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Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 37 Number 3
November 2010
NE council rejects scallop permit stacking
NEWPORT, RI – Scallopers will not be allowed to stack permits under Amendment 15 to the federal scallop plan.
The New England Fishery Management Council reached this verdict during its Sept. 28-30 meeting here before a roomful of deeply divided industry members.
The stacking proposal was initially developed as a tool to reduce capacity in the fishery. It was meant to allow scallop vessel owners to combine the days-at-sea and access-area trip allocations from two separate limited-access permits onto one boat.
Some said it would allow vessel owners to get rid of aging boats and keep better ones more active. Under current allocations, which for 2010 totaled 38 open-area days and four access-area trips for full-timers, some vessels remain tied to the dock upwards of 240-to-285 days a year.
However, when the stacking question was finally called, the council voted 11-to-6 for “no action,” which defeated stacking.
Prior to the vote, supporters and opponents – both in the audience and around the council table – passionately argued their positions, but few minds were swayed.
Council Chairman John Pappalardo of Massachusetts gave audience members the chance to speak first, and Roy Enoksen of Eastern Fisheries in New Bedford used the opportunity to urge the council one last time to support stacking and allow vessel owners to operate their boats more efficiently. He also emphasized that stacking was voluntary, not mandatory.
“I’m in favor of stacking,” he said. “It wouldn’t happen overnight. If nobody wants to do it, nothing happens. It’s just an option.”
Enoksen said he understood that some people associated stacking with consolidation.
“This does not have an effect on consolidation,” he said. “Consolidation in this fishery has already taken place. Whether you allow stacking or not, just about every permit that’s sold goes to a multivessel owner.”
Federal regulations prevent individuals from owning more than a 5% interest in the total number of limited-access permits and, Enoksen said, “You can’t break that 5%. We have to report every year who owns what of every permit.”
However, he added, the council could eliminate some of the derby aspects of the fishery, especially in access areas bound by yellowtail flounder caps, by allowing stacking.
“I really think that maybe we’ve lost sight of some of those core issues,” Enoksen said. “You’ll have a better fleet. The boats will be safer. All you’re doing is taking iron off the water, and most of it would be old iron.”
Paul Weckesser, who owns four boats and three shoreside businesses in New Bedford, didn’t see it that way at all.
“This should be about jobs, jobs, jobs,” he said. “Your own report says it will kill jobs. It will kill communities and have a social impact far greater than we have seen or heard.”
Weckesser asked, “When there’s stacking on these boats, who do you think will ultimately pay the price? It will be the crew. It will trickle down to the crew. It will trickle down to the shoreside businesses. You will see it throughout every single community. Gangs will pay. Single boat owners will pay. Communities will pay.
“The only persons who will benefit from this will be the large-fleet, vertically integrated companies that will reap the profits at every single other person’s expense,” he concluded.
Jim Kendall of New Bedford Seafood Consulting came at the issue from a different angle.
“This particular amendment was to address overcapacity,” he said. “I asked the question: ‘Will this action in any way reduce capacity, and is this attempt to allow stacking and leasing due to a biological concern in the resource?’”
Kendall said the response was “no.”
Therefore, he said, “There is no biological need to go to that point. This is management of people, not resource. And the majority of the people who have spoken out have adamantly stated that they are opposed to this.”
Council’s turn
Council members then presented their own positions.
Mary Beth Tooley of Maine strongly supported the stacking option.
Recognizing the opposition around the table and the scallop committee’s recommendation to stick with status quo, Tooley said, “Does this mean people do not think we have a problem? Clearly there is overcapacity in this fishery. Vessels are tied to the dock for 240 days of the year and rafted five deep.
“People talk about jobs,” she said. “Most of the people in this fishery, whether they are for or against this, are running one crew for two vessels. The job loss has already taken place.”
Tooley urged the council to be proactive.
“I just think there is an opportunity here that will be lost,” she said. “We’re three years into this. To not take some action today would truly be a travesty for this fishery.”
Maine council member Jim Odlin, who also supported stacking, emphasized the provision’s safety aspects, arguing that people would stack permits onto better boats and get rid of aging vessels that shouldn’t be on the water anymore.
