Department of Commerce submits plan to comply with Obama regulatory review

Ironic: Jerry Brown Has a Jobs Plan…Meanwhile AB 1299 Will Kill 3,000 Jobs

Truth is stranger than fiction — while Gov. Jerry Brown is developing a plan to add jobs,  the Legislature is contemplating a bill — AB 1299 — that would kill at least 3,000 jobs.  Hard working fishermen and blue-collar processing crew jobs, which represent the backbone of California’s  fishing economy.

FRESNO — Gov. Jerry Brown said today that he and legislative leaders are considering a series of measures to address California’s persistent unemployment, suggesting he has a jobs plan but declining to discuss it in detail before talking with lawmakers Thursday morning.
“We have a series of things that we’re doing,” the Democratic governor said between meetings in Fresno. “Some are bills, and some are actions, and some are proposals.”

Brown said in his gubernatorial campaign last year that growth in renewable energy could create at least 500,000 jobs, and he has increasingly talked about clean energy since passage of the state budget. Earlier today, Brown appointed former bank executive Michael Rossi to be his top jobs adviser.

Brown said in a lengthy speech to civic leaders this afternoon that Rossi’s appointment is to ensure the state is responsive to business.

With California’s unemployment rate around 12 percent, politicians are lining up with jobs plans.

Read the rest at the Sacramento Bee.

Surprising squid encounter in La Jolla delights photographer

Jon Schwartz of Carlsbad comes across a large shoal of squid swimming near his kayak off the La Jolla coast. Photos by Jon Schwartz/ www.bluewaterjon.com

By Steven Mihailovich

Jon Schwartz has been photographing marine life for the past four years and he’s good at it. Good enough for 15 magazines such as Field & Stream, Sport Fishing and Marlin to grace their covers with his photos. Schwartz said he travels far and wide to get his shots of exotic fish, such as marlin in pristine tropical waters, to destinations like Hawaii, Mexico and the Caribbean islands among others, where he has landed in pursuit of his prized subjects.

However, when Schwartz and fishing buddy Josh Pruitt launched their kayaks in the predawn hours of June 20, none of his many expeditions across the globe prepared him for what he found just one mile off the coast of La Jolla: a large shoal of squid swimming near the surface by his kayak.

“The squid encounter was super special,” Schwartz said of the experience. “It’s expensive to go to the places I go to get the pictures I get. With this, I didn’t have to get on a plane and bring my gear. It was completely unexpected and I was back at my house in half an hour.”

That day, the pair had kayaked for hours and Pruitt hooked a 40-pound white sea bass while Schwartz snapped photos of it. At about noon, they chanced upon the shoal of red squid just underneath them, which Schwartz estimates to have been about 20 feet by 30 feet, or the size of two SUVs.

Read the rest of the story here.

Long-time local fishing family hopes to memorialize those lost at sea

Elizabeth Pennisi-Nozicka and Jiri Nozicka in front of the San Giovanni on Monterey’s Wharf #2. The wooden trawler has been in the Pennisi family for more than 50 years.

By Joel Ede

Having stuffed the hold of his 50-foot trawler, Relentless, with Dover sole, David “Rowdy” Pennisi, 43, and crew member Michael Odom headed to San Francisco in the early hours of June 21, 2004 to offload their catch. But, like hundreds of other Central Coast fishermen, they never made it back to port.

The Pennisi family has been a cornerstone of the Monterey fishing industry since the early 1900s, and the tragic story of Captain Rowdy and the Relentless has since become local lore. Rowdy’s sister, Elizabeth Pennisi-Nozicka, says since her brother’s accident, memorializing the lost fishermen of the Central Coast has weighed heavily on her heart. Monterey is one of the only major fishing ports on the West Coast without a dedicated memorial to commercial fishermen.

Heading up People United for American Commercial Fisheries, Pennisi-Nozicka and her husband, Jiri Nozicka, are reaching out to the community with high hopes that this year’s Third Annual Fisherman’s Days will raise enough money to construct a permanent memorial.

Technological advances like the Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon and on-the-hour transponder transmissions, which relay ship speeds and locations to the National Marine Fisheries Service, are designed to make life safer for fishermen.

But navigating the Central Coast is just as dangerous today as it was 100 years ago – maybe even more so, says Nozicka, a fisherman on the Pennisi family’s wooden trawler, San Giovanni.

