True and false facts about the NJ free fishing bill S1122

[kensdock]

FALSE--- Fishermen will vacation in NJ because it is free to fish.

FALSE---- Money was stolen/diverted or raided from the 2010 NJBMF’s budget.

FALSE---- If NJ had a saltwater license the money would not be protected.

FALSE--- Most fishermen oppose a fee to fish in NJ.

FALSE--- NJ fishermen care about symbolic acts to lure tourist.


TRUE --- The more fishing opportunities {Fish} the more fishermen will vacation in NJ.

TRUE--- Money was not stolen/diverted o raided from the NJ Marine fisheries budget.

TRUE— All fishing and hunting license funds are protected by federal law.

TRUE--- free fishing bill S1122 will cost New Jersey Millions of dollars in Dingell-Johnson Sport fishing Restoration funds.

TRUE--- NJ will continue to lose grant money with the free registry bill. Like the $150,000,000 federal grant Florida was online to receive last year. Florida planned to build saltwater hatcheries, creating 3,129 immediate construction jobs and 169 permanent jobs.

Please check the facts and quote below:




“I have attached a report showing the projects New Jersey has funded with Dingell-Johnson Sport Fish Restoration Dollars. All DJ funds are obligated through my office; the New Jersey Division of Fish and Wildlife asks for our approval of proposed work, so there are many checks and balances to ensure DJ funds go only to work authorized under law. In addition, the Dept. of the Interior Office of Inspector General (OIG) audits NJ DFW (and all State fish and wildlife agencies) every 5 years to ensure funds are used properly.



Director Dave Chanda and Federal Aid Coordinator Paulette Nelson are, in my opinion, of the highest integrity. I know from experience how diligent they are in protecting license funds and DJ dollars from outside attempts to divert them. I have great confidence in their ability to safeguard sporting dollars. If NJ were to establish a Saltwater Fishing License that generated revenue, the amount of DJ dollars they receive would increase.

Federal regulations under 50 CFR Part 80 would apply to saltwater fishing license funds. These dollars would be provided the full protection of federal law, and could not be used for any purpose other than the fisheries work of NJ DFW. My office, and the OIG enforce these regulations - it is a big part of what we do. Over the past two years I have personally intervened in close to 20 attempts to divert license revenues or assetts acquired with those funds across the 18 agencies in our region that receive Wildlife and Sport Fish Restoration dollars. We take this responsibility very seriously, and have, to date, prevented diversions.”




John F. Organ, Ph.D., CWB
Chief, Division of Wildlife and Sport Fish Restoration
Adjunct Associate Professor of Wildlife Conservation, UMass Amherst
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
300 Westgate Center Drive
Hadley, MA 01035



Here is the results of the saltwater license poll taken after a long debate, that included represenitives of the fishing groups opposed to the license and all users of the saltwater fishing resource, 24,000 members.http://www.thebassbarn.com/forum/sho...d.php?t=203517 2-1 in favor of a New Jersey saltwater license.
http://www.coralreef.gov/grants/usfws/SPORTF-2.pdf

http://supportfloridasportfish.typep...s-package.html

[kensdock]

I forgot one very important fact, politics, like or not it is a big part of how saltwater fish are managed. You have groups that regardless of what the concerns of the biologist are, they push for the longest season and shortest size limit, in complete disregard of the future of saltwater fishing or the condition of the fish stock. One group claims to represent recreational fishermen, however, how can any group represent both business interest and recreational interest without compromising one or the other? With a little research you will find an article that appeared in the Newark Star ledger concerning this “recreational” fishing group. The article claimed this group was being sued by a watch dog group. The group claimed a CEO of a local company was signing the checks and calling the shots, questioning their non-profit status. Be mindful as to where their allegiance lies before taking their word as gospel.
This is exactly were we are with the free fishing bill S1122.
Politics will remain part of the fish management process. The best contribution you can make is to form your own opinion about the issues that effect saltwater fishing, and make the phone call and send the e-mail yourself.

[kensdock]

I do not agree with Ted Williams on all issues, but he is right on the money with this article. In part:

The Oz figure behind this attempted gutting of Magnuson is the Recreational Fishing Alliance (RFA), which reports that Pallone’s bill has the backing of 100 fishing groups and industry members. The board and staff of the RFA is dominated by fishing-boat builders, fishing-gear manufacturers, advertisers fronting as fishing writers, party-boat owners and charter-boat owners who call themselves sport fishermen but who, under Magnuson’s definition, are commercials because they retain and sell their clients’ catch.
There’s scarcely anyone involved who doesn’t make money killing fish—not that there’s anything wrong with that. But the RFA would get more respect if it was honest and called itself a trade association.
When it comes to limiting your catch, the RFA believes in strict dieting except when hungry. And it’s always hungry. According to the RFA, the only thing standing in the way of more fillets in America’s freezers are environmentalists.
RFA Director James Donofrio describes the amended Magnuson Act as the dirty work of “anti-fishing environmental groups who have lobbied against our efforts” and who control the minds of anglers “still drinking the Kool-Aid of the anti-fishing environmental groups.”
Such pronouncements puzzle me because I have worked with or for all the national environmental groups, and I know for a fact that not one is anti-fishing. Can the RFA mean local environmental groups? They’d have to be incredibly powerful.
The RFA has confused me further with its Web site announcement that “environmentalists are pushing their agenda on marine fisheries issues affecting you.” For anyone paying attention that’s great news because environmentalists are unwavering in their support for restoring natural fish abundance with sustainable fishing, but the RFA didn’t mean to commend them. Somehow it fancies that anglers and environmentalists are different people on different and opposing sides. But the questions I have for the RFA are these: Are we not all environmentalists? Do you know of people anywhere, even among your staff and board, who are not in favor of their surroundings?
Railing against what it calls “the devastating management measures put forth due to the reauthorization of the Magnuson Act” and lobbying for evisceration via the Pallone bill is United We Fish. Members include the RFA, Conservation Cooperative of Gulf Fishermen, United Boatmen of New York, United Boatmen of New Jersey, New York Sportfishing Federation, Maryland Saltwater Sportfishermen’s Association and the Fishing Rights Alliance.

