Maine groundfisherman speaks at Senate subcommittee meeting

A Maine groundfisherman made his case before senators, representatives and the nation’s top federal fisheries administrator in Washington, D.C., Tuesday morning, arguing that New England’s fishing families need security.

“One of the hardest things to accept is that even as fish stocks have grown, so has the amount of uncertainty about my fishing future, and therefore my family’s future,” said Vincent Balzano, a Portland-based fisherman and a member of the Governor’s Groundfish Task Force.

“Lately, it has been impossible for men like me to develop strategies to keep our businesses operational, make plans for our children’s education, and work toward our retirement,” Balzano said.

Tuesday, Balzano was among the speakers who addressed the Oceans, Fisheries and Coast Guard Subcommittee of the federal Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee – a body co-chaired by Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe.

In February, Snowe submitted a bill to reauthorize the law that is the basis of the nation’s fisheries regulation – the 1976 Magnuson-Stevens Act. On Tuesday, the subcommittee began the process of considering her bill, known as the Fishery Conservation and Management Amendments Act of 2004. This would be the first major overhaul of federal fisheries rules since the 1999 Sustainable Fisheries Act, which required greater protection for struggling species and led to lawsuits and ultimately the controversial new groundfishing rules known as Amendment 13.

The Sustainable Fisheries Act had given fisheries managers only 10 years to rebuild fish populations, which many scientists argued was necessary to avoid a population crash, but fishermen have called draconian.

Snowe sought to relax the requirement in her bill, setting goals for fish conservation but avoiding timelines altogether. Overall, the bill has a focus on considering the impacts that new regulations have on fishing communities by making laws more flexible, encouraging more cooperation among government scientists and fishermen, and balancing potential harm against scientific goals that Maine fisheries regulators support.

“Our fishing communities are in turmoil and our managers are struggling to hold this industry together,” Snowe said in a statement released Tuesday, blaming the 1996 rules’ strict timelines for much of the hardship.

However, two independent reports of the state of America’s seas released in the past year – conducted by the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy and the Pew Commission – predict dire consequences if fisheries managers do not take conservation seriously.

“Our oceans are at their breaking point,” Lee Crockett, executive director of the Marine Fish Conservation Network, said Tuesday.

Crockett argued that existing requirements that fisheries managers rebuild at-risk fish stocks to healthy levels within 10 years should stand. He also encouraged legislators to amend Snowe’s bill to reform the governmental structure of federal fisheries management – which many conservationists argue is weighted too heavily in favor of the fishing industry.