Read the rest here.

San Diego Union Tribune-Letter: Foraging for responsible bills

San Diego Union-Tribune

Letters to the Editor

July 29, 2011

If you didn’t know, you might think that forage fish like sardines and squid are on the brink of destruction in California. That’s what some activists and the Union-Tribune story on Assembly Bill 1299 imply (“Thinking small for a sea change,” July 18). However, these claims are incorrect.

California’s forage fisheries are among the best protected in the world, with one of the lowest harvest rates. Yet this state would squander millions of tax dollars – and thousands of jobs – to duplicate existing laws. Why?

To initiate new legislation like AB 1299 as if no current regulation exists is fiscally irresponsible and disrespectful of California’s management history.

Moreover, virtually all of these species range far beyond California state waters and wouldn’t be helped by this bill.

The anti-fishing activists pushing this legislation misrepresented the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s research. For example, they cited an incomplete ecosystem assessment to prove their overfishing hype, but failed to say it excluded Southern California waters, where 80 percent of California’s squid harvest occurs. AB 1299 is simply a disingenuous attempt to curtail sustainable fisheries.

 — Diane Pleschner-Steele, California Wetfish Producers Association

State’s no-fishing rule stinks

By David Hansen

When fishing as a boy, I used to stare at my jar of salmon eggs and marvel. I wondered how they could arrive so perfectly formed and opaque and inherently controversial — stripped from their host like corn off a cob.

Years later as a reporter covering tribal fishing rights in the Pacific Northwest, I learned a lot more about salmon eggs, types of salmon, salmon hatcheries, salmon fillets, Copper River salmon (yes, they are worth the price) and how to properly paint a salmon-colored wall.

So it is with great interest I read about how the state of California basically will ban fishing off Laguna Beach starting Oct. 1 (Coastline Pilot, “State’s ‘no fishing’ rule starts in fall,” July 8).

There are some activities in life — fishing, hunting, reading a paper, purchasing certain goods and services — that are closely tied to “inalienable rights.” People get emotional when you take them away.

There are also times when those activities become at risk due to overuse.

The truth is often somewhere in the middle.

Unfortunately, in our day, it takes lawsuits to figure it all out, and that’s what will happen here.

Read the rest of the column in the Laguna Beach Coastline Pilot here.

The (Nonsensical) Politics of Fisheries Funding

Fisherman Larry Collins stands next to his boat the Autumn Gale at Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco. SOURCE: AP/Marcio Jose Sanchez

By Michael Conathan

All eyes in Washington are focused up these days. They’re peering cautiously at that ever-encroaching debt ceiling and the economic ruin pundits and politicians are forecasting if we allow ourselves to bump into it. Meanwhile, spending-phobia has gripped the less headline-grabbing, more mundane aspects of congressional operations as well. So we’re going to spend a bit of time today in one of Capitol Hill’s metaphorical windowless rooms crunching numbers to find out what Congress is doing to fund (or not fund) fisheries management.

Let’s start with a quick note about the congressional appropriations process. Per the Constitution, Congress holds the “power of the purse.” The president asks for money by submitting a budget but the legislature dictates how much will actually be spent.

Like all pieces of legislation—recall your “Schoolhouse Rock”—spending (also known as appropriations) bills originate in committee. In this case, that’s the Appropriations Committee, which passes them on, accompanied by an explanatory report, for consideration of the full body. Ultimately, both House and Senate must pass identical versions of legislation that are then sent to the president to be signed into law. The bill that contains funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, and thus for fisheries management, is the Commerce, Justice, and Science, or CJS, Appropriations Act.

House appropriators talked a good game this year in the CJS bill’s report, stating “healthy levels of investment in scientific research are the key to long-term economic growth.” One would think that in these days of anemic job growth, 9.2 percent unemployment, and an angry electorate, if Congress held “the key to long-term economic growth,” they might use that key to unlock America’s potential. Instead, line-in-the-sand politics rose up and trumped common sense. In short, the “cut spending now” mantra seems to have all but obliterated the more reasoned and storied catchphrase of entrepreneurs everywhere: “You have to spend money to make money.”

Read the rest of the story here.

