Saving Seafood

New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell Voices Coalition Concern Over Marine Monuments at House Hearing

WASHINGTON – March 15, 2017 – The following was released by the National Coalition for Fishing Communities:

Today, New Bedford, Mass. Mayor Jon Mitchell delivered written testimony to the House Natural Resources Committee on behalf of Saving Seafood’s National Coalition for Fishing Communities. His testimony expressed serious concerns about the impacts of marine monuments, designated using executive authority under the Antiquities Act, on fishermen and coastal communities.

Mayor Mitchell had planned to testify in person before the Subcommittee on Water, Power, and Oceans as a representative of the NCFC, but was unable to attend the hearing in Washington due to snow and severe weather conditions in the Northeast.

In his testimony, Mayor Mitchell questioned both the “poorly conceived terms of particular monument designations,” as well as “more fundamental concerns with the process itself.” Mayor Mitchell also delivered a letter to the committee signed by eleven NCFC member organizations further detailing their concerns with the monument process and how fishing communities across the country are affected by monument designations.

The letter was signed by the Atlantic Offshore Lobstermen’s Association, the California Wetfish Producers Association, the Fisheries Survival Fund, the Garden State Seafood Association, the Hawaii Longline Association, the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association, the Menhaden Fisheries Coalition, the North Carolina Fisheries Association, the Southeastern Fisheries Association, the West Coast Seafood Processors Association, and the Western Fishboat Owners Association.

In addition, three NCFC member organizations, the Atlantic Offshore Lobstermen’s Association, the Hawaii Longline Association, and the North Carolina Fisheries Association submitted individual letters outlining in further detail their opposition to marine monuments.

Mayor Mitchell was also critical of the monument designation process, by which a president can close off any federal lands or waters on a permanent basis using executive authority under the Antiquities Act. He instead praised the Fishery Management Council process created by the Magnuson-Stevens Act, which he said affords greater opportunities for input from stakeholders, scientists, and the public.

“The monument designation process has evolved effectively into a parallel, much less robust fishery management apparatus that has been conducted entirely independent of the tried and true Fishery Management Council process,” Mayor Mitchell said. “It lacks sufficient amounts of all the ingredients that good policy-making requires: Scientific rigor, direct industry input, transparency, and a deliberate pace that allows adequate time and space for review.”

Mayor Mitchell used his testimony to call attention to issues affecting fishing communities across the country, including New England fishermen harmed by the recently designated Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, and Hawaii fishermen harmed by the expansion of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument. He also expressed the concerns of fishermen in Mid-Atlantic, South Atlantic, and Pacific waters in dealing with the monument process.

Mayor Mitchell concluded by calling on Congress to integrate the executive branch’s monument authority with the established processes of the Magnuson-Stevens Act, ensuring that the long-term interests of all stakeholders are accounted for.

“This Congress has an important opportunity to restore the centrality of Magnuson’s Fishery Management Councils to their rightful place as the critical arbiters of fisheries management matters,” Mayor Mitchell said. “Doing so would give fishing communities much more confidence in the way our nation approaches fisheries management. And it could give the marine monument designation process the credibility and acceptance that it regrettably lacks today.”

The mayor spoke at the hearing on behalf of the NCFC. The city of New Bedford, as Mayor Mitchell stated in his testimony, was instrumental in the founding of the Coalition, providing an initial seed grant for its creation.

Read Mayor Mitchell’s full testimony here

Read the NCFC letter here

Read the Atlantic Offshore Lobstermen’s Association letter here

Read the Hawaii Longline Association letter here

Read the North Carolina Fisheries Association letter here

Will Trump Be Able To Undo Papahanaumokuakea?

November 28, 2016 — In the months leading up to the Nov. 8 election, President Barack Obama signed a series of proclamations to dramatically increase the amount of land and water that is federally protected from commercial fishing, mining, drilling and development.

On Aug. 24, he established a nearly 90,000-acre national monument in the Katahdin Woods of Maine. 

Two days later, Obama expanded Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument around the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands by 283 million acres, making it the world’s largest protected area at the time.

And on Sept. 15, he created the first national monument in the Atlantic Ocean, protecting more than 3 million acres of marine ecosystems, seamounts and underwater canyons southeast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

Obama has used a century-old law called the Antiquities Act to federally protect more land — 550 million acres and counting — than any other president. He’s established 24 new national monuments in at least 14 states since taking office eight years ago, with the bulk of the acreage in Papahanaumokuakea and the Pacific Remote Islands.

But with Republican Donald Trump’s surprise upset of Democrat Hillary Clinton, attention is turning to what Trump plans to do when he takes office in January and whether he will seek to undo or at least modify the national monuments that Obama created.

