Capt. Mark Phillips of the F/V Illusion warns that electronic monitoring will be cost prohibitive
The Nature Conservancy a 6.5 BILLION dollar ENGO (2014 IRS 990) has put forward a paper seeking Electronic Monitoring on groundfish boats by May 1, 2017. If people recall The Nature Conservancy said very little about the BP
oil spill.
NOAA and it’s environmental partners are bound and determined to force paid monitoring and eventually EMS on the fishermen. The last EMS study was delayed and delayed so that NOAA’s partners could put out misinformation
about costs. And when the report did come out it substantially underestimates costs by assuming the average groundfish trip is 1.5 days when in reality my sector ‘s average trip is 6-10 days which is 4 to 7 times greater in duration. The report also underestimates the number of hauls, claiming the average trip has five haul backs when in fact we are looking at between 40 to 60 hauls per trip, an underestimation by a factor of 10. 
Even with such severely flawed underestimations the report calculates Electronic Monitoring start up costs at
$59,575 with an average annual cost of $50,619 and an estimated first year learning fee of $42,684. The total estimated first year cost amounts to $152,878 which represents between 15 to 25 percent of a groundfish boat’s GROSS income! That figure doesn’t even take into account the underestimation by a factor of 4-10 of groundfish trip effort. These cost estimates were derived from the NOAA Fisheries Greater Atlantic Regional Fisheries Office and Northeast Fisheries Science Center
paper of June 10, 2015 entitled ‘A Preliminary Cost Comparison of At Sea Monitoring and Electronic Monitoring for a Hypothetical Groundfish Sector.’
To submit written comments:
- Email: nmfs.gar.efp@noaa.gov. Include in the subject line “TNC EM EFP.”
- Mail: John K. Bullard, Regional Administrator, NMFS, Greater Atlantic Regional Fisheries Office, 55 Great Republic Drive, Gloucester, MA 01930. Mark the outside of the envelope “TNC EM EFP.”
See the links below for more information:
http://www.greateratlantic.fisheries.noaa.gov/regs/2016/April/16tnce_efp.pdf
<http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.greateratlantic.fisheries.noaa.gov%2Fregs%2F2016%2FApril%2F16tnce_efp.pdf&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNGoLgYrDoEJk16O9z6-PldL-Blb-A>