LAT looks for surprising numbers to track possible fishing recovery

By Rosland Gammon

Like its Gulf Coast counterpart, the fishing industry in California has faced hard times. But it doesn’t have an oil spill to blame. Instead, a low population of salmon prompted a three-year ban on fishing. Alana Semuels of the Los Angeles Times takes her audience aboard Duncan MacLean’s boat as he goes out for the first time after the ban was lifted. She writes:

“As dawn breaks on a recent morning, he sits at the helm of his 43-foot wooden boat, the Barbara Faye, guiding it past yachts and pleasure cruisers, two break walls and a beacon. But his enthusiasm to be fishing again is tempered by anxiety over what he will catch.”

Read the rest of the story here.

California water pact attacked by GOP congressmen

Washington — House Republicans representing the San Joaquin Valley pressed their attack on California’s plan to restore water to fisheries and wildlife, holding a hearing Thursday on a bill that would gut a key bipartisan pact passed by the state Legislature in 2009 after decades of litigation.

The bill has environmental groups and Bay Area Democrats in an uproar, but it has an excellent chance of passing the GOP-controlled House this year – one of many areas from abortion limits to spending cuts where Republicans are moving aggressively to shift the direction of government.

In the Democratic-controlled Senate, however, the water bill faces strong opposition from California Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, both Democrats, as well as opposition from the Obama administration.
Read more at the San Francisco Chronicle.

Oceana Twists Truth to Further Agenda

Oceana’s Geoff Shester recently penned an op-ed in The Santa Cruz Sentinel alleging that forage fish harvesting is out of control and must be reigned in.  The only problem with his opinion:  the “facts”.  They are, in fact, not accurate, but instead reflect an agenda.

Below, I’ve highlighted Mr. Shester’s false claims and followed them with a dose of reality:

• “Thirty years ago forage species accounted for 40 percent of California’s commercial fish landings by weight.  Today, with big fish gone, forage landings have soared to 85 percent”

In 1981, a moratorium was in effect prohibiting sardine fishing, and tunas dominated California landings, totaling more than 40 percent of the California catch.  The tuna canning industry based in San Diego, then the tuna capitol of the world, was driven out of California beginning in the mid-1980s, due in large measure to unfair competition from foreign water-packed imports and the excessive cost of doing business in the Golden State.  Those ‘big fish’ weren’t gone from the ocean, however, they were just not landed in California.

The sardine resource made a dramatic recovery beginning in the late 1970s, with the advent of a warm-water oceanic cycle.  Resource managers reopened the fishery in 1985, but this time around, they enacted strict harvest limits coupled with environmental triggers.  The resource was declared fully recovered in 1999 when the population exceeding one million metric tons.  But the harvest rate was capped at 10 percent after subtracting 150,000 mt off the top of the biomass estimate to account for forage needs.  The stock appears to have entered another natural decline and biomass estimates have dropped sharply.  Which brings up another allegation:

• “…Overfish the forage and the rest of the marine species are in trouble…but that is exactly what is happening in California today.  Pacific sardines have declined 70 percent in the past decade, and market squid are being fished at record levels.  California fisheries, like salmon, rockfish and tuna, are depleted and in dire need of recovery.”

Regarding sardine, the conservative biomass estimate does not measure transboundary stocks in Canada and Mexico, but it does count landings from those countries, and those have declined; but coastwide harvest guidelines, including Washington and Oregon, as well as California, have also declined precipitously – from 152,000 mt in 2007 to 40,000 mt in 2011.

The market squid statement also is calculated to confuse.

California’s ocean has exhibited incredible productivity in the past two years, producing the highest grey whale count on record, resurgent rockfish stocks and a rebounding salmon fishery.  Market squid also thrived in these productive ocean conditions, but the fishery did not hit ‘record levels’.  In fact precautionary management has established a maximum harvest cap, intended to prevent overexploitation.  The fishery reached it and was closed before the end of the year.  A post-season survey of the squid spawning grounds revealed large aggregations of squid spawning nearly everywhere, well beyond end of the normal spawning cycle.

The squid life cycle runs from birth to death after spawning in nine short months or less, and abundance is driven primarily by environmental cycles. To maintain a sustainable fishery, The Department of Fish and Game instituted weekend fishing closures, allowing squid to spawn untouched for 30 percent of the week, and implemented marine reserves in more than 30 percent of traditional fishing grounds in central and southern California.  In addition, the fishery management plan approved in 2004 reduced the fleet by more than half.