Last October, some 300 flexibility activists staged a demonstration outside NMFS’ regional offices in Gloucester, Mass., shrieking hysterically and hanging NMFS personnel in effigy. On February 24, 2010, they staged a similar protest on the steps of the Capitol Building in D.C., shouting down NMFS director Eric Schwaab when he tried to address them and waving placards adorned with swastikas and such messages as “NMFS: No More Fake Science”; “Fishing is a God-Given Right”; “Seniors Against Fishing Closures”; “Lubchenco: Obama’s Fox Guarding the Nation’s Fish Houses”; “NMFS Starving America”; and “PEW Something Stinks.”
“I’m not sure how much this stuff helps them,” remarks Pew Charitable Trusts’ Lee Crockett, propped up as an alleged anti-fishing boogeyman by the RFA and other United We Fish members to frighten anglers into parting with their money. “Is this the face of the recreational-fishing community we want Congress to see? When our elected officials think of recreational fishermen they think of the RFA. It’s the loudest, and it gets the attention. Congress needs to hear from conservationists who don’t want to kill the last fish.”
Recently, United We Fish has allied itself with commercial-fisheries consultant, Garden State Seafood Association flack and tireless recreational-angling critic Nils Stolpe. Magnuson, he laments, has been “distorted by anti-fishing activists” so as to blight “what used to be vibrant fishing communities that dotted our coastlines from Maine to Florida, along the Gulf coast, and from San Diego to Seattle.” It is this law, he contends, that has caused the “onslaught that started at about the time of Florida’s net ban in the early 1990s; fishing business after fishing business has had its doors shut by ill-conceived, inflexible and unnecessary laws and regulations supposedly put in place in the name
of ‘conservation.’”
Never have I read anything by Stolpe suggesting that overharvest has had something to do with his industry’s travails or that sustainable fishing might solve them. The industry’s argument that “economic considerations” dictate a need for overfishing can be summarized as follows: Our current economic ill health leaves us no choice but to destroy the stocks on which our economic health depends. Stolpe and the United We Fish members he speaks for have yet to grasp what all good parents have learned—that sometimes the kindest word one can utter is “No.”
At times, United We Fish members approve of good science, and at other times they do not; it all depends on the findings. Occasionally, both personalities manifest simultaneously.
For instance, in the RFA press release of December 16, 2009, Stolpe complains that “the scientists have been put in charge, and as the list of closures and restrictions…painfully demonstrates, the Act has been turned into a weapon that is now being used against fishermen and fishing communities.” But in the very same release RFA’s Donofrio congratulates United We Fish members for supposedly “calling for scientific based Magnuson reform” and Bob Zales, mouthpiece for United We Fish member Conservation Cooperative of Gulf Fishermen, proclaims that his people “fully support real science-based management.”
Good marine fishing depends on good science. Without accurate data gathered by NMFS fisheries observers deployed on commercial vessels the agency cannot determine which stocks are sustainable. NMFS fisheries observers are the eyes of the agency; it uses their information to measure health and abundance of fish populations. These data enable councils to develop regulations that can protect fish and the future of recreational and commercial fishing.
So marine conservationists saluted the RFA when it hired former NMFS fisheries observer John Depersenaire as its “Fisheries Policy and Science Researcher”—that is, until they learned about his criminal record. In 2006, he received five years probation and was ordered to pay restitution of $29,541 for, in the agency’s words, “embezzling” money and “falsif data from 59 trips” for which he was a no-show while under contract as a NMFS observer. Such is the RFA’s commitment to science.
Fortunately, there are lots more recreational anglers defending Magnuson than attacking it. Few are more knowledgeable than Charles Witek, chair of the Coastal Conservation Association’s Atlantic States Committee, vice chair of its national government relations committee and former member of the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council.
“What happens to striped bass and tunas if New England herring aren’t properly managed?” Witek inquires. “We don’t know because ecosystem management hasn’t come along far enough. Right now there’s a lot of concern that pair trawlers are stripping herring inshore. We tried flexibility all the way up to 1996. It didn’t work. That’s why we passed the Sustainable Fisheries Act; that’s why we strengthened the act in 2006. Fishermen made it clear that they can’t manage themselves. Turning back the clock is only going to harm the fisheries and public interest.”
And then there’s Doug Olander, the smart, tough editor of Sport Fishing magazine whose editorials are not to be missed by anyone who loves the sea and its life forms.
“While technically I am bound by law to honor our mortgage agreement, requiring me to make payments of a specified amount each month, I am hereby declaring a ‘Flexibility in Meeting My Debts Proclamation,’” he writes in a mock letter to his fictitious home-mortgage officer, Mr. Farnsworth Buttingham. “I am not for a moment suggesting I shouldn’t pay what I’ve promised. But, really, why insist on doing that in 15 years? Why not stretch that out to 50 or 60 years? And why have set payments when, in a lean year I’d rather pay much less.”

Ted Williams

[Curmudgeon]

Would anyone actually vacation in NJ? I mean, really ...