“The safety issues are real,” he said. “New boats are better. The facts bear that out. The casualty rates bear that out.”
Mark Gibson of Rhode Island agreed.
“We’ve been talking for years about overcapacity in this fishery and vessel safety, and here we have an opportunity to address it and we’re going to run away from it because it’s unpopular,” he said.
Gibson, like Odlin, made another point related to overfishing, noting that a new benchmark stock assessment for scallops concluded that overfishing was not occurring, but just barely.
“We had to go to three decimal points to determine that we’re not at the overfishing threshold level,” said Gibson. “That’s absurd. We can’t measure that.”
And both Gibson and Odlin noted that once overfishing is deemed to be occurring, the council will be required to further reduce effort, which will make individual vessels even more inefficient and require them to spend additional time tied to the dock.
“At what point do we allow people to deal with this issue?” asked Odlin.
Stacking inequities?
Council member Rodney Avila of New Bedford initially was a staunch supporter of stacking.
“It does promote safety. It does get old boats out of the water. It does unclutter the docks,” he said.
But then he had a change of heart.
“What made me turn against this motion, which I was so in favor of at the beginning, is that it hurts the person who cannot stack,” Avila said. “We’re so close to the overfishing line. If we allow stacking and the boats become more efficient and it creates overfishing, then it has to come off of everybody.”
Connecticut council member Mark Alexander said he looked at the language in Section 312 of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, and it said that a capacity reduction program must meet several requirements.
“One is that you get rid of boats. Another is that you get rid of the permits that go with those boats, as well as the fishing privileges that go with those permits,” Alexander said.
“That’s not happening here. You’re only doing half the job. Removing the vessels benefits the vessel owners. Removing the permits and the fishing privileges benefits everybody,” he said. “I think that’s an important idea that is missing here.”
Is it legal?
Council member David Pierce, who chairs the scallop committee, spoke after everyone else and emphasized that he was speaking on behalf of himself and the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries (DMF) and not the committee.
Pierce said he and DMF Director Paul Diodati were greatly influenced by the “very convincing arguments made by the public” against stacking and had concluded that allowing stacking “would be a serious mistake both in the short term and long term.”
“Our position is very firm on this. We oppose stacking,” said Pierce. “We are convinced that permit stacking will lead to increased efficiency, increased landings per unit effort, and that will then result in a cut in days-at-sea and other restrictions in the near future that will impact the single permit holders far more. Those who can stack will be able to survive. They’ll make do. But those others will not.”
In conclusion, he said, “If we are going to truly address excess capacity in the scallop fishery, we are going to have to do that through a very comprehensive amendment that is very specific to the issue of excess capacity and implement protections for the single permit vessel holders who will not be able to benefit.”
Pierce raised another issue that he said troubled DMF. The agency believed that stacking violated National Standard 5 of the Magnuson-Stevens Act, which states: “Conservation and management measures shall, where practicable, consider efficiency in the utilization of fishery resources; except that no such measure shall have economic allocation as its sole purpose.”
Pierce said DMF considered stacking to be all about economic allocation, which he considered to be a clear violation of National Standard 5.
However, attorney Gene Martin of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Office of General Counsel disagreed.
“I come to the totally opposite conclusion,” he said. “There is an obligation for the council to consider efficiency.”
Martin added, “I think the (stacking) alternative is intended to maximize or increase efficiency in the scallop fishery. It will increase safety at sea and it will decrease costs, which is National Standard 7. It has purposes other than economic allocation. This is just a means to create more efficient fleets. I don’t see any inconsistencies at all with National Standard 5.”
National Marine Fisheries Service Northeast Regional Administrator Pat Kurkul agreed.
“I do think we have an obligation to deal with the situation we have in the scallop fishery,” she said. “We have a requirement under the Magnuson Act to look at the efficiency issue, and if we’ve created a situation that creates inefficiency, which we clearly have in the scallop fishery, then we have an obligation to take action to try to fix that.”
After all these arguments were made, the council then cast its 11-to-6 vote on the motion to recommend “no action,” which effectively killed the stacking proposal.
Janice M. Plante
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