What’s one or two more dead Pacific loggerhead or leatherback sea turtles a year going to mean for the survival of those species? According to the federal Western Pacific Fishery Management Council, probably nothing.
Conservationists, on the other hand, believe that when it comes to these two federally listed, and some say critically endangered, animals, the loss of even one animal, or its injury as a result of an encounter with fishing gear, is one too many.
On April 14, the council recommended raising the annual “hard caps” on turtle interactions (also known as takes) with Hawai`i’s shallow-set longline swordfish fishery from 17 for loggerheads and 16 for leatherbacks, to 46 and 19, respectively. The new caps are tied to another recommendation made at the April meeting to abolish the annual limit of 2,120 shallow sets, an action the council predicts could result in a doubling of fishing effort, of revenue, of sea turtle interactions, and of administration and enforcement costs.
According to a spreadsheet prepared by council staff and based on discussions during a March meeting of the council’s Scientific and Statistical Committee (SSC), removing the limit on sets would probably result in an increase in fishing effort to between 4,250 and 5,550 sets a year. And if that were to occur, staff calculated that loggerhead takes (either fatal or non-fatal interactions with gear) would increase to between 40 and 50 a year and the number of adult loggerhead females that would be killed would be two or three. Leatherback takes would increase to between 16 and 21, and the number of adult female leatherbacks killed would also be two or three.
Based on the results of a computer model of extinction risks, council staff determined that the turtle deaths associated with lifting the set effort limit were just shy of the level where there might be “issues” with the loggerhead population. While the predicted leatherback mortality rate exceeded that level, council staffer Eric Kingma pointed out that mortality rates for both turtles were likely to improve since there had been no loggerhead interactions and only one leatherback interaction between January 1 and the April meeting.
Dissent
The measures passed, but not without controversy. Hawai`i council members Peter Young, Laura Thielen, and Rick Gaffney and Guam member Alberto Lamorena voted against raising the caps. Young and Lamorena also voted against lifting the effort limit.
Before voting on the hard caps, Young said, “I think it’s inappropriate to lift turtle caps and say it’s a good thing. It encourages more interaction [with turtles].” He added that the numbers upon which the council was basing its decision were merely what was presented by council staff and did not necessarily represent the best available science.
Thielen, director of the state Department of Land and Natural Resources, agreed. “Similar to Peter Young, I’m voting no. Before I can support an increase, I would like more information,” she said.
Guam member Manuel Duenas, however, argued that the council’s decision is merely a jumping off point that will lead to a new biological opinion – and, ultimately, new fishing rules – by the National Marine Fisheries Service. “If [its] scientists can come up with new numbers, good!….This is what it takes to get things going,” he said.
Adding to the fireworks was an exchange between Young and council chair Sean Martin, who is also president of the Hawai`i Longline Association. It was HLA’s proposal to NMFS, in February 2007, that set in motion the council’s efforts to loosen the shallow-set fishery regulations. Although Martin had voluntarily recused himself from voting on any of the shallow-set fishery action items, he continued to chair the meeting and participate in discussions. Concerned about arguments Martin had made during the discussion on whether the best available science was being used, Young said, “I think you’re trying to convince us [to feel a certain way]. If you’re recusing, it would be helpful to not try to do that.”
In a less controversial vote, the council unanimously decided (except for an abstention by NMFS Pacific region director William Robinson) to recommend that the service change the way caps are implemented. At present, they are calculated annually. As soon as either cap is reached (on sets, or on turtle interactions), the fleet is to shut down immediately for the rest of the calendar year. Under the recommended plan, the caps would be calculated on a multi-year basis. So instead of having the fishery shut down after 16 loggerhead interactions, they’d have a limit of 48 over three years.
The council also recommended the following regarding the shallow-set fishery:
• Require the NMFS and council staff to fully analyze turtle-fishery interaction numbers and associated adult female mortalities and require a comprehensive review of that analysis by the SSC prior to final action.
• Abolish the shallow-set certificate program that tracks how many sets are made each year.
• Do not implement a time-area closure. Although there isn’t one now, last year, when determining the scope of the supplemental environmental impact statement for amendments to its Pelagic Fisheries Management Plan, the council voted to evaluate whether or not a time-area closure should be imposed on the swordfish fishery.
