Letter: Feds only fixing crisis they've created

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October 1, 2012

Letter: Feds only fixing crisis they've created

Anonymous Gloucester Daily Times The Gloucester Daily Times Mon Oct 01, 2012, 12:00 AM EDT

To the editor:

Well, so it seems the fisheries finally made a good call to adjust the times and areas of the porpoise closure – and that makes them good guys, right?

Not.

Back before the Western Gulf of Maine closure, gillnetters like myself could fish year-round on the eastern side of the closure line without acoustic pingers being needed to attach to the nets and warn the marine mammals. We simply did not have interactions with the harbor porpoises out there.

But due to the ineptitude of the service to see the whole picture — and the usual bias and corruption on the New England Fishery Management Council (”don’t close my back yard where I fish, let’s stick it to the gillnetters”) — the Western Gulf of Maine closure forced all of the gillnetters onto Jefferies Ledge. This is a 40 mile ledge that runs parallel to the coast.

It was the failure of the National Marine Fisheries Service and the New England council that caused marine mammal deaths.

Yet, they went the usual “the stupid fishermen are to blame” route, and got all of the usual eco-fraud suspects to support the closures for this reason alone.

No one on the hill can seem to envision the whole picture when it comes to fisheries management.

In spite of all the rhetoric about eco system management, the greenheads and the service alike fight hard to perpetuate the need for crisis management, from the ill-conserved placement of closures to the illegal implementation of sectors to benefit a few wealthy sector heads. And now these folks are gonna get $100 million in disaster relief to spend on creating more disaster to perpetuate the ctrisis?

What a joke — and the suckers, otherwise known as taxpayers, keep footing the bill for a bloated agency’s incompetence.

DAVE MARCIANO

Gloucester