Advocates for commercial fishing interests on the East Coast have started nudging policymakers to consider what changes the next administration could make. But West Coast and Hawaii industry groups are still gathering information and developing plans.

Saving Seafood, a nonprofit that represents commercial fishing interests, has already started pushing policymakers to consider what changes the next administration could make to the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument. 

Saving Seafood Executive Director Robert Vanasse told the Associated Press earlier this month that he thinks it would be “rational” to allow some sustainable fishing in the monuments.

Read the full story at the Honolulu Civil Beat

Fishing industry seeks reversal of Atlantic Marine Monument

November 21, 2016 — The Gloucester Fishing Commission isn’t ready yet to employ a full-court press on President-elect Donald Trump to reverse the Obama administration’s creation of a Marine National Monument in the canyons and seamounts off the coast of southern New England.

It’s not that the commission members think it’s a bad idea. They just think it’s too early to start beating that particular drum.

“There’s already a lot of talk and the group letters will be coming along like before,” said commission Chairman Mark Ring. “But I don’t think we should be doing a letter now. It’s too premature.”

“Let’s wait until he gets into office,” said Angela Sanfilippo.

Other fishing stakeholders around the country have said they hope to appeal to Trump’s oft-stated intent to reverse any of the Obama administration’s policies and decisions he deems to be executive overreach.

“It’s a new day,” said fishing industry advocate Robert Vanasse of the Saving Seafood website. “I would anticipate there would be a desire to address monuments. Whether it’s the radical step of revoking the designation, or modifying it to allow non-destructive, sustainable fishing to take place, which we think is rational, I don’t know.”

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

‘Sad day’ for the fishing industry following marine monument designation

September 16, 2016 — NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — Backers of the Northeast U.S. fishing industry reacted with anger, chagrin and legal arguments Thursday to President Barack Obama’s declaration of a marine national monument south of Cape Cod, saying the ocean preservation effort circumvented public process and will significantly damage a key economic engine — and way of life — in the region.

“It’s all anybody’s talking about, that’s for sure,” said Jon Williams, president of Atlantic Red Crab Co. on Herman Melville Boulevard. “The general feeling is (that) it’s a sad day for the New England fishing industry.”

Obama’s designation of the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument — in two areas also known as New England Canyons and Seamounts — permanently bars those areas from an array of commercial and industrial uses, including commercial fishing. The areas total 4,913 square miles, are more than 100 miles southeast of Cape Cod and are the first such monument in the Atlantic Ocean. The designation follows at least a year of concerns and opposition from advocates of the commercial fishing industry, who feared yet another financial hit from government regulations that already include catch limits and quotas broadly questioned by fishermen.

“Millions of dollars of lost revenue are at stake” in the monument decision, states a letter from the Washington, D.C. office of international law firm Kelley Drye & Warren.

The firm sent the letter Sept. 14 to Christy Goldfuss, managing director of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, on behalf of the Southern Georges Bank Coalition. The coalition of fishing representatives includes Williams, J. Grant Moore of Broadbill Fishing in Westport, and at least 10 other members from Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and New York.

The letter said those entities “are directly affected by the monument description, as it includes their fishing grounds,” and called Obama’s use of the Antiquities Act to declare the marine monument, “an illegal and illegitimate use of presidential authority.”

“I think there’s widespread and pretty much universal disappointment, anger, frustration and feelings of betrayal in the commercial fishing industry,” said Bob Vanasse, a New Bedford native and executive director of Washington, D.C.-based Saving Seafood.

“There is widespread and deep feeling that our fisheries should be managed under the public process of the Magnuson-Stevens Act,” Vanasse added.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

Obama’s Atlantic Monument Hurts Lobster, Red Crab, and Other Fisheries

September 15, 2016 — President Obama will designate a national monument Thursday covering thousands of square miles in the Atlantic Ocean, pleasing environmental groups but flying in the face of opposition from state officials and fishing organizations.

The Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument will cover 4,913 square miles off the coast of New England — an area nearly the size of the state of Connecticut — the White House announced Thursday. It will include “three underwater canyons deeper than the Grand Canyon, and four underwater mountains known as ‘seamounts’ that are biodiversity hotspots and home to many rare and endangered species,” it said.

Robert Vanasse, executive director of fishing advocacy group Saving Seafood, slammed the declaration, saying White House officials never seriously took the concerns of locals into account.

“It’s just really obvious that the fix was in from the start,” Vanasse told BuzzFeed News. “I believe the sound waves hit their eardrums but I don’t believe they were actually listening.”

Though the exact parameters of the monument were not available late Wednesday, Vanasse said the designation could potentially cost the offshore lobster community $10 million a year. He also said red crab, squid, and other fishing industries could take significant hits by a monument designation.