• Require council staff, the Pacific Island Fisheries Science Center, and the NMFS Pacific Islands Regional Office to create a pilot project to investigate whether video monitoring is an effective substitute for 100 percent, on-board observer coverage, which is now required of the shallow-set fishery.
• Require council staff to work with the NMFS to describe in the draft supplemental environmental impact statement on the FMP amendments the different incidental take statements for various U.S. pelagic fisheries operating in the western Pacific region.
• Direct council staff working with the NMFS to describe in the DSEIS other fisheries in Hawai`i and California that may be impacted by the council’s decisions.
• Continue turtle conservation efforts and ask the NMFS “to include successful results in an environmental baseline as well as credit the results as they may offset the impacts of the Hawai`i shallow-set fishery as appropriate.” A February 2008 informal draft supplemental EIS prepared by council staff states that the council’s conservation efforts in Japan have resulted in “over 100,000 loggerhead hatchlings conserved and released over the past four years that would have otherwise been lost.”
Turtle Credits?
While no members of the public offered testimony on the suite of measures relating to the Hawai`i-based shallow-set longline fishery, Earthjustice attorney Paul Achitoff told Environment Hawai`i during a break in the meeting, “It’s now become sort of a derby. How much [swordfish] can you catch before you catch a certain number of turtles? It demonstrates that the council doesn’t have much comprehension of the Endangered Species Act or conservation sensitivity.”
Achitoff, who represented the Center for Biological Diversity and the Turtle Island Restoration Network in the litigation that led the NMFS to place the current restrictions on the fishery, said that he’s not surprised at the council’s decisions.
“I’ve always assumed the longline industry and the council would push [for looser restrictions]…and say, ‘Look at our mitigation.’ I’m surprised it took this long,” he said.
Achitoff said he has no idea how the council staff derived the proposed new caps. He has long believed both caps should be set at zero, he said.
With regard to the council’s request that the NMFS incorporate the results of council-sponsored conservation efforts into its review of the fishery, Achitoff said, “I can’t say I’ve ever seen a biological opinion that allows credits…I don’t think it makes rational sense. It’s not how you do the analysis.”
According to PIRO deputy administrator Mike Tosatto, however, the idea of conservation credits is not new and is being seriously considered by government resource management agencies, including the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the NMFS.
“I look at it like a needle on a gauge. If the needle is pointing down and if we’re doing something to point that needle upward, why can’t we get credit? Fishing deflects the needle downward, conservation pushes it upward….Why not take that cumulative impact [into consideration]?” Tosatto told Environment Hawai`i.
He added that although the NMFS has no policy or rules regarding conservation credits, the
council’s proposal will be considered in the biological opinion NMFS must prepare on the proposal. (A biological opinion, or BiOp, determines whether or not a proposed federal action will further jeopardize a listed species.) Tosatto acknowledged that determining how or whether the council’s loggerhead turtle conservation efforts in Japan counteract the Hawai`i fishery’s impacts won’t be easy.
“It would be nice if it were a Petri jar where everything is equal…. [but] we’re affecting two different life cycles,” he said, referring to the fact that the fishery interacts mostly with juveniles, while the conservation efforts are focused on hatchlings.
Next Steps
All of the decisions made at the council’s April meeting were re-dos of council votes made at the meeting in Guam and Saipan held March 17-21. According to the Federal Register, the council office had sent its agenda to the NMFS in early February, but the service didn’t publish the notice until March 21. Because the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation Act requires advance notification of council meetings, the council was forced to reconsider all of the actions taken at the March meeting.
The council must still take final action on all of its April decisions at a second meeting, which Kingma said would be in either June or October. Once final decisions are made, the council will submit a DSEIS to the NMFS, which will release it to the public for comment. At the same time, the NMFS will begin preparing a BiOp in accordance with the Endangered Species Act.
Now that the council has indicated its preferred course of action, Tosatto says, the NMFS will work with council staff to ensure that the DSEIS includes, as much as possible, the same information that might be used in a BiOp.
Investigations Mount Over Council Spending
Over the past year, the council has received several Freedom of Information Act requests from individuals and organizations — including council member Young, Kaua`i activist Maka`ala Ka`aumoana, Tina Owens of the LOST Fish Coalition, and Environment Hawai`i – seeking detailed information about council expenditures, in particular, those related to the Ho`ohanohano I Na Kupuna Puwalu series held in 2006 and 2007. The meetings, sponsored mainly by the council and organized in cooperation with the Association of Hawaiian Civic Clubs, were a crucible for state legislation passed in 2007 establishing a committee to investigate community-based natural resource management.
