Opportunities for Public Comment

[Gerry Zagorski]

A bit more clarification on why option C is being supported by NJDEP, the NJ Marine Fisheries Council and our state representatives in the ASMFC. There's a lot more involved but these are the cliff notes and my basic understanding after talking to Dr Pat (pddmd in this thread) who is on our states Marine Fisheries Council.

As mentioned above, reverting back to the old option is not a good choice because it wasn't doing anything for the fish or the fishermen. It also caused sea saw regulations that were subject to change ever year and there was hardly any weight given to stock assessment data. It also condensed the time line for information to be digested, public comments and decisions to be made. Other options like C allows us to put in place a 2 year plan so we don't have sea saw regulations from year to year and it takes into account stock assessments which is a much better measurement of the health of a fishery. The old system which if we were to do nothing, would be put back in place and in general was more focused on quotas vs assumed catch data like MRIP if we were assumed to catch more then our quota we'd be penalized in the following years regulations. We all know the MRIP data can not be trusted and the health of a fishery is better measured by the stock status.

Where C differs from the rest of the plans is it would allow more liberalization and relaxed regulations for fisheries that have been rebuilt. Perfect example here is Sea Bass which has exceeded the rebuild target for several years now but the regulations have not been relaxed.

Options D and E have some nuclear options that would allow fishery management to take more unilateral emergency actions like closing down fisheries completely... Further they are based on Catch rather then Harvest like AB and C.. Catch means any fish legal size or not that are landed are measured, Harvest means the only fish retained are measured and I assume some mortality rates applied for released fish... The fear with a catch based system is you may loose the flexibility to trade longer seasons for larger legal fish or visa versa, which gives the states more flexibility.

I'd be interested in other opinions but those are the state and council recommendations and Dr Pat said he'd be monitoring this thread if anyone needs more clarification or had questions.