SCALLOP GRAB BLOCKED continued from Home Page

But over the past year, the council has received scores of written comments and heard a preponderance of testimony from scallop fishermen and public officials against the two capacity reduction measures under consideration. The testimony remained largely in opposition to the measures at the council’s September meeting.

The excess capacity measures included two options intended to increase the efficiency of the fleet and provide operational flexibility.

Permit stacking would have allowed a limited access vessel to have up to two limited access permits. Specifically, the vessel would be permitted to fish the allocations for both permits.
Leasing would have allowed a limited access scallop vessel to lease fishing effort from another limited access permit. There was one option for days-at-sea leasing and one for leasing of access area trips. The leasing alternatives were designed to increase flexibility among limited access scallop vessels without increasing fishing effort in other directed fisheries that scallop vessels participate in.

“Capacity,” says the Amendment 15 document, can be defined in several ways relative to technical efficiency and economic and social constraints, such as the type of fishing gear used, vessel characteristics and the size of the boat crew.

While the measures included numerous restrictions to prevent excess consolidation and limit potential increases in catch from stacking and/or leasing, the council ultimately decided against them, saying that the negatives impacts on vessels that do not stack or lease would be too great.

The primary concerns about leasing and stacking voiced by the public and council members included potential loss of jobs on the waterfront that would have trickle-down impacts on other fisheries and communities, potential impacts on future fishing opportunities for vessels that do not stack or lease, potential impacts on other fisheries if scallop vessels redirect effort after leasing out scallop effort, and unintended consequences of additional consolidation in the scallop fishery.

Each year the council sets the number of trips that scallop vessels may take into the productive scallop beds on Georges Bank and in the Mid-Atlantic region. Additional “days-at-sea” – time available to fish for scallops on top of the trips to the “access areas” – are also allocated each year.

Under this system, a boat’s total fishing time can fluctuate, depending on the availability of harvestable scallops, but has remained constant at about 80 days annually over the last several years.

Those who opposed stacking and leasing at this time said they worried that the proposals would have significant community impacts such as a further consolidation of fishing businesses into large corporations. Other concerns included a potential uptick in unfair business practices, unemployment, lower wages, monopoly pricing and a loss of shore-side support jobs during the current economic downturn.

Council member David Pierce, who chairs the council’s scallop committee charged with making recommendations on the measures, said the committee had determined that public opposition to the stacking and leasing options could not be ignored. Pierce said the committee was convinced that stacking would lead to increased fishing efficiency and increased landings. That, he said, could consequently lead to decreases in the number of fishing days-at-sea available to the fleet as a whole, and could therefore impact far more individual vessel owners than it might help owners who take advantage of the stacking option.

“We contend that it will change the economic structure of the industry,” Pierce said. “It will change the economic conditions of the industry.” Leasing and stacking, said Pierce, could result in consolidation of the industry and subsequent loss of employment and the concentration of capital and market power.

“This is a compelling argument as far as I’m concerned,” Pierce said. “Leasing and stacking tend to have negative impacts on those who are less powerful in an industry.”

The council, said Pierce, must protect single-permit, single-vessel owners who won’t benefit from stacking opportunities. Paul Wexler, who owns four vessels and three shoreside businesses in New Bedford, Mass., said that stacking could put fishermen out of business.

“Stacking is only good for large vertically integrated businesses,” Weckesser said. “This should be about jobs. It will kill jobs, it will kill communities, and will have a social impact far more than is heard or seen today.”

The stacking option would cause single-vessel owners immediately to lose equity in their boats, Weckesser said. The impact will trickle down to the entire community, he said. “Who do you think will ultimately pay the price?” Weckesser said. “It will be the crew. You will see it throughout every community. The communities will pay. The only persons who will benefit from this will be the large, vertically integrated companies who will reap the profits at every other person’s expense.”

Joseph Gilbert of Stonington, Conn., who owns two limited-access vessels, said he also didn’t favor the stacking option. “I have friends on both sides of issue,” Gilbert said. “It’s a divisive issue. One side says they have too much stuff and could operate better without so much. The other side wants something. We’re asking for relief on too much stuff. It has nothing to do with resource conservation or managing a fishery. If you have too much stuff, usually you divest it, not ask for regulatory relief.”

New Bedford Seafood Consulting executive director Jim Kendall said that, from the standpoint of the preservation of the scallop resource, there was no need for the stacking and leasing options. The council, he said, is charged with protecting natural resources for the benefit of the country as a whole. “These fishermen are part of the country and the majority oppose this,” Kendall said.

Council member David Preble said that, while he favors the idea of increasing the efficiency of the fleet and increasing the number of business options that a boat owner can have, the stacking and leasing options would result in inequalities of opportunity. “One group is favored over another,” said Preble.

Council member Rodney Avila said he agreed that stacking would promote safety and get old boats out of the water. But, said Avila, “we’re here to manage the fish. If fishermen choose to fish in unsafe boats, that’s their problem. The motion hurts the person who cannot stack. I’d be more in favor of a management scheme that deals with the people who cause the overfishing.”
Jim Lovgren – a board member of the Point Pleasant Beach, N.J.-based Fishermen’s Dock Cooperative, which comprises 12 owner/operator boats – said that leasing would hurt the industry.

“This council has created a have and a have-not industry,” said Lovgren. “Leasing of days-at-sea will come back and hurt us, because the vessel that leases won’t stay tied to dock. He’ll put it on another boat and make it more efficient.”

Terry Stockwell – a staffer with the Maine Department of Marine Resources and one of Maine’s two representatives on the council – said he supported the concept of leasing, but that it needed work. “The public testimony reinforced my concern about the devil in the details issue,” Stockwell said.

A small number of speakers favored the idea of moving the stacking and leasing options forward. They said that leasing and/or stacking more than one permit on a vessel would be a reasonable option, given the large amount of time a boat spends at the dock as a result of the restrictions on scallop fishing time. Safety at sea was another important concern for vessel owners who might choose to place all of their fishing time on the newest or most efficient of two boats.

Ron Enoksen of Eastern Fisheries in New Bedford, which owns multiple vessels, said that the option of stacking permits would alleviate derby fishing, or the rush of many vessels to fish in favorable areas. And, he said, it would allow fishermen to retire their older boats, making the overall fleet safer. “Stacking gets rid of iron,” Enoksen said. Council member Mary Beth Tooley, who is also a member of the scallop committee, and representative for owners in the herring trawler fleet, said that stacking and leasing would represent at least some progress toward resolving the problem of overcapacity. “If we don’t move forward with anything, do people think we don’t have a problem?” Tooley said. “Because vessels tied to the dock for 240 days per year is a capacity problem. Clearly, there is overcapacity in this fishery.”

Job loss, said Tooley, has already taken place in the scallop fishery. Many boat owners, she said, are already running one crew per two boats. “There’s an opportunity here that will be lost,” said Tooley.

Council member Mark Gibson agreed with Tooley. “We’ve been talking about aging vessels and overcapacity for years,” said Gibson. “And here we’re going to run away from it because it’s unpopular.”

The scallop fishery is currently the most valuable commercial fishery in the United States. Much of the harvest is landed in New Bedford, Mass., which was ranked as the nation’s top fishing port in the latest annual report on “Fisheries of the United States,” issued by the National Marine Fisheries Service’s Fisheries Statistics Division in Silver Spring, Md.

According to information provided in Amendment 15, “There is currently excess capacity in the limited access scallop fishery; that is, the capacity of individual vessels and the fleet as a whole is greater than what is needed to harvest sustainable levels of catch.”

Currently, says the document, average full-time vessels fish only 80 days per year – about 40 days in open areas and 40 in access areas. The document says that, as a result, the council was approached by some members of the industry who said that level of effort was insufficient to maintain vessels and crew throughout the year; and that some ports are congested with vessels tied to the dock for the majority of the year, causing safety, space and financial issues.

The Atlantic sea scallop fishery is prosecuted in concentrated areas in and around Georges Bank and off the Mid-Atlantic coast, in waters extending from the near-coast out to the continental shelf. According to the Amendment 5 document, the fishery is primarily full-time.

The number of full-time vessels has been on the rise since 1997 but leveled off to between 340 and 345 beginning in 2007. According to the ownership data for 2008, only 75 out of 346 vessels were owned by one person. The landings by single boat owners amounted to about 20 percent of the total fleet landings in 2008. The majority of vessels are owned by several individuals and/or different corporations with ownership interest in more than one vessel.

The council decided to move forward several other measures in Amendment 15. These included measures related to the general category fishery: an increase in the possession limit from 400 pounds to 600 pounds; an increase in the maximum quota a vessel can harvest from 2 percent to 2.5 percent of the total limited access general category quota; and a provision to allow a limited access general category vessel to permanently transfer their quota but retain their permit.

Other measures will modify the essential fish habitat areas closed to the scallop fishery to be consistent with EFH areas implemented under Amendment 13 to the Groundfish Plan and will improve the current research set-aside program.

The council also voted against changing the start of the scallop fishing year to May 1 from March 1. Instead, to address management delays that occur because of timing issues related to using updated resource surveys, the council modified the specification process so that a third year would be recommended in each biennial framework until superseded by the next specification package.

The approved Amendment 15 measures will likely be implemented next June, following a review by the National Marine Fisheries Service.