In recent years, the use of council staff and funds to help craft state legislation has become a source of great concern among several local non-profit organizations. In February, prompted by their complaints, U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman wrote a letter to the Government Accountability Office asking it to investigate the council’s expenditures to “verify whether the council and its executive director are properly using and accounting for government funds.” In March, the GAO agreed to start an investigation later this year and to work with the Inspector General’s office, which is also investigating the council, to avoid any duplication of effort.
Pending the results of those investigations, members of the public continue to seek expenditure information on their own. In March 2008, Environment Hawai`i published an article on the inadequate response it has gotten to its November 2007 FOIA request for documents regarding puwalu-related expenses. And judging by testimony given at the council’s April meeting, it appears that Owens and Ka`aumoana have also been left wanting.
Testifying by phone, Owens said her questions to the council had not been adequately addressed and she complained about how difficult it has been to get documents from the council. As an example, she said that she had asked for a copy of a council budget given to members at the March meeting, but was told by council executive director Kitty Simonds that it was not for distribution.
At the April meeting in Honolulu, Owens asked which council program had provided money for the puwalu series, and also asked about Simonds’ alleged profit sharing. (In 2006, the Cascadia Times newspaper reported that Simonds’ salary includes an annual profit sharing payment of $20,000.)
Simonds responded that the puwalu was a series of meetings intended to engage the community in fishery management, which she said is a fundamental job of the council. Therefore, she said, money for the series came from all programs, including those for the fishery ecosystem plan, information collection, and indigenous fishing rights, among others.
As for her alleged “profit sharing”, Simonds said that is simply what her 401(k) retirement program is called.
Ka`aumoana testified that although she understands Simonds’ explanation about the puwalu funding, she still hoped to see travel budgets, as well as a general budget for 2007. She added that she has not received documents that puwalu coordinator Leimana DaMate promised to provide.
Simonds said she would check into the DaMate issue. She also suggested that
because the various FOIA requests ask for many of the same things, “We can ask the government to do one document [to answer] all the FOIAs.”
How much you make?
While discussing miscellaneous issues with council members, Simonds revealed that Owens had sent an email to the council’s entire staff, except for Simonds, listing all of its paid positions and associated salaries and asking each staff member how much they were getting paid. Although the list did not include any names, Simonds says that based on the position title, “Now, each staff member knows what the other makes and they didn’t before.”
Although council member Manuel Duenas worried that this would cause animosity among staff members, Silas DeRoma, general counsel for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said that the council is treated as though it were a federal agency subject to disclosure laws and that salary information can be obtained by the public.
An Apology on Guam
At the council’s March meeting held in Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Guam member Manuel Duenas apologized to the council for his role in a series of complaints by government officials that council representatives from Guam were spreading false or misleading information about marine conservation programs and insulting and intimidating invited speakers at public informational meetings.
Between January and March, NOAA Coral Reef Conservation Program Manager David Kennedy received four letters from government and conservation group representatives in Guam and Pohnpei alleging that council representatives had disrupted a series of community meetings in November 2007 on Guam, Rota, and Saipan regarding marine preserves and community-based management.
According to a February 4 letter from Evangeline Lujan, who works for Guam’s planning bureau and is a member of the U.S. All Island Coral Reef Committee, “Off-island guests were flown in to foster discussion and share their experiences with community-based marine protected area management. Council representatives disrupted the meeting to the point that concerned community members were forced into silence, while invited guests eventually walked out.”
In a March 7 letter to Kennedy, Paul Bassler of Guam’s Department of Agriculture wrote that his department and the council both seek to conserve and manage fisheries resources. “This is why the department is astounded by WESPAC’s actions on Guam. WESPAC representatives should be partnering and cooperating with the department and other local resource agencies…. Instead, WESPAC representatives continually undermine the mission and goals of the jurisdiction and directly oppose the jurisdiction and their efforts.”
Although all of the letters mentioned the alleged disruptions and dissemination of misinformation at the November 2007 meetings, Bassler notes that such activities by council representatives began two to three years ago, when they would “host meeting/forums on Guam focusing on local management issues, such