According to the White House, fishing within the monument will be phased out; red crab and lobster fisheries will have seven years before having to leave, and other commercial fishers will have a 60-day transition period.

Vanasse praised the gradual change — because it’ll give the industry time to fight the designation.

“The fact that they have some time is going to be a good thing because we can fight this and we’ll be fighting it with a different administration,” he said. “I imagine that we will see a legal challenge.”

Read the full story at BuzzFeed News

Environmentalists push for Atlantic Marine Monument

August 30, 2016 — President Obama made history last week when he more than quadrupled the size of a protected marine area off the coast of Hawaii, safeguarding fragile coral reefs and thousands of species that depend on the Pacific Ocean habitat.

Now conservationists hope the administration will protect the Atlantic Ocean’s deep-sea treasures.

Conservationists have called on the president to use his executive power to designate 6,180 square miles encompassing eight canyons and four seamounts as the New England Coral and Seamounts National Monument.

If the president heeds their advice, fishing groups warn the move would shut down portions of a productive $15 million lobster and crab fishery along the edges of the offshore canyons—and unnecessarily outlaw fishing within the zone’s borders for tuna and other open-ocean species that pass through the water column but don’t dwell on the seabed.

“What’s at issue is the lack of transparency in establishing a national monument,” said Robert Beal, executive director of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, which is in charge of managing near-shore fishery resources for 15 coastal states. “If these large boxes are drawn and large areas of the ocean are deemed off-limits, than there is going to be a lot of fishing opportunities displaced or stopped altogether.”

Typically, state and interstate fishing councils are part of the public debate on determining fishery closures and habitat protection zones. That’s how the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council moved to ban bottom trawling in 2015 along more than 35,000 square miles of seafloor from Long Island to North Carolina, just south of the proposed national monument area.

But with the Antiquities Act—a law presidents since Theodore Roosevelt have used to protect iconic landscapes such as Mount Olympus in Washington, the Grand Canyon in Arizona, and Muir Woods in California—Obama could decide to fully protect the region without input from the fishing industry.

Past presidents have mostly used the authority to preserve land from development. The first president to use the power offshore was George W. Bush, who established the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument in 2006.

“It’s frustrating because that power is meant to close off the smallest amount of area as possible that needs protecting, and that’s not the case here,” said Robert Vanasse, executive director of Saving Seafood, a fishing industry advocacy group.

He said the proposed national monument boundaries outlined by Connecticut’s congressional delegation and led by Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., bans fishing far away from the most sensitive coral habitat and could unnecessarily hinder fishing industries that don’t target bottom-dwelling species. Vanasse’s group, along with the fisheries commission, is asking that if the regions are declared a national monument, fishing be allowed up to depths of 3,000 feet.

“If they really just want to protect the seamounts and the canyons, why would you want to stop fishing over them?” Vanasse said. “You don’t tell planes to stop flying over Yosemite.”

Read the full story at Take Part

Regulators fail to decide on 2017 Atlantic menhaden harvest cap

August 4, 2016 — A new 2017 coastal catch limit for Atlantic menhaden proved a slippery target Wednesday as regional managers failed over and over to agree on a number.

In vote after vote by the Atlantic Menhaden Management Board meeting this week in Alexandria, representatives from Maine to Florida knocked down motions to raise the cap by as little as 1 percent to as much as 20 percent.

In the end, they could only agree to try again at their next meeting in October. The board is part of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission.

“They just kicked the can down the road,” said Bob Vanasse, executive director of Saving Seafood Inc., a D.C.-based outreach and advocacy group that coordinates the Menhaden Fisheries Coalition and supports raising the catch limit.

Read the full story at the Daily Press

Should the New England Aquarium be in the advocacy business?

July 30, 2015 — Hillgarth, now 62, has taken that zeal to spread awareness and compel change to a new level since becoming president and CEO of the aquarium in Boston, a city she had never visited before interviewing for the post.

Among her goals: more closely linking what the aquarium’s 1.3 million annual visitors experience and their interest in protecting the environment. Surveys there have shown that about 40 percent of visitors leave saying they want to do something to help the oceans; she aims to double that.

“We don’t have much time to wake the public to the issues,” she says. “There comes a point when things are so important in the environment that you can’t sit back and say nothing.”

But Hillgarth’s mix of scientific analysis and environmental concern has spurred some to question whether she may be pushing one of the region’s premier cultural institutions — which has more visitors than all but five other aquariums in North America — too far into an advocacy role.

They have raised concerns, for example, about the aquarium’s support of controversial legislation that would ban the sale of shark fins and its efforts to persuade the Obama administration to declare a marine monument in portions of the Gulf of Maine. The proposal has angered the region’s fishermen because it would ban fishing in those areas permanently. A monument is a federally designated protected area similar to a national park.

