TAB B, No. 2
GULF OF MEXICO FISHERY MANAGEMENT COUNCIL
REEF FISH MANAGEMENT COMMITTEE
The Beau Rivage Biloxi, Mississippi
OCTOBER 29-30, 2007
October 29, 2007
VOTING MEMBERS
Vernon Minton Alabama
Roy Crabtree NMFS, SERO, St. Petersburg, Florida
Robert Gill Florida
Julie Morris Florida
William Teehan (designee for Ken Haddad) Florida
Bobbi Walker Alabama
NON-VOTING MEMBERS
Columbus Brown U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Bill Daughdrill Florida
Karen Foote Louisiana
Joe Hendrix Texas
Tom McIlwain Mississippi
Harlon Pearce Louisiana
William Perret (designee for William Walker) Mississippi
Michael Ray Texas
Robin Riechers (designee for Larry McKinney) Texas
Bob Shipp Alabama
Susan Villere Louisiana
Kay Williams Mississippi
STAFF
Steven Atran Fisheries Biologist
Janet Bernard Secretary
Assane Diagne Economist
Trish Kennedy Administrative Assistant
Stu Kennedy Fisheries Biologist
Rick Leard Deputy Executive Director
Michael McLemore NOAA General Counsel
Charlene Ponce Public Information Officer
Wayne Swingle Executive Director
Amanda Thomas Court Reporter
OTHER PARTICIPANTS
Dave Allison Oceana
Pam Baker Environmental Defense
Buffy Baumann Oceana, Washington, DC
191
Lt. Cliff Beard 8th Coast Guard District, New Orleans, LA
Glen Brooks GFA, FL
Felicia Coleman FSU
Marianne Cufone GRN, Tampa, FL
David Cupka SAFMC
Ken Daniels Ruskin, FL
Andy David SEFSC
Dale Diaz Biloxi, MS
Wes Erickson British Columbia
Libby Fetherston Ocean Conservancy, St. Petersburg, FL
Chris Gledhill SEFSC
John Greene Daphne, AL
Tom Jamir NOAA SEFSC
Chris Koenig FSU
John Koolman British Columbia
Vishwanie Maharaj Environmental Defense, Austin, TX
Jim Nance NMFS
Russell Nelson CCA, FL
Bart Niquet Panama City, FL
Dennis O’Hern FRA, St. Petersburg, FL
Joe Powers NOAA
Tracy Redding Bon Secour, Alabama
Darden Rice St. Petersburg, FL
Hal Robbins NOAA OLE
Bob Spaeth Southern Offshore Fishing Association, FL
Phil Steele NOAA Fisheries
Andy Strelcheck NMFS
Bill Tucker Dunedin, FL
Carl Walters UBC
Donald Waters Pensacola, Fl
Wayne Werner Alachua, FL
Bob Zales, II, Panama City Boatmen’s Assoc., Panama City, FL
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The Reef Fish Management Committee of the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council convened in the Camellia Ballroom of the Beau Rivage, Biloxi, Mississippi, Monday afternoon, October 29, 2007, and was called to order at 1:00 o’clock p.m. by Chairman Vernon Minton.
CHAIRMAN VERNON MINTON: Let’s get the Reef Fish Committee to the table, please. I believe we’ve got everybody here today. Before we get started, Wayne has an announcement for us.
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR WAYNE SWINGLE: I would like to suggest that the committee take a moment of silence for Lela Gray’s father, who is in a hospital on a life support machine. Lela, for those of you in the audience who don’t know her, has been one of our secretaries for the last four or five years.
CHAIRMAN MINTON: Thank you, Wayne.
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR SWINGLE: Can I make one other housecleaning --
CHAIRMAN MINTON: Certainly, go ahead.
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR SWINGLE: I guess Cathy Readinger is ill in bed, at the recommendation of her physician, and so we have decided to reschedule the Budget Committee at the January meeting and that would mean that we would use that hour of time for the Joint Reef Fish/Mackerel/Red Drum Committee and that would have the effect of moving the Data Collection Committee to a one hour later start time. That’s all on Tuesday afternoon.
