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NY SALTWATER ANGLERS DO NO NOT NEED A LICENSE TO FISH!

Question Answered As New Budget Immediately Repeals Saltwater Fishing Fee

New York's saltwater anglers are officially off the hook with regard to paying a fee to fish!

Governor Andrew Cuomo's new $132.5 billion budget passed before the April 1 deadline immediately repeals the saltwater fishing license and replaces it with a free registry coordinated through the state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC). Swapping out a fee-based saltwater fishing license with a free registry should allow New York to retain its federal registry exemption, thereby allowing state anglers to avoid having to pay a $15 federal fee to fish. As part of the Environmental Conservation budget bill, the registry will be no cost to anglers for at least the next two years.

According to state Senator Lee Zeldin (R-Shirley), an agreement secured through leaders from the senate, assembly and governor's office last week helped pave the way for the repeal, which includes a full refund of the lifetime license fee ($150), no reduction to the balance of the Conservation Fund and an additional $1.9 million in General Fund support for Marine Bureau operations. Also effective immediately, party and charter boat captains no longer have to buy a $400 annual saltwater license to cover their passengers.

Sen. Zeldin, who helped spearhead senate efforts to repeal the saltwater user fee, also said the DEC's Marine Bureau will not be responsible for paying for jobs for which it assumed responsibility in 2009, and added that full compliance with the federal saltwater fishing registry requirements means New Yorkers will not have to purchase any separate registrations.

"This is a piece of legislation that is very important to the needs of my district," Zeldin told NewsLI.com. "I would like to thank not only my senate and assembly colleagues who spent hours listening to me and working with me, but I would also like to thank the thousands of fishermen, including the Recreational Fishing Alliance (RFA), who called, wrote, faxed and signed our petition," stated Senator Zeldin.

In February, Senator Zeldin introduced a bill (S3638) to repeal the saltwater fishing license fee, and has been working the halls of the Capitol ever since to bring a broad coalition together to fight for its repeal. The budget agreement finalized by Governor Cuomo's approved budget now sets the Conservation Fund balance at $22.2 million as of today, with a projected balance totaling more than $38 million in the fund as of April 1, 2012.

Similar to the free registry program being developed in New Jersey, the New York registration will also collect names and phone numbers of New York state marine anglers to fulfill the federal requirements for data collection. According Jim Hutchinson, Jr., RFA managing director and president of the New York Sportfishing Federation, the state DEC has a couple of mechanisms already in place which can satisfy the federal registration requirements.

"DEC's Automated Licensing System (DECALS) is the backbone of the license program and can handle the registry requirements at a cost of about $2.14 per transaction, while the Harvest Information Program (HIP) used for identical waterfowl survey programs can adequately accomplish this same task for just $1 per user," Hutchinson said citing DEC sources. "The federal registration requirements should not have been used for a separate funding mechanism for the bureaucracy, and we're thankful that legislators worked across the aisle in order to repeal this user fee."

Assemblyman Fred Thiele (I- Sag Harbor), primary sponsor of the Assembly version of the license repeal bill, called the saltwater fishing "ill-conceived" from the start. "Not only was it a tax on one of the fundamental rights that Long Island residents have had since colonial times, but it was a burden to the recreational fishing industry at a time when the recession was taking its toll on the local economy," Assemblyman Thiele said. "This action will send a message that the state recognizes that the right to fish should be free and that recreational fishing is a critical part of the Long Island economy," he added.

While many public sector representatives opposed the repeal efforts, the vast majority of private sector anglers and business owners argued against the license fee since first being implemented back in 2009. While the fee was relatively low when compared to states like California which charges fees of $40 to $135 a year for anglers to access marine waters, representatives of the New York recreational sector argued that new access fees on Long Islander were simply an open door for future problems.

"It's not just $10, it's another $10 and that's what's important to remember," said John Mantione, spokesman for the New York Fishing Tackle Trades Association (NYFTTA). Mantione said additional fees have helped contribute to overall reduction in angler effort, which is the worst thing for business owners in a recession as it leads to lost sales in the business community, which in turn means less tax revenue for the state. "The repeal of the saltwater tax will help recover our limited Long Island economy," he added.

