DMR: Some paid up to $10,000 for urchin licenses

MACHIAS – A Maine urchin fishing license – if you could get one – would cost $249, but some people paid as much as $10,000 for one last year, according to the state Department of Marine Resources.

Margaret Hunter, a DMR marine resources scientist, confirmed Friday that some fishermen who attended Thursday’s meeting of the Sea Urchin Zone Council said they paid anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000 for a license during last November’s one-time urchin license transfer program.

The license transfer opportunity was the only way that urchin fishermen who previously fished under someone else’s license could continue to drag for urchins in 2002. That is when it became illegal for anyone who possessed an urchin license but no longer fished for the valuable seafood to lease his license to another fisherman.

Urchins were a $17.7 million industry in 2000, second only in value to lobsters in Maine’s ranking of commercial fisheries. To protect the dwindling resource, new urchin fishing licenses have been limited since 1994.

Under current state regulations, five people must leave the fishery before one new license is issued, and applicants for the license are subject to a lottery.

The 1994 law, however, contained a provision that turned out to be a loophole that allowed new people to enter the fishery, according to Penn Estabrook, deputy marine resources commissioner.

In order to accommodate crew members who worked on urchin draggers, the provision permitted a crew to fish under someone else’s license.

Over time, fishermen who had an urchin license, but no longer wanted to fish, leased their licenses to others who had never fished for urchins before. The practice, which was unique to urchin licenses, didn’t make sense in a fishery where officials were trying to reduce the number of fishermen, said Estabrook.

Last year, the Legislature eliminated that loophole at the recommendation of the DMR and the Sea Urchin Zone Council.

The council is a 15-member advisory board of urchin divers, draggers, buyers and marine biologists.

The council wanted to close that loophole, but did not want to put anyone out of business. So it recommended the one-time license transfer opportunity, said council Chairman William Sutter.

The council wanted to give an opportunity to those fishermen who had been leasing urchin licenses for at least two years to have the licenses transferred from the owner into their names.

Hunter said about 30 fishermen obtained licenses under the transfer program, but another 15 to 20 who had been dragging for urchins during the last two years were unable to negotiate license transfers.

In one case, four Cobscook Bay fishermen had been leasing their licenses from members of the Passamaquoddy Tribe. Tribal regulations limit ownership of the licenses to Passamaquoddy, so those licenses could not be transferred.

On Thursday, the zone council voted to recommend that the Legislature accommodate those 15 to 20 people who missed the transfer program. Hunter said the DMR would take the council’s recommendation to give those fishermen a license to the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Marine Resources.

The proposal does nothing, however, for John Polk, the 24-year-old Machiasport fishermen who attended Thursday’s zone council meeting to argue his case for an urchin license.

Polk said he bought his urchin dragger in 2001 and leased a non-active urchin license from another fishermen.

The fifth-generation fisherman said he talked with a secretary at the DMR several times in late 2000 and the first six months of 2001, making sure that he would qualify for the transfer program. Polk said those he talked to, whose names he did not record, assured him he’d qualify for the program.

Polk did not qualify, however, because he has been fishing under the leased license for only one year and not two as required. He said Friday that the zone council refused to recommend that he be issued a license.

“Well, none of the people they want to let in qualified either because they couldn’t find a license to lease,” Polk said. “I worked on the stern of a dragger for my cousin since high school and I’ve put in just as much time as anyone else.”

Chairman Sutter said the zone council went through a long process, including several public hearings, to establish the criteria for the transfer program and did not want to go back into the process and establish more criteria.

The council did not intend to create a bidding war by recommending the license transfer program, Sutter said.

If the Legislature approves the council’s recommendation, those 15 to 20 fishermen will simply be issued new licenses and won’t have to negotiate with previous owners or pay thousands of dollars for them. That won’t put the fishermen who did pay for the licenses last year at a disadvantage, said Sutter, because the 15 to 20 fishermen have already lost a season’s worth of fishing.

Given the most recent limits on the number of days that urchin fishermen can drag, fishermen can make between $20,000 and $40,000 a season, said Hunter, the DMR scientist.

Hunter said she is looking into Polk’s complaint that someone at DMR may have given him inaccurate information.