Six congressional representatives in districts from Massachusetts to North Carolina have asked the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to assume costs for scallop fishery's observer program, which have defaulted to the industry after annual set-aside catch allocations were used up in barely half the year.

Observers are assigned to 10 percent of scallop trips, which can last two weeks and cost about $750 a day — or as much as $10,000 per trip. The scallop fishery is the only one in the nation required to pay for its own observers.

To compensate the boats, 1 percent of the projected catch and additional days at sea are set aside for allocation to the observer-carrying boats. But this year's set-aside allocations got used up mid-way through the fishing season, which ends Feb. 28.

As a result, "fishing vessel owners and crew are now responsible for paying the cost of an observer in this access area out of pocket," according to Harry Gural, press secretary for Congressman Barney Frank, D-Mass.

Frank represents New Bedford, the nation's leading scallop port. He and Congressman Walter Jones, D-N.C., wrote to NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco in June when the indications of the surprisingly rapid exhaustion of the set-aside program first surfaced.

They wrote a second letter Saturday, this time with four additional congressional petitioners — William Delahunt, D-Mass., James Langevin, D-R.I., John Adler, D-N.J., and Robert Wittman, D-Va.

The letter traced the rapid depletion of the set-aside to "poor communication" among the National Marine Fisheries Service, the NOAA's regulatory agency, and the Northeast Science Center, which provides scientific stock information for the purpose of managing the program.

"This program has been in place for almost nine years and there should be few surprises," the congressmen wrote last week. "It is clear that poor communications exists between government regulators at NMFS and the science center.

"The recent breakdowns in the observer compensation program are not a failure of industry and to require fishermen to pay for this coverage without promised compensation is not an acceptable alternative and unfair," they wrote.

"This is crazy," said Adler whose coastal New Jersey district includes Barnegate, another scallop port. "Our fishermen are paying a huge price for a bureaucratic error."

"We will review and prepare a response to the members of Congress who submitted the letter," said NOAA spokeswoman Maggie Mooney-Seus. "You should also know that both the agency and council are working to identify how to move forward to address issues with the industry-funded observer program and to take steps to adjust the program to improve compensation mechanisms with input from the industry."

"We're appalled by what is happening," said Ronald Smolowitz, a technical advisor to the Fisheries Survival Fund, in the industry Web site Saving Seafood's report on the Sept. 14 meeting of the New England Fishery Management Council's Scallop Committee in Warwick, R.I.

"(NMFS) regional office in Gloucester operated completely blind on this," Smolowitz added. "It started managing the set-aside program without consulting anyone. They weren't listening to the Science Center in Woods Hole who were trying to tell them what was going on."

Centered in New Bedford, but with boats fishing for scallops throughout New England and all along the Atlantic Coast, the scallop fishery is the nation's most valuable, with recent annual sales figures close to $400 million.

In 2007, the last year for which the Times was able to obtain figures, the industry landed 35,142,000 pounds of scallops producing $385,037,000 in sales value.

Richard Gaines can be reached at rgaines@gloucestertimes.com