“I think it’s appropriate for the New England Aquarium to advocate for a greater appreciation and understanding of our oceans, but I think it’s inappropriate for a museum and cultural institution to use its resources for the advocacy of highly charged, controversial political positions,” says Robert Vanasse, executive director of Saving Seafood, a Washington-based group that represents the fishing industry. “I think Dr. Hillgarth should lead the aquarium in a way that it doesn’t become a pawn of the more extreme wing of the environmental movement.”

Vanasse and others have decried a potential presidential decision on a marine monument. They say it would circumvent a well-accepted legal process, one required by Congress, which applies to all other proposed fishing closures.

“I’m a big fan of the aquarium, but I think they’ve picked the wrong battle on this,” says Mayor Jon Mitchell of New Bedford, one of the nation’s top-grossing fishing ports.

Read the full story at the Boston Globe

GLOUCESTER TIMES: Obama should hold firm on Cashes Ledge decision

July 12, 2016 — The Obama administration must hold firm to its decision earlier this year to reject so-called monument status for the vast swath of ocean around Cashes Ledge despite last-minute arm twisting from powerful environmental lobbying groups.

Earlier this spring, the administration passed on a proposal that he decree a large portion of the Gulf of Maine, including Cashes Ledge, a permanent “maritime national monument.” The edict, made through the federal Antiquities Act, would have come with little or no input from the citizenry at large or groups whose livelihoods are tied to the ocean, like the Northeast fishing industry.

Cashes Ledge, about 80 miles off the coast of Cape Ann, serves as a habitat for sharks, dolphins and sea turtles as well as migrating right whales. The area — more than 520 square miles is already off limits to fishing. There are no efforts on the part of the industry to change that.

“We’re not all nut cases here,” said Robert Vanasse, executive director of the fishing advocacy group Saving Seafood. “It’s pretty much every non-environmentally subsidized fishery organization that is opposed to the use of the Antiquities Act to create marine monuments. The Magnuson-Stevens process works. It could be better, but it’s working.”

Read the full editorial at the Gloucester Times

AP: Conservationists keep pressing for Atlantic Ocean monuments

July 11, 2016 — The following is excerpted from a story published today by the Associated Press. In it, representatives of the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Conservation Law Foundation (CLF) call for President Obama to use executive authority under the Antiquities Act to designate multiple national marine monuments off the coast of New England.

Last month, eight members of the National Coalition for Fishing Communities (NCFC) and the valuable fishing port of New Bedford, Mass., united in opposition to proposed Atlantic monuments. The groups agreed that fishing areas and resources should continue to be managed in the open and transparent manner stipulated by the Magnuson-Stevens Act (MSA).

Previously, many of the environmental groups calling for Atlantic monuments expressed support for fisheries management under the MSA. In December, Pew called the MSA “the bedrock of one of the world’s best fishery management systems.” In April, the CLF wrote that the MSA is “the primary reason why the United States can say that it has the most sustainable fisheries in the world.” In February, the Environmental Defense Fund said that the MSA “has made the United States a global model for sustainable fisheries management.”

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Environmental conservationists aren’t giving up on trying to persuade the White House to designate an area in the Gulf of Maine as a national monument.

In the final months of President Barack Obama’s term, they’re hoping he’ll protect an underwater mountain and offshore ecosystem in the Gulf of Maine known as Cashes Ledge. They also want him to protect a chain of undersea formations about 150 miles off the coast of Massachusetts known as the New England Coral Canyons and Seamounts.

The White House Council on Environmental Quality said in March, and reiterated last week, that while the New England Coral Canyons and Seamounts area is under consideration, Cashes Ledge currently is not. There are no marine national monuments in the Atlantic Ocean.

Robert Vanasse, executive director of the fishing advocacy group Saving Seafood, said environmental groups seemed to be “in denial and shock” after the White House first said it wasn’t considering Cashes Ledge in March.

“I think they overplayed their hand. They arrogantly seemed to think that they could dictate to the White House,” he said on Wednesday.

Vanasse said fishing interests are now taking the White House at its word that Cashes Ledge is off the table. The industry is already struggling with quota cuts and climate change.

Commercial fishing groups oppose creating any marine monument in the Atlantic under the American Antiquities Act because the decision is left entirely to the president, Vanasse said. There are existing procedures to protect areas where the public participates in the process under the top law regulating fishing in U.S. oceans, the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, he added.

“We’re not the fringe nutcases here,” Vanasse said. “It’s pretty much every non-environmentally subsidized fishery organization that is opposed to the use of the Antiquities Act to create marine monuments. The Magnuson-Stevens process works. It could be better, but it’s working.”

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Boston Herald