December 7, 2007

Mr. Daniel Furlong
Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council
Room 2115 Federal Building
300 South New Street
Dover, DE  19904-6790

Dear Mr. Furlong:

Once again, Coastal Conservation Association New York ("CCA NY") is taking the opportunity to address one aspect of the recreational summer flounder specifications, the question of whether all anglers, in all states, should fish under a single, uniform set of regulations, or whether the current state-by-state regulatory approach should be maintained.

CCA NY strongly advocates abandoning the current approach and adopting a single, coastwide set of regulations. 

I

NMFS acknowledges the failure of state-by-state management

            In a letter to W. Peter Jensen, Chairman of the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council (the "Council"), Dr. William T. Hogarth, Assistant Administrator for Fisheries for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and director of the National Marine Fisheries Service ("NMFS"), stated that "while the concept of allowing states to craft management measures designed to achieve the necessary recreational harvest reduction to be equivalent to Federal measures is both appealing and has strong merits, it has not served the rebuilding efforts well." [1]   Patricia Kurkul, the northeast Regional Administrator for NMFS, echoed Hogarth's sentiments, stating that "The 2007 state-by-state conservation equivalency management measures have not been effective in constraining harvest." [2]

            Given NMFS' realization that state by state management is inadequate to constrain recreational harvest, it would be irresponsible for the Council to continue to recommend such an approach.  Instead, it is time for the Council to recognize that, as Dr. Hogarth suggested, "new approaches" are needed, to "better ensure that the recreational targets are not exceeded" [3] in 2008 and beyond.  State-by-state management, while appealing in theory, includes too many inherent flaws to be a viable management approach.  An examination of such flaws shall comprise the remainder of these comments.

II

The current state-by-state approach is not supported by reliable data

            Under the current state-by-state management approach, "states are required to adjust effort to achieve landings proportional to their landings from 1998, as reported by the Marine Recreational Fisheries Statistics Survey ("MRFSS")." [4]   Such single year's MRFSS data is an insufficient basis for allocating summer flounder among the affected states.

            MRFSS, while the only available estimate of recreational summer flounder harvest, contains serious flaws.  Those flaws have been recognized by the National Research Council, which recently issued a report critical of MRFSS. [5]   Unfortunately, managers are using MRFSS for purposes for which it was not intended and clearly not suited, including the estimation of harvest at finer geographical scales than the coastwide scale at which MRFSS was originally intended to operate. [6]   Using a single year of MRFSS data to allocate recreational summer flounder harvest among the states is a clear misuse of such data.

III

State-by-state management introduces additional sources of error into the data

            The use of MRFSS data to predict the future harvest of anglers in any particular state allows numerous opportunities for error.  Perhaps the most obvious arises out of the calculation of season length.  Typically, each day within a particular two-month "wave" is assigned a value representing the total harvest estimate for the two-month period, divided by the number of days in the wave.  That results in a satisfactory estimate so long as the entire wave is included within the open season.  However, once a wave straddles a season opening or closure, error necessarily intrudes.  Using the northeast (New Jersey to Massachusetts) fishery as an example, far more summer flounder are caught in the last two weeks of June than are caught in the first two weeks of May, and far more are landed in early September than in late October.  However, for purposes of setting seasons, no allowance for such intra-wave variations are made, and all days of the wave are given equal weighting.  Thus, a season which begins in late May or early June, and ends some time in September may, on paper, be adequate to constrain harvest but, in reality, is almost certain to lead to overfishing due to the greater daily harvest which occurs at the end of Wave 3 and beginning of Wave 5, when compared to those waves overall.  By eliminating state-by-state management, and going to a coastwide management regime embodying no closed season, such source of overfishing is effectively foreclosed.

            Coastwide management also limits the impact of local abundance of summer flounder and local weather conditions.  It is inevitable that, somewhere on the coast, unusually good weather will coincide with an abundance of summer flounder, and the resultant harvest will push the "fortunate" state well above its annual allocation.  Similarly, other areas will, for reasons of poor weather or a local scarcity of fish, take lower than average numbers of fish in a given wave or perhaps an entire season.  While such underharvest creates no management problems in the year that it occurs, it does create an issue in the succeeding year, when weather and the availability of fish return to more typical levels and the affected state, now fishing under relatively liberal regulations because of the previous year's low harvest, substantially exceeds its allocation.  Something of this sort occurred in New York in 2006 and 2007.  Wave 3 harvest in 2006 was lower than expected, and accounted for a disproportionately low share of total harvest for that year.  After taking all of 2006 harvest into account, New York was required to reduce recreational landings by roughly 48% in 2007, and adopted a season, bag limit and size limit that should have been more than adequate, as they were calculated to reduce harvest by 56%.  However, when Wave 3 landings not only returned to normal levels in 2007, but actually exceeded landings for Wave 4 (usually the single most productive wave), New York exceeded its allocation in mid-season despite the margin for error incorporated in its regulations, and as a result closed its season earlier than had been planned.  Coastwide regulations, because they are not affected by issues of local abundance or access, remove this source of error from the specification setting process, and makes over-all recreational harvest easier to predict.

IV

Coastwide management is the approach most likely to restore traditional harvest patterns

As CCA NY pointed out in similar comments provided in 2006, the assumption that underlies the current state-by-state allocations is that each state's proportional share of the 1998 recreational summer flounder harvest represents what such state would normally harvest if it fished under the same set of regulations as every other state.  Thus, the Council and the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission ("ASMFC") agreed that states could be permitted to set whatever combination of size limit, bag limit and seasons they believed would best benefit their local fishery, so long as they remained within their allotted share of the recreational summer flounder harvest.  That decision appeared sound at the time that it was made, but experience has shown that, in practice, it has not achieved the desired result.

In recent years, both the regulations and the share of landing in each of the states landing summer flounder have fluctuated substantially.  Perhaps that is due to errors in the MRFSS figures for 1998, which may not have accurately quantified each state's share of the overall harvest.  Perhaps it is due to an expanding summer flounder population, containing a higher proportion of larger fish, expanding its range and shifting its centers of abundance, so that the distribution and harvest patterns of 1998 no longer apply.  Whatever the reason, it is time to abandon the use of 1998 figures and adopt a coastwide management plan which, in the future, might serve as the foundation for a new state-by-state or regional allocation, if managers so decide, based on patterns of harvest and distribution more typical of a recovered stock.

V

Conclusion

There is little if any justification for continuing to allocate recreational summer flounder landings on a state-by-state basis.

The initial basis for the current allocation, MRFSS estimates of each state's harvest in 1998, has been effectively discredited by the National Research Council's criticism of MRFSS generally, and more particularly by its conclusion that the MRFSS methodology is inadequate for accurately estimating harvest at finer (i.e., state-level or smaller) geographic levels. 

Even if the 1998 harvest estimates were valid, it appears that changes in patters of the distribution and harvest of summer flounder bring the continued use of such estimates into question.  Managers now need to move past the current allocation scheme to one which reflects the reality of today's fishery.

However, perhaps the most compelling argument in favor of coastwide management, and one recently acknowledged by NMFS, is the simple and basic fact that the current state-by-state management scheme, as applied in good faith by the states and monitored, using the best tools available, by the technical committee at the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, has been unable to adequately restrain recreational harvest.

            CCA NY thus again requests that the Council recommend, and that NMFS adopt, regulations that abandon the current state-by-state allocation in favor of a coastwide regulatory scheme that is more appropriate to MRFSS capabilities, recent landings patterns and traditional notions of equity.

            Thank you for considering CCA NY's views on this matter.

Sincerely,

Charles A. Witek, III

State Chair

Cc:  Patricia Kurkul