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CHOIR Coalition Correspondence
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Received 06/12/09 |
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I received the below from
Chris Weiner this afternoon. Please read it in full and
make your thoughts known by emailing Chris or
me and i will make sure it gets passed on. Thanks. Dave |
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As many of you know, last week (Thursday/Friday), the NEFMC
Herring Committee met in Portland, Maine, to continue
working on Herring Amendment 4. This Amendment has been
underway for well over a year now- and was actually
initiated in November of 2007- and in that time quite a bit
of work has been done. As I have explained before, there are
currently 4 alternatives in the document: one that was
developed by Council staff, one that was developed by CHOIR,
one that was developed by the midwater trawl industry, and
one that was submitted by MA DMF. While initially the
Council was hoping to be able to move forward alternatives
at this point in time, after a long year the process is not
far enough along and so that was not possible. This has led
to some possible changes in the time-line that I will
explain below.
Day 1:
The Committee meeting was full of reports: from the Plan
Development Team (PDT), the Herring Advisory Panel (AP) and
the Enforcement Committee. These bodies all met in the
previous months in order to discuss the amendment and offer
insight on the amendment process.
There was also some discussion of the results of the
Scientific and Statistical Committee (SSC) meeting. Finally,
a presentation was done on the 'EVTR' system, or the
Electronic Vessel Trip Report system, which is a new system
being tested in other fisheries. While this system has been
included in the midwater trawl industry alternative, the
report left some to doubt how useful it would be in the
midwater trawl fisheries. According to the presentation,
this equipment has not been tested in midwater trawl
fisheries, it is not tamper-proof, and it is still in the
testing phase. There are also legal issues that may get in
the way of its possible use. While it may be possible in the
future, there will be a lot of work required for that to
happen.
Finally, the Committee spent a good deal of time discussing
the issue of Annual Catch Limits (ACLs) and Accountability
Measures (Ams). As some of you may know, these are new legal
requirements under the revised Magnuson Act. While there are
a lot of complex issues involved in the ACL/AM discussion,
the big discussion at this meeting had to do with the issue
of overages. If you go over your quota, what happens? Some
feel that paybacks are needed in case of quota overages.
Some do not. In our opinion, if you go over you should have
a payback so that the quota is take off to account for the
overage. The Committee struggled with this issue and it will
be up to the full Council to decide.
Day 2:
There were two important events on day 2. The first was the
Committee decision to include additions to Alternative 3-
the Alternative we developed. After our discussions at
meetings and with industry, we found that there were some
important changes needed in order to make the alternative
stronger.Instead of discussing them again here, I will
attach to this email the letter we submitted for the
Committee meeting, which outlines all the additions. I
suggest people take a look at it.
The second big event on Day 2 was the move by the Committee
to spilt the Amendment. As mentioned above, the time-line
for this amendment initially set out that we would already
have finalized the alternatives by this point in time. But
after working for the last year, the process has taken
longer than expected. This summer, the Council staff- the
ones developing the amendment- have to work on the
Specification (specs) process, which is the process of
setting TACs and other settings for the fishery. They
believe this process will take at least the whole summer. So
they believe that the amendment will basically not be worked
on for the next 3-4 months. On top of this, you have the
legal deadline for setting up ACLs and AMs. Some feel that
because of the deadline, and the delay caused by the Specs
process, that if you continue trying to do a monitoring
program in Amendment 4, that you will make it so that you
dont have the ACLs and AMs in place in time for the legal
deadline. In other words, monitoring is taking so long that
it really needs to be pushed back so that we can the other
stuff done first.
This worries some people because what this really means is
that we will not see a good monitoring system in the herring
fishery for longer than first expected. Others feel that if
you dont split you will not be able to have a good
monitoring system developed because it will be rushed. But
one issue that everyone can agree on is that if you do split
the amendment, that you need to make sure that Amendment 5
is narrow in scope- that is, that it only addresses the
parts of Amendment 4 that are not going to be done in time,
and that new work is not added. For example, some worry that
if the Amendment is split that the midwater industry will
try to push for allocation again.This was not only disliked
by most in the herring industry, but it would also be
tremendously time consuming. Luckily, the Committee voted
that if the amendment is split, that Amendment 5 would only
address the issues that were supposed to be done in
Amendment 4. While some are unhappy with the idea of the
split, everyone agrees that if the split happens that the
scope for Amendment 5 has to be narrowed. What this means is
that if the Council decides to take the Committee
recommendation and they split the amendments, the monitoring
program will be delayed by as much as a year (or possibly
more). It remains to be seen what will happen, since all of
this needs to be decided upon by the full Council at its
meeting in a couple weeks. (As an aside, some have
highlighted that a split in order to allow for ACLs/AMs to
go through does not make sense because they feel you cannot
have ACLs and AMs without a proper monitoring program. This
will likely receive discussion at the Council meeting.)
While there was supposed to be discussion of all 4
alternatives, once again, the discussion was focused almost
entirely on Alternative 3. For one reason or another, this
Alternative has received much more thought an discussion
than the other 3 alternatives. This is likely due in large
part to the highly developed nature of the proposal when we
submitted it. Unfortunately, until the Committee and the
Council as a whole works on the other alternatives, the
Amendment will not go anywhere. We are all hoping that they
quickly start work on these other alternatives to get them
to the detail level that Alternative 3 is at so that the
amendment can move forward.
Anyways, I could go on and on, a lot happened at this
meeting, but those are the biggest points. It is important
to remember that the full Council will be discussing all of
this at its meeting on June 23rd, at the Holiday Inn By The
Bay, in Portland, Maine. The whole day is dedicated to
herring. I hope that some of you will show up for this
important meeting.
Lastly, while I have tried to nail the big issues at this
meeting, I hope that those of you who were there will
respond with any issues that I may have missed.
Thanks everyone
Chris |
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© Offshore Pursuits LLC 2009 |
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