CHAIRMAN MINTON: Thank you, Wayne. I guess the first thing is we’ve got some new members here, Ms. Kay Williams, a new member back again. Welcome. You can’t make any motions today, just remember that, and a very new member, Mike Ray. Mike, welcome aboard and good luck.
MR. MICHAEL RAY: Thank you, Vernon.
ADOPTION OF AGENDA
CHAIRMAN MINTON: Folks, we have a suggested revised agenda, if you’ll turn to Tab B, Number 1. If you’ll look that over for just a second and see if there’s any revisions or changes that you would like to make.
MR. BOB GILL: A question, Mr. Chairman. It looks like under the revised agenda the four hours of work that’s listed there, to my mind, it seems problematic to get through. What is the plan if we do not?
CHAIRMAN MINTON: We roll it. We’ll do the best we can in either case. If we happen to get lucky and move forward a little bit, we’ll take some of the items for tomorrow, unless they’re real lengthy. Otherwise, we’ll go as long as we can and then we’ll adjourn and start off first thing in the morning.
MR. STEVEN ATRAN: Just to the point about rolling things over, I just wanted to point out that the last item of business scheduled for today is the Ecosystem Modeling Presentation by Carl Walters and I believe he’s only going to be here for today.
CHAIRMAN MINTON: Where is Carl at? Carl, are you going to be okay with where we’re set up now on the agenda? Steve had --
DR. CARL WALTERS: If you had an opening earlier, I would appreciate it.
CHAIRMAN MINTON: Thank you. Is there a motion to adopt the agenda then?
MS. BOBBI WALKER: So moved.
CHAIRMAN MINTON: It’s moved by Ms. Walker and seconded. We’ve got a motion on the floor to accept, but it hasn’t been voted on.
DR. ROY CRABTREE: If I could, Mr. Chairman, under Other Business, I would like to have a discussion of the recreational red snapper landings estimates through Wave 4 and issues related to the recreational quota and overruns for this year.
CHAIRMAN MINTON: Any objection? We’ll slip that under Other Business then. Anything else? Any objection to adoption as amended? Hearing none, so ordered. That then brings us to British Columbia.
MR. ATRAN: We have Approval of Minutes.
APPROVAL OF MINUTES
CHAIRMAN MINTON: We haven’t done the minutes yet. I’m sorry. I’m trying to get to British Columbia in a hurry. On Tab B-2, we have the minutes for your review. Are there any additions, changes, corrections?
MR. GILL: I’ll find it in a minute, but there’s a correction and it was way the heck down here. Let me find it and I’ll get right back to you, but there is a correction that needs to be made.
CHAIRMAN MINTON: We’ll take a second. Go ahead. Can you find it, Bob? Tell you what, let’s just hold on this vote while you’re looking for it and we’ll get started with the presentation and when that’s over, we’ll come back and we’ll actually approve the minutes. Is that okay with you? Is that okay with the other members? Okay, thank you.
Now we have two guests here today, Mr. Wes Erickson and John Koolman from British Columbia. They’re going to be talking about their IFQ program and I haven’t met you and so -- Which one are you? I’m sorry.
MR. WES ERICKSON: I’m Wes Erickson.
CHAIRMAN MINTON: Wes, okay. The next guy must be John. Wes, thank you for coming down. We really appreciate it and look forward to your presentation and you have the stage.
BRITISH COLUMBIA IFQ PROGRAM
MR. ERICKSON: Thanks for having me and I just want to mention right off the bat that I’m a commercial fisherman and I’m not a presenter and so you’ll have to forgive me for my nervousness or any mistakes I might make along the way.
I want to thank the Gulf Fishermen’s Association for inviting John and myself down and I want to thank Environmental Defense for helping to facilitate our coming down to speak to fishermen. This was a fishermen’s initiative, like it usually is in individual quota systems, and I’m pleased to see that they’re looking into other fisheries.
I’m an active commercial fisherman. My last day of commercial fishing was on September 13th of this year, 2007. I’m going to tell you what it was like prior to quotas and what happened and what it’s like now.