According to NYFTTA, an email update from the Division of Fish, Wildlife and Marine Resources to state license retailers said marine licenses were no longer necessary as of Thursday. "Customers must register through DECALS however and we will be adding a registry item to the catalog. It will take some time before the registry is available via DECALS. There will be no charge for the registry," the email reported, adding that refunds will be started soon for customers who purchased a Lifetime Marine Recreational Fishing License. Meanwhile, Lifetime Combo License holders will have their Lifetime Combo License exchanged for a Lifetime Fishing License.

"I cannot think of a better way to start the new fishing season off than with this great news," Zeldin said, adding "it's a bright, sunny day for saltwater fishermen."

Hutchinson said the RFA wished to officially thank those legislators who helped move the license repeal efforts, including co-sponsors of the Senate version of the repeal bill senators Greg Ball (R-Patterson), Kemp Hannon (R-Westbury), Owen Johnson (R-Babylon), Bill Larkin (R-Cornwall-on-Hudson), Ken LaValle (R-Port Jefferson), Tom Libous (R-Binghamton), Carl Marcellino (R-Syosset) and Jack Martins (R-Mineola). Assembly co-sponsors include James D. Conte (R-Huntington Station), Michael J. Fitzpatrick (R-St. James), Al Graf (R-Holbrook), Dan Losquadro (R-Shoreham), Tom McKevitt (R-East Meadow), Michael Montesano (R-Glen Head), Dean Murray (R-East Patchogue), Andrew P. Raia (R-East Northport), Joseph S. Saladino (R-Massapequa), Michelle Schimel (D-Great Neck), and Harvey Weisenberg (D-Long Beach).

"We're particularly grateful to Environmental Conservation Committee Chairs Assemblyman Bob Sweeney (D-Lindenhurst) and Senator Mark Grisanti (R-Buffalo) for their efforts to help support and protect our coastal resources, while also safeguarding the access rights our coastal constituents," Hutchinson said, adding "not to mention those dedicated RFA-NY and New York Sportfishing Federation members who participated in the lobbying efforts to push this repeal through, it was most certainly a group effort."

"It helps of course to have a saltwater angler living in the governor's mansion, and I think all our anglers owe Governor Cuomo a debt of gratitude for facing these tough budget decisions with an eye on our saltwater fishing community," he added.

About Recreational Fishing Alliance

The Recreational Fishing Alliance is a national, grassroots political action organization representing recreational fishermen and the recreational fishing industry on marine fisheries issues. The RFA Mission is to safeguard the rights of saltwater anglers, protect marine, boat and tackle industry jobs, and ensure the long-term sustainability of our Nation's saltwater fisheries. For more information, call 888-JOIN-RFA or visit www.joinrfa.org.

Fishermen Cry Foul

Industry worries about new members of council

By Russell Drumm

http://www.easthamptonstar.com/dnn/Archive/Home20090806/News/FishermenCryFoul/tabid/9660/Default.aspx

(08/06/2009) When the names of new state delegates to the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council were announced in June, representatives of both commercial and recreational fisheries cried foul. Even the council’s executive director and New York’s director of marine resources seemed puzzled. East Hampton Town officials plan to protest.

Critics have said this was a new strategy by well-funded environmental groups to unnecessarily curtail landings and reduce the size of East Coast fishing fleets by circumventing the grassroots approach to choosing delegates to the federally empowered management council.

Stuffing council seats was the latest effort, they said, by groups including the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Environmental Defense Fund to paint an unrealistically dark picture of the ocean’s resources at a time when both fishermen and the government’s own scientists report robust stock recoveries.

According to those close to the process, the goal was to gain control of policy without the necessary vetting of management concepts that normally begins when people with broad experience in the field recommend delegate candidates to each state’s marine resource agencies, including the Department of Environmental Conservation in New York. The vetting normally continues when those agencies review the candidates and pass their own recommendations to the governor.

This was not done in the case of three newly appointed delegates to the council, said Arnold Leo, secretary of the East Hampton Town Baymen’s Association and a director of the town’s fisheries consultancy and committee.

According to the Magnuson-Stevens Act, the body of United States fishing law, the final picks are made from the governors’ list at the Department of Commerce headquarters in Washington, D.C., and its subagencies, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and its National Marine Fisheries Service.

There are eight federally empowered management councils nationwide that set fishing regulations that are codified and enforced by the fisheries service. The Mid-Atlantic Council oversees species found outside of the three-mile state jurisdictions between New York and North Carolina.

Since President Barack Obama took office and selected Jane Lubchenko to serve as NOAA administrator, the agency has aggressively advocated a fundamental change in the way the fishery resource is managed, according to a NOAA spokesman, from a scheme in which fishermen have open access to a common resource managed by quotas and seasons, to a system in which fishermen are given “catch shares” of a government-restricted resource, under strict rules of eligibility, or else remain in an even more restricted common pool.

Proponents say the catch-share system extends fishing seasons, reduces the overall catch, and tends to raise the price of fish at the dock. Opponents say the approach forces many out of business, and destroys the fabric of shoreside communities. In the process, they say, catch limits are set far lower than necessary to maintain sustainability, which is a rate of fishing that will not endanger the resource.

The Long Island Commercial Fishing Association is not alone in its opposition to the catch-share model. The group claims that the result would be a marketplace governed not by the laws of supply and demand, but one in which catch shares are traded like a commodity with prices directly tied to “total allowable catches” set by the federal government.

Dan Furlong, executive director of the Mid-Atlantic Council said catch shares were attractive in some ways, but “administratively burdensome.”

According to Richard Gaines, a veteran reporter with the Gloucester Times in Massachusetts who has written extensively about what he calls the “Pewification” of the fisheries, the catch-share concept now being promoted by NOAA was largely an academic enterprise. It had been percolating for years within a network of academic institutions and staged media symposiums largely funded by environmental organizations especially by the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Environmental Defense Fund.

Lee Crockett, the director of Pew’s federal fisheries reform polices, said, “We have nothing going on regarding council appointments. I don’t think catch shares should be the across-the-board, de facto management scheme.”

NOAA’s new director, Ms. Lubchenko, is a Pew scholar from the University of Washington, an ocean scientist who served on the board of trustees of the Environmental Defense Fund, and served as its chairman in 2005. E.D.F. is funded, in part, by the Pew Charitable Trusts. Once appointed, Ms. Lubchenko named Justine Kenny to push the catch-share agenda for the agency. Ms. Kenny was the director of communications for the Pew trusts.

Bonnie Brady, executive director of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association, said the fear was that by circumventing the delegate appointment system, decades of accepted science and at-sea experience will be replaced by unfounded dogma.

Ms. Brady claimed that much of the science used to discredit the current U.S. management schemes and to paint an unfairly dire view of the resource had an incestuous relationship with the organizations funding it, and with the media outlets that reported it. “Peer reviews say they’re using faulty science,” Ms. Brady said. “The dirty little secret is, stocks are recovered. We’ve done the pain, where’s the gain?”

In a recent report to Congress, NOAA stated that 77 percent of 199 species studied to see if they were being overfished were not. Scientists also reviewed 251 species to see which were being harvested at too high a level. Only 41 stocks, or 16 percent were considered overfished. Monica Allen, a NOAA spokeswoman, said the important statistic was the fish stock sustainability index, a tracking model created with the Sustainable Fisheries Act of 1996, which set stock recovery deadlines. “It’s risen, a sign of improving information and condition of fish stocks.”

Ms. Brady said the most recent appointments to the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council were a troubling example of an attempt by powerful environmental groups to crowd fishermen out of management decisions.

In June, the governors of New York, New Jersey, and Virginia chose delegates to the Mid-Atlantic Council: Steven Schafer of New York, Christopher Zeman of New Jersey, and Peter deFur of Virginia, whose names were not well known to the industries they are supposed to represent. They had not been recommended to the governors by the state agencies overseeing marine resources, as has been the accepted norm since the councils were created in 1976.

Instead, their names apparently went directly to Govs. David A. Paterson, Jon Corzine, and Tim Kaine. How this was done is the subject of a freedom of information request by The East Hampton Star to the office of Mr. Paterson, and is the subject of an enquiry by Representative Tim Bishop.

The question of who, specifically, recommended Messrs. Zeman, Schafer, and deFur was put to all three executive chambers. Press agents for Mr. Paterson and Mr. Corzine would not comment. A spokesman for Mr. Cane said Mr. deFur’s name had come out of the governor’s own cabinet.

“I had never heard of him until after the appointments,” Jim Gilmore, the New York Department of Environmental Conservation’s director of marine resources, said of Mr. Schafer.

Mr. Gilmore said Mr. Schafer had not been recommended by his agency, even though it was customary for the governor to choose his delegation from the list proffered by the D.E.C. Mr. Gilmore was quick to add, however, that there was nothing on the books to prevent others from submitting prospective candidates to the governor. “The real decision is the National Marine Fisheries Service’s — the N.M.F.S. administrator,” Mr. Gilmore said.

Mr. Schafer’s at-large seat means he will be involved in commercial fishing issues relative to New York and elsewhere within the council’s purview. He won the seat over three experienced candidates the D.E.C. had reviewed: Emerson Hasbrouck, an agent for the Cornell Cooperative Extension who has been involved for decades in the state’s commercial fisheries, Dan Farnham, a veteran longline fisherman from Montauk, and Mark Phillips, a draggerman long involved in fishery issues from the North Fork.

In addition to being a former professional golfer, Mr. Schafer is director of retail operations for Wild Edibles, a seafood shop in New York City. The “personal fisheries experience” form submitted to the Mid-Atlantic Council noted that he was “a seafood expert relied upon by Martha Stewart, and the New York Times, among others. It also described him as “an affable man with all-American good looks.”

Mr. Schafer has worked with the nonprofit group Blue Ocean Institute founded by Carl Safina of Amagansett, a Pew scholar. Reached on Monday, Mr. Safina said he had written a letter of recommendation for Mr. Schafer. “He waged a prolonged and energetic campaign to get through the vetting. He met with everybody, got letters of support, really went after it. He spoke to a variety of people in NOAA and the Congressional delegation.”

Mr. Safina said, “catch shares are generally extremely good if they have the right safeguards . . . you want to be mindful of certain social considerations,” he said, adding that the shares should be owned by those actually fishing, not by corporations of processing plants that make sharecroppers of everybody.”

Mr. Schafer could not be reached for his views on catch shares versus the current management scheme, but critics claim it is his inexperience that was at issue.

“The Magnuson Act requires a balanced makeup of the council — commercial, recreational, and other, which usually means environmental, or scientific representatives. We were outraged by Steven Schafer,” Mr. Leo said yesterday. “He is obviously not commercial. The Town of East Hampton had written a letter to the governor recommending Dan Farnham, Emerson Hasbrouck, or Mark Phillips. We are extremely unhappy that someone with such obvious environmental connections has been given one of the commercial positions on the council,” Mr. Leo said.

New Jersey’s new delegate, Mr. Zeman, is an attorney for Zurich North America and has worked with leading environmental groups such as the Ocean Law Project, American Oceans Campaign, and Oceana. Oceana was created in 1999 with underwriting from the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Mr. deFur, the delegate for Virginia, is president of Environmental Stewardship Concepts and teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University. He has served on the staff of the Pew-funded Environmental Defense Fund, whose president, Fred Krupp, has championed the harnessing of market forces for environmental ends, the goal of catch-share management.

All three delegates begin their three-year terms on Tuesday with the possibility of serving for the next nine years.

Dan Furlong, executive director of the Mid-Atlantic Council, said council delegates “are supposedly knowledgeable. None of the people who are new have been engaged with our council. The governor has to appoint qualified people. The criteria is specific,” Mr. Furlong said, going on to cite the section of the Magnuson-Stevens Act that states that governors may not submit a name unless he or she has determined the candidate is qualified after consulting with commercial and recreational users of the resource.

Lori Nolan is the council delegate who left New York’s delegate seat open after completing her third three-year term representing commercial fishing interests. She said that with the new slate of delegates, the Mid-Atlantic Council had no delegate with any actual fishing or industry-related experience outside of the states’ three-mile limit, which is the council’s jurisdiction.

Tony DiLernia, a veteran charter fisherman who represented sportfishing interests as a state delegate from 1991 to 2002, said he saw a sea change in the way fishing policy was being debated and shaped. He said in the past it was the sportfishing industry and the market (commercial) industry that went head-to-head over quota shares and other regulations.

“Now it’s the commercial industry, both sport and market fishermen, people who make their living on the water, versus the environmental industry,” Mr. DiLernia said.


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