The New England Marine Fishery Management Council will be holding a two-day workshop in a couple of weeks on the highly controversial new regulatory regime for commercial fishing.
Good luck to the parties most affected in finding a seat.
The workshop will be open to the public, sort of. There will even be a public comment period. But, according to the council, it is "not intended for the public."
Indeed, the council seems to be doing what it can to make a public meeting as nonpublic as possible, by making it difficult for those affected by catch shares, the new method of privatizing fish stocks and granting harvesting rights, to attend.
The workshop is nowhere near Cape Ann or any other fishing port. It is being held at the exclusive Mount Washington Resort in Bretton Woods, N.H. — 31รขÑ2 hours from Gloucester and more than two hours from other ports farther north. Plus, there will be only 30 available seats each day — and the public comment period "will be limited," according to an e-mail from the council.
This, according to Patricia Fiorello, spokeswoman for the council, is because the workshop was organized not primarily for the public or those in the industry, but to help the council, which is the federal legislative body for the region's fisheries, to get a better understanding of catch shares.
There is a context to Fiorello and council leaders wanting go bring the council members and the group's staff up to speed on the issues of catch shares. And it's understandable, to a degree, want to hold such workshops in some type of "retreat" setting - as the Mount Washington site may very well prove to be.
But the timing raises a number of questions: There has, after all, been more than a year of bitter debate about catch shares, which common sense would suggest is more than enough time for council members to gain an intimate understanding of the system. Where have they been for the past two years? Vito Giacalone, a leader of the Gloucester-based Northeast Seafood Coalition, and one who has worked extensively on making the catch-share and "sectors" system work for the fishing industry, summed up the scheduling absurdity nicely. "Fire, ready, aim," he said.
Beyond that, just who will be "educating" the council members on these issues? There is an overwhelming aroma of a one-sided agenda, controlled by the Pew Environmental Group and other environmental giants through their ties with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The featured speaker is Monica Medina, who is being paid more than $100,000 a year to direct a Catch Share Task Force. She was chief counsel for NOAA under President Clinton, and then, during the George W. Bush presidency worked for the Pew Environmental Group. She was on the search committee that nominated Jane Lubchenco, also with Pew connections, to become the new head of NOAA. Plus, the Environmental Defense Fund is an indirect sponsor of the event. The fact is, this workshop needs more "public input" — the "public" being the individual New England fishermen caught up in this tangle.
The fact that fewer than 50 percent of New England's fishermen have signed up for a catch-shares "sector" shows our fishermen are not buying NOAA's regulatory snake oil. Factor in the move by regional National Marine Fisheries Service chief Patricia Kurkul to shamefully try to change the "common pool" rules after the signups were completed — then NMFS' embarrassing admissions that its own data for setting catch limits is flawed and it doesn't have the "expertise," or shall we say competence, to fix it — and you have a marine regulatory debacle of whale-sized proportions.
It would be nice if sometime amid these workshops, council members got the truth about this picture - and could discuss the only solution that now makes sense:
Given the botched data, the likely illegal after-the-fact rules change, and tentative catch limits that would drive countless fishermen and their small-business boats right out of business, the council must pull back its June approval of this flawed system, and delay any implementation of a catch share or other format until at least 2001.
But don't expect that to happen at a non-public "public" retreat about fishing — in New Hampshire's Bretton Woods.