I’m not very familiar with the fishery here in the Gulf. I’ve read about the various problems and proposals, but I know reading about it is one thing and actually living it is another thing. It will be up to you to draw your own comparisons and take what you want out of this presentation and leave the rest. I’m certainly not here to tell anybody how to manage their fishery.
Just off the bat, that’s a Pacific halibut. That’s a particularly big one we caught this year. That’s me and my son standing there. We’re primarily a longline fishery and we encounter various species when we’re longlining. This is the coastline we fish on. We fish from the Washington border right up to the Alaska border.
What it was like in 1990, we had six days of fishing. There was 435 vessels that participated in the fishery and several million pounds of halibut were landed at once, a small amount of fresh and the majority was frozen, because of the volume.
We had poor quality and very low prices. Buyers controlled the price, just because of the sheer volume that came in. There was only two or three buyers that had the infrastructure to handle that kind of volume.
Our non-target species were discarded, because we all thought we were going to fill up on halibut during an opening and we didn’t want to take a chance and keep species other than halibut and so we tossed them over the side.
We had fishermen lost at sea because of the competitive nature of commercial fishing. You go out in just about any weather. In 1987, we lost seven vessels and several fishermen, a few of which were my friends. We lost gear because of the competitive nature and that gear continued to ghost fish.
There was lots of low-paying, short-term jobs. You can imagine they would be short-term in six days. We would under harvest and we would over harvest on some openings. Aquaculture was actively developing a farmed halibut industry to fill the marketplace with fresh fish when we weren’t fishing, which, as you can imagine, was many days out of the year.
Our main motivator was safety. This is a great slide, because it shows the mentality we had. This vessel is actually sinking and you can see the fishermen still trying to hold the fish onboard the boat as it’s going down. That could have been me.
Marketing was a main concern. We had no control over price. We just all ran into the buyers and dumped our fish off as quick as possible, for whatever price they paid us. Conservation, of course, was a concern, because we were discarding non-target species.
We considered many options. One was do nothing and one was gear restrictions and another one was catch restrictions, time and area restrictions, government-funded buyback programs, and individual quota program. We decided to study an individual quota program.
As you can imagine, there was a lot of resistance to this. The biggest resistance was the allocation formula. No one felt they got allocated enough in an individual quota and as the formula changed, as my father likes to say, it just shifted the smiles around the room as you changed the formula.
Corporate concentration was a concern. It would devastate coastal communities and that was a concern. Privatization of a public resource was thrown out there, that doctors, lawyers and environmental groups would purchase all the quota, and why should we change? Why not let the sport sector change or the native sector? Why should we be the first ones to change? We thought that our behavior should be conditional on someone else’s behavior.
I’m going to tell you about what it’s like now. We actually took a vote and we went to quotas and now we’re always within the TAC. In fact, I don’t think we’ve ever been over the TAC. We always come in just under it. Our catch is now landed over nine months and it’s primarily a fresh market.
Our quality has improved substantially. Our trips, which used to be long, are now two to five days long and we’re getting record prices. We’ve removed competition amongst fishermen and now that the competition is gone, we are concentrating on maximizing our return on the fish we have and getting the fishermen individually trying to get the most money for our fish and that leads right into buyer and seller independence.
We have choice now. There’s a lot more smaller buyers in the markets and we have the option of marketing our own fish independently.
One of the down sides is it is difficult for new entrants into the fishery. It’s very expensive. You must own a license prior to purchasing quota and you must own a vessel to put that license on.
The initial cost to fishermen, before you actually go out fishing, because we fund part of the management, it costs me personally about $8,000 to leave the dock every year before I land one fish, but the money I get for my fish now, compared to before, far outweighs that initial cost.
We have a dockside monitoring program, which tags each fish individually. That’s led to a decreased number of violations, because if you see a halibut in British Columbia that doesn’t have one of these tags on the tail, that’s an illegal fish. These tags are sequentially numbered and can be tracked back to the fisherman and the vessel and the plant and the time it was caught. It has also helped considerably in marketing our fish.
Individual accountability has led to individual responsibility. We found in the old system that collective responsibility did not work at all, because we had what we called the dirty dozen in our fishery.