administration. When President Ronald Reagan took office in the early 1980s, the White House adopted more permissive rules for air pollution caused by manufacturing plants. The Natural Resources Defense Council sued the Environmental Protection Agency, then under the leadership of Anne Gorsuch, contending the agency had exceeded its authority.

Read the full story at NPR

Legal Sea Foods chowder not on Trump’s menu

January 13, 2017 — WASHINGTON — Ever since Ronald Reagan rode into this town, there’s been a certain custom here regarding Boston seafood. When new presidents move into the White House, the festivities include a steaming hot cup of New England clam chowder.

Or at least that used to be the tradition.

So far the Boston company that has traditionally supplied chowder, Legal Sea Foods, has been frozen out. Donald Trump’s campaign is built on challenging the status quo in Washington, and that evidently includes menus at inaugural lunches and balls.

“I haven’t heard from anybody yet,” said Roger Berkowitz, the CEO of Legal.

The reason is a matter of speculation. Could it be because Massachusetts voters didn’t support Trump? Or hard feelings over Legal’s ads making fun of Trump’s reported sensitivity about his small hands? Or is the new administration just charting its own course, unaware of tradition?

Berkowitz, for one, is holding out hope that the inaugural committee might still be interested in serving chowder during the weekend.

“It’s not partisan chowder,” he explained. “This has nothing to do with politics. . . . Maybe this is the chowder that brings America together — who knows?” It often comes down to the last minute, he said.

Read the full story at The Boston Globe

How Foreign Crews Are Able To Work Aboard US Fishing Boats

September 22, 2016 — Foreign crew members reportedly working in slave-like conditions for monthly wages as low as $350 would not have found their way onto Hawaii’s longline fishing boats without an exemption carved into the law almost 30 years ago, according to longtime industry leaders, federal officials and government records.

Today, almost all the vessels in the longline fleet have entirely foreign crews.

It wasn’t always that way.

As the Cold War was coming to an end in the late 1980s, there was a push to “Americanize” the country’s fishing fleets by instituting requirements similar to those imposed under the Jones Act on vessels engaged in coastwise trade — namely, that U.S.-flagged ships be built in the U.S. and crewed by U.S. citizens.

Congress passed a bipartisan bill to that effect, and President Ronald Reagan signed it in 1988 as the Commercial Fishing Industry Vessel Anti-Reflagging Act.

But the legislation exempted commercial fishermen fishing for highly migratory species, such as tuna and swordfish, from the law’s requirement that U.S. citizens comprise at least 75 percent of each crew.

At about the same time, the longline industry — then comprised of just a few dozen vessels — and more established purse seiners were leaving the West Coast to set up shop in Hawaii and Pacific Island territories. 

They left because of depleted stocks and, in the case of purse seiners, pressure to stop killing so many dolphins. 

The purse seiners were setting their huge nets, up to 500 yards deep, around schools of tuna near pods of dolphins. It created a national controversy that led to new restrictions and “dolphin-safe” tuna.

The longline boats, which catch fish by extending miles of line with thousands of hooks, initially remained strictly crewed by U.S. citizens. This changed as the fleet grew and it became harder to find local residents willing to work on the boats. Fuel prices also soared after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, adding to operational costs.

This spurred the longliners to take advantage of the foreign-crew exemption that had been pushed by members of Congress from the West Coast who were looking after the purse seiners’ interests, said Jim Cook, who co-owns several longline fishing vessels, a marine supply store and fish restaurant at Pier 38 in Honolulu. 

“It slowly infiltrated our fleet,” he said.

The longline industry now includes roughly 140 vessels, nearly all of which are ported in Honolulu, and most have entirely foreign crews, according to industry leaders and federal officials.

Read the full story at the Honolulu Civil Beat