In a pointed letter to the Obama administration's top fisheries administrator, Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank has added his voice to a growing chorus of concerns about the transition of the New England groundfishery to a "catch share" regulatory system.

He also expressed a number of related frustrations with federal fisheries management, including the death by old age of "tens of millions of dollars" of scallops in a overlooked, closed area of Georges Bank.

In the letter released yesterday, Frank told Jane Lubchenco, chief administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, he worried that the voluntary reorganization of independent fishermen into cooperatives — or sectors — as planned for here next spring, may not be viable at its onset through the setting of overly conservative catch limits. The regulatory change would grant share-catching rights for a predetermined portion of the allowable harvest — with the shares seen as a tradeable commodity for corporations to buy out small-business fishermen.

Two influential industry figures — Vito Giacalone of Gloucester's Northeast Seafood Coalition, and David Goethel of the New England Fishery Management Council — have recently expressed similar concerns, and on Tuesday the Pew Environment Group urged the Obama administration to slow the race to invoke market-based solutions to solve problems of alleged overfishing.

A Democrat from Newton, Frank also represents New Bedford, the co-capital of the New England fishing nation with Gloucester. While leading the House of Representatives' inquiry into the collapse and consolidation of the investment and banking sector, Frank has maintained his role as the point person for oversight and advice to Lubchenco.

Frank said his "biggest fear" in the transformation of the New England groundfishery from a system viewing fish as a common resource to one opening the door to market principles "is the real threat of significant consolidation."

The groundfishing fleet, with about 800 active permits, has been shrunk in half in the last decade through effort control conservation measures and faces another intense throe of intended consolidation in the shift into catch shares.

Nearly everywhere this approach has been tried, notably in Alaska and British Columbia, the size of the fishing fleets have been reduced quickly and radically, with socio-economic, as well as ecological, implications.

"Fishermen need to have access to fish in order to sustain their businesses and care for their families," Frank wrote to Lubchenco. The Oct. 26 letter followed up an Oct. 6 meeting in her offices that included staff from the office of Massachusetts Congressman John Tierney, industry figures from Gloucester and New Bedford, and Brian Rothschild. A professor of marine sciences at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, Rothschild is Frank's top adviser on fisheries issues and the only known candidate for the top National Marine Fisheries Service position — the only major appointive unfilled post — in Lubchenco's command structure.

The lengthy letter surveyed a series of problems at NOAA and its National Marine Fisheries Service, including two recent administrative or management fumbles.

"Despite the importance of NOAA's fishery mission," Frank wrote, "it seems fraught with a lack of responsiveness and a management process that is notoriously slow to react."

Frank made no mention of the unfilled NMFS administrator's position, but he did admonish NOAA and NMFS to find proper ways to help the fishing industry, especially in resolving bureaucratic mistakes that add unwarranted and unnecessary burdens to the fishermen.

"In situations where it is clear that more fishing opportunities are warranted, either through updated stock assessment data, or mistakes in the scientific assessment or review process," Frank wrote, "the agency must be willing to act on its own to ensure decisive and immediate action to implement revised regulations necessary to protect fishermen and fishing communities from unnecessary and often devastating financial hardship."

Divided into sections, the Frank letter begins with a review of two missteps costly to the industry — a miscalculation of skate catch limits, and administrative mismanagement of the observer program in the scallop fishery.

Then, the letter shifts to a consideration of a fishing closure of a huge swath of Georges Bank.

"I remain deeply troubled by the fact that 30 percent of Georges Bank has been closed to fishing since 1996, with no recent discernible analysis having taken place since that time to appropriately determine whether or not there has been any benefit to this action," Frank wrote. "An abundant scallop resource has been allowed to go unharvested resulting in the loss of tens of millions of dollars due to natural mortality."

Frank also questioned the scientific foundation for setting a conservative catch limit on pollock — a limit now set 67 percent below last year's catch — and suggested allowing fishing up to the overfishing limit pending a stock assessment next year.

Giacalone, the architect of the sectors business plan for the Gloucester-based Seafood Coalition, argued last summer after the pollock catch limits were proposed that the reduced catch would trigger a shutdown of the entire sector system because the catch share system derives from a hard-catch limit base. Once a species' catch limit is reached in the multispecies groundfishery, fishing must stop.

Giacalone, who was a member of the Frank group that met with Lubchenco, has been highly critical of the catch limits set by the New England Fishery Management Council, and predicted that levels set last summer would force half the fleet out of business.

Frank also wrote that the catch share or sector system was largely without economic analysis.

"Based on the documents that come across my desk," he said, "the economic impacts of many regulations and actions are unclear despite the mandate of National Standard 8 (of the Magnuson-Stevens Act)," which requires conservation policies to "minimize ... to the extent possible ... adverse impacts on fishing communities."

On the same day that Frank's party met with Lubchenco and her aides, David Goethel, a member of the council and a New Hampshire fisherman, was testifying to the same point before U.S. House Subcommittee on Insular Affairs, Oceans and Wildlife,

"In groundfish, we voted an allocation scheme and management regimes in June and the annual catch limits in September; and yet no fisherman has any idea what these mean in terms of their catch and business viability in 2010," he said. "When the individual allocations are finally announced, the outcry and anger will be loud and long."

Pew's critique, meanwhile, was directed at NOAA and the Environmental Defense Fund, which has successfully lobbied the Obama administration to make catch shares the universal tool for fixing diverse fisheries.

"Given our nation's recent disastrous experience with the unintended and negative consequences of deregulation and poor oversight of financial and real estate markets," Pew wrote in a Sept. 4 letter to Lubchenco that was released Tuesday with its white paper on catch shares, "it is imperative that NOAA commit up front to establish rigorous monitoring, oversight and regulation of the new markets that catch share programs will create."

Frank conveyed similar worries.

"I have to state that, while I am generally opposed to sectors as an abstract concept," he wrote, "I am troubled by the lack of specificity in sector planning."

Richard Gaines can be reached at 978-283-7000 x3464, or via e-mail at rgaines@gloucestertimes.com