California fisheries are by no means depleted, they are managed strictly by both the state and federal government (that’s why landings have appeared to decline – more fish are left in the ocean!).  Rockfish and salmon are managed under the ecosystem-based fishery management mandate of the federal Magnuson Act, with precautionary annual catch limits to prevent overfishing.

• “A recent federal study found that top ocean predators off California have declined by more than 50 percent since 2003.  Removing their source of food is like taking medicine away from the patient.  Traditional fisheries management concentrates on single species …”

The study, presumably the first draft of the “California Current Integrated Ecosystem Assessment”, does not yet include the area south of Point Conception – a critical omission acknowledged by the scientific team.  The draft IEA was submitted to the Pacific Fishery Management Council as an example.  Clearly, with data from a significant part the ocean missing, conclusions are not ready for ‘prime time’.

The IEA was developed to assist the Council in developing its Ecosystem-based Management Plan for the entire California Current – which will inform all the other fishery management plans, which now include ecosystem considerations themselves.  (The Coastal Pelagic Species plan has considered forage needs for more than a decade!)

Similar innuendos and misstatements run throughout the article, but I will touch on just one more:

• “The question of fishing sustainably is a matter of political will.  That’s why a strong coalition of conservationists, fishermen and seafood businesses that want to see … healthy California oceans are supporting Assembly Bill 1299 that emphasizes the critical role that forage species play…”

A vast majority of California’s fishing communities, including municipalities, port districts, recreational and commercial fishing groups and individuals, seafood companies and knowledgeable fishery scientists, believe California already fishes sustainably;  indeed, California Current fisheries are acknowledged as having one of the lowest harvest rates in the world.

This super-majority is very much opposed to AB 1299, seeing that it embodies the same type of confusing, captious policy statements as contained in the ‘forage fishing must be controlled’ article.

To be clear, the majority of California fishing-related interests oppose the bill for the following reasons:

• A multi-million dollar boondoggle:  AB 1299 is a solution in search of a problem.  This bill fails to acknowledge and integrate all the existing protections for forage species that now exist in both state and federal law. Whales, sea lions, and sea birds are thriving, providing clear evidence that state and federal forage species policies are working. Moreover, there are no ‘reduction’ fisheries in California, nor fishmeal plants, so the alleged threat from increasing forage fish production for aquaculture does not exist here: fisheries are strictly regulated.

• Fails to recognize existing efforts: California has done a good job managing forage fish – far better than most other states and countries.  In addition to strict harvest rates and other management measures, the Marine Life Protection Act has implemented no-take reserves, including many near bird rookeries and haul out sites to protect forage for other marine life.  To start as if from scratch is both redundant and disrespectful of that management history.

• Requires non-existent funding and staff time: Department of Fish & Game (DFG) is already enormously underfunded and understaffed for its existing tasks. The increased demand for Department research and management resources that this bill would create cannot be met without sacrificing resources for programs that are actually necessary.

• Duplicates federal and state efforts: Oceana, the bill author, admitted at a public forum that California’s Marine Life Management Act already provides a science-based process to manage forage species. The federal Pacific Fishery Management Council is currently developing its California Current Ecosystem Management Plan, which will cover the entire West Coast, not just California state waters, with objectives similar to those in AB 1299. We encourage California to collaborate with the PFMC, which does not require legislation.

• Places impossible standard on fisheries: The May 27 amendments to AB 1299 camouflage the millions needed to do specified research and make findings, yet still require new fishery management plans and amendments to fishery plans to be consistent with the new policy after January 1, 2012.  The new policy objective requires ecosystem-based management that “recognizes, prioritizes, accounts for, and incorporates the ecological services rendered by forage species”.  This implies setting explicit allocations for birds and mammals off the top of all fishery harvest plans  – and much of this information is not available.  Although final amendments in Appropriations Committee removed specific language, the threat of restriction is still inherent in this policy.

AB 1299 still requires millions in new money for DFG to prove that a fishery had no negative impacts before allowing it to operate. This is money that could be going to schools, health care, and other state programs with proven needs.

• AB 1299 does not consider best available science, and could actually impede ecosystem-based management. AB 1299 will not protect forage species as virtually all range far beyond California state waters, but the policy proposed in this bill could severely restrict California fishermen unnecessarily and unfairly.