Oct. 15 marked the end of the official public comment period on the New England Fisheries Management Council’s strategy to rebuild groundfish stocks. The council actually developed four alternative stock rebuilding strategies, and members took their show on the road to gather testimony from all over New England. Maine’s fishing community showed up in force for hearings in Portsmouth, Ellsworth and Portland.
If the councilors were aiming for some clear, if not unanimous, direction as to which of the four alternatives New Englanders prefer, they were disappointed. In Maine at least, speaker after impassioned speaker presented testimony critical of the council’s proposals as more of the same failed strategy that brought the fishery to where it is now. If there was any unanimity at all, it was that each of the council’s proposed alternatives condemns Maine’s groundfish industry to a risky and uncertain future.
In tone, these hearings took on a more serious, somber character from previous regulatory reviews. Gone was the circus atmosphere that typically accompanies the bluff and conjecture about who will feel the pinch most from the next round of regulatory belt tightening. This time, fingers from Portland to Ellsworth all pointed in one direction, and with one message: any of the rebuilding plans, if implemented, will permanently change the face of Maine’s coastal fishing communities.
Real impacts
The Draft Amendment 13 document is 1,500 pages of numbing analysis, modeling and statistics. Marine Resources Commissioner George Lapointe said it “provided a cold pillow a couple of nights trying to wade through it.” Stonington fisherman Ted Ames said the same thing another way: “What you’ve presented before us is so complex, it would take a New York lawyer to figure out where start-one is, let alone where you’re supposed to end up.”
Economic analyses for each of the council’s four proposals consider short and long-term impacts by vessel size, gear type, target fishery and fishing community. The rebuilding strategies all show net benefits to the groundfish stocks, but by the council’s own admission it will take a long time to realize them. Council staffer Tom Neis pointed out that a fisherman actually would do better fishing under 2001 regulatory measures until some time after 2014 than he would under any of the proposed alternatives.
To many people, that was simply too long a wait for too little gain. Declared Portland City Councilor Nick Mavedones, “the environmental gains are so small in size and so far out in time as to be considered conjecture. It would deprive public confidence in the process.”
Behind the graphs, tables and macroeconomic indicators in the draft Amendment lay the potential for serious economic displacement. In any of the four alternatives, the economic loss to New England’s groundfish industry ranges from $87 to $217 million; personal income losses range from $5.5 to 11.8 million. Ed Bradley, co-owner of Vessel Services, Inc. on Portland’s waterfront, cited the potential losses to Portland’s groundfish industry at $10.7 to 23.1 million.
“The real story isn’t in the tables. It’s based on what is going to happen in the decisions and reactions of individuals and businesses,” said Bradley. He used ice sales at Vessel Services as a barometer of the health of the groundfish industry in Portland.
In May 2002, reductions in days-at-sea imposed by the court consent decree resulted in a 25 percent decrease in Vessel Services’ sales revenues. Referring to Amendment 13, Bradley warned that “another 50 percent reduction in a one-year period is an inevitable slow and painful decline into bankruptcy and economic death.”
The tables in the draft document do not reflect decisions already being made by Portland’s groundfish fleet to relocate to southern New England ports like Gloucester in anticipation of further restrictions. Bradley ironically referred to this as “the only bright spot in the picture…so we may die more quickly.”
Morbid metaphors seemed especially abundant, even generating occasional levity. Bill Gerencer, a buyer and longtime member of the Maine groundfish advisory panel said, “It’s as if an innocent man has been convicted of murder on a mere technicality. Everyone who’s honest about it knows that the death sentence is unwarranted, but to comply with the letter of the law, there are only four choices: the gallows, the firing squad, the gas chamber or the electric chair. Also known as Alternatives 1 through 4. “‘It’s OK,’ we’re told, ‘there’s a bright future for this fellow down the road. A few years from now,’ they say, ‘he’ll be glad we killed him.'”
Portland Fish Exchange manager Hank Soule offered a real-world preview of coming events at the Fish Exchange with Amendment 13. He said because of weather and normal vessel rotations the total volume at the exchange one week was 175,000 pounds – down about 60 percent of the average weekly volume, and close to what Soule expects to see under Amendment 13. “We lost $10,000 this week,” said Soule. “That’s not a projection, it’s a real number.”
Strength in numbers
It is difficult to tell whether the perennial competition between Maine’s large and small boat fleets has subsided, or simply inaudible behind the overwhelming roar of rejection against the four stock rebuilding alternatives.
Craig Pendleton of the Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance (NAMA) spoke in Ellsworth on behalf of the communities that depend on small, inshore boats for their survival. He asked the council to consider three factors – jobs, community and access. Pendleton said inshore boats make up the majority of the job base in Maine’s groundfish industry, most employing at least two people and directly tied to a coastal community where they purchase fuel, ice and supplies. Just as these boats depend on local services, he pointed out, so the communities depend on the boats. Under Amendment 13, many of these boats will be facing an allocation of fewer than 30 days at sea.
“If places like Portland Fish Exchange will suffer greatly under the new rules, just imagine the impact on the dozens of small fish piers and sellers up and down the coast who will no longer be able to get fish,” said Pendleton. “It is an important connection that is being underestimated and overlooked.”
Former Marine Resources Commissioner Robin Alden stated frankly that in many ways the groundfish battle in eastern Maine has already been lost. Her home port of Stonington used to support 14 gillnetters but is down to one; NAMA says that there are now only 17 active groundfish permits east of Port Clyde. “Losing groundfish isn’t something that can be temporary,” said Alden. “Groundfish and lobster are the two linchpin, foundation fisheries. If we lose the rest of the groundfish industry through Amendment 13, we won’t get it back. And the loss of the boats…and the shoreside infrastructure, including Portland Fish Exchange, are things that will ripple into all the other fisheries of the coast. Because the suppliers and the market structure depend on that.”
The grip by which coastal fishing communities hang on is more tenuous than ever. Maine’s small traditional fishing communities rely on diverse and seasonal fisheries such as lobster, scallops, urchins and groundfish to survive. Alden pointed out that in the eastern part of the state the full impact of the loss of groundfish has been masked by fishermen’s ability to switch to the lobster fishery. “Where that leaves us is in an incredibly precarious position,” said Alden. “And the type of impact that Amendment 13 is presenting for the big groundfish ports like Portland and Gloucester could happen overnight in Stonington if lobster hiccupped. Then you would see the full effect of the groundfish management problem,” said Alden.
Phippsburg fisherman and selectman Proctor Wells echoed other coastal residents when he said that small coastal fishing communities are especially vulnerable. “Once these fishing communities collapse, they are gone forever,” said Wells. “For every one of these private wharfs that succumbs, there’s a long line of out of state money ready and waiting to buy them up, and turn a private commercial wharf into a summer home.”
Wells offered his town as an example, where there used to be 30 inshore draggers and five gillnetters. Now, only three of these fishermen remain. “Ninety three percent of our waterfront property is owned by absentee owners and non residents,” said Wells.
“If we don’t have anything to fish for, it has all been wasted.”
Distasteful as all of the four alternative rebuilding strategies are, Commissioner Lapointe suggested that it would be better to choose one of them than to hand the decision-making over to the federal courts or the National Marine Fisheries Service. But others urged scrapping altogether a management system they convict as guilty for 20 years of failure. In a forceful and pointed condemnation, Stonington’s Kathleen Billings said, “The whole process needs to be overhauled, given its rate of failure for preservation of a public resource, not to mention all the federal and state taxpayer money that has been lost or jeopardized in investments in the coastal economy and infrastructure grants. If we don’t have anything to fish for, it has all been wasted.”
Former commissioner Alden added her wealth of historical perspective to pose it another way. “I was in on the second council meeting in 1977 when the regional director came in and said ‘We have to cut effort by 50 percent, we’re in a crisis situation in groundfish management.’ Well in every major plan development and every major amendment, we’ve been in a crisis situation having to cut effort 50 percent or more. And we have done it over and over and over again. Isn’t it time to look at the fact that the way we’re managing groundfish is not working? The Amendment 13 process must result in some type of fundamental change in groundfish management.”
Were it not for some powerful political allies, such pleas for change would probably be lost in the gale. But Senator Olympia Snowe, chair of the Senate subcommittee on Oceans, Fisheries and the Coast Guard, promised congressional hearings to build flexibility into the Sustainable Fisheries Act and scrutinize the National Marine Fisheries Service’s interpretation and enforcement of the law.
Whether Snowe and her allies are successful in bringing social and community impacts into balance with stock rebuilding efforts remains to be seen. May 1, 2004 – the date when a new set of groundfish rules is set to go into effect – is still a long way off. Given the passion and unity that Maine’s groundfish community showed at the hearings, the fight may have barely begun.