Saving Seafood

SEAN HORGAN: Trump looking to ax NOAA budget

March 20, 2017 — Fresh from battering the Trump administration like a pinata over its (rescinded) plan to whack the U.S. Coast Guard budget to the tune of $1.3 billion, Washington D.C.’s loyal opposition now is taking up the cause of — wait, can this be right? — NOAA.

A dozen congressional members from coastal communities throughout the U.S. are lobbying the Office of Management and Budget to reconsider the proposed cuts of $990 million, or about 17 percent, to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s total budget.

Cape Ann’s congressman, U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Salem, is a signatory on a letter to OMB Director Mick Mulvaney pointing out that the cuts could have a devastating impact on coastal communities battling sea rise and other extreme weather events.

“To disarm our coastal communities, many of which are already experiencing first-hand the effects of severe weather, is dangerous and short-sighted,” the letter stated.

The letter also decried the proposed $513 million in cuts to the National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service and the gutting of the Sea Grant college program.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

Trump wants to end grants that support Maine fishing jobs

March 20, 2017 — The national $73 million Sea Grant program, which includes about a dozen researchers affiliated with the University of Maine, could be eliminated if Congress approves drastic budget cuts proposed for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration by President Trump.

Funding for the state’s Department of Marine Resources and for collecting weather and climate data in the Gulf of Maine also could be put at risk by the president’s proposal.

Paul Anderson, director of the Sea Grant program at University of Maine, said Tuesday that the money NOAA has funded for the program has been “money well spent” because it has helped draw additional funding to Maine and has helped spur economic development.

“I think [Trump] has just got a fundamentally different attitude about government,” Anderson said Tuesday, without going into further detail. “What [people can do to try to protect the program] is write to our congressmen and senators.”

Trump’s administration already is considering slashing funding for the U.S. Coast Guard, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, and for the Environmental Protection Agency, which provides about 20 percent of Maine’s Department of Environmental Protection annual funding. Now, according to the Washington Post, the federal Office of Management and Budget is looking to cut funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration by 17 percent.

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

Trump’s proposed cuts to NOAA alarm Maine’s marine community

March 7, 2017 — A Trump administration proposal to slash funding for the federal government’s principal marine agency and eliminate the national Sea Grant program is prompting alarm in Maine’s marine sector because it depends on services provided by both.

President Trump wants to slash the budget of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – the agency responsible for fisheries management, weather forecasting, nautical surveys and assisting marine industries – by 17 percent, The Washington Post reported Friday. And he wants to eliminate NOAA’s Sea Grant program, the marine equivalent of the federal agricultural extension and research service, in the fiscal 2018 budget, which begins Oct. 1.

“There was a lot of concern when the news broke, and a flurry of messages went out to our congressional delegation from fishermen and aquaculturists who understand how they benefit from Sea Grant,” said Paul Anderson, director of Maine Sea Grant at the University of Maine in Orono, one of 33 Sea Grant universities in the country. “I don’t now if on October 1st we will all of a sudden not exist.”

The news has sent reverberations across Maine’s marine community, which has long benefited from the partnership between UMaine and the federal government. Sea Grant researchers created the Fishermen’s Forum – the industry’s premier event – in 1976, and also helped found the Portland Fish Exchange and the university’s Lobster Institute, which researches issues of concern to the industry.

Patrice McCarron, executive director of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association, said the cuts to NOAA would be terrible for fishermen. “The industry relies pretty heavily on their forecast reports on the wind and the wave heights and make decisions day to day if they are going to go out, so those satellites are really important,” she said. “And nobody loves (the National Marine Fisheries Service), but keeping them fully funded and their research going is essential to manage our fisheries.”

She noted that recent cuts to the agency’s right-whale monitoring program had hurt fishermen because if scientists didn’t have time to find the whales, they had to assume they weren’t there, increasing the regulatory burden on lobstermen, whose gear the whales sometimes get entangled in.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

Oregon Sea Grant funding in the crosshairs

March 7, 2017 — A budget proposal reportedly being floated by the Trump administration would end Oregon State University’s Sea Grant program and could potentially gut other OSU programs as well.

The proposal calls for a 17 percent budget reduction to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which funds research on climate change, ocean conditions, weather patterns and other aspects of earth science. Among the NOAA programs targeted for elimination is Sea Grant, a research and education initiative at 33 U.S. universities, including Oregon State.

The proposed cuts were reported on Friday by the Washington Post, based on a four-page budget memo that has not been made public by the administration.

Oregon Sea Grant Director Shelby Walker said the funding cuts, if approved, would devastate her program. Currently, Walker said, Oregon Sea Grant gets about $2.4 million of its annual budget of $5 million from the federal agency, with another $1.2 million in matching funds from OSU tied directly to NOAA dollars.

“It would basically eliminate the program,” she said of the White House budget proposal.

Read the full story at the Corvallis Gazette-Times

Alaska fisheries escape effects of climate change for now

September 22, 2016 — With coastlines eroding, temperatures rising, and sea ice retreating, Alaska is feeling the effects of a warming planet. But a new federal report suggests fisheries in the state haven’t experienced many observable impacts of climate change so far.

Commercial fishing in Alaska is a multi-billion dollar industry. For 18 consecutive years, fishermen have hauled more fish into Dutch Harbor than anywhere else in the country. But at this point, researcher Terry Johnson says climate change isn’t a hot topic in the industry, even though it could affect young fishermen.

“We aren’t talking about next year, but we are talking about within this century or within the working lives of young people who are just coming into the fishery now,” he said.

Johnson says interest in the topic is growing among fishermen.

As a researcher for Sea Grant — an offshoot of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — he’s synthesized hundreds of scientific papers, interviewed scientists and stakeholders, and combed through popular media to compile this report.

Read the full story at KTOO

New manual outlines steps for fishermen, communities to take in crisis

GLOUCESTER, Mass. (March 25, 2016) — The concept first began to crystallize in Angela Sanfilippo’s mind about four years ago, when the president of the Gloucester Fishermen’s Wives Association realized she needed to start putting some things down on paper.

Sanfilippo, both in her roles with fishing-based community groups and her own experience as a wife, daughter and sister of fishermen, had helped develop a series of protocols to help fishermen avoid calamities on the water and help the Gloucester fishing community deal with fishing tragedies when they occur.

“I just thought that we should start putting these things in writing because we’re not going to be around forever,” Sanfilippo said.

Thus was born the idea that burst into reality Thursday when the Fishing Partnership Support Services unveiled its RESCUES manual in an event at the U.S. Coast Guard’s Station Gloucester.

The title of the manual, assembled with assistance from staffers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sea Grant College program and Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, is an acronym for “Responding to Emergencies at Sea and to Communities Under Extreme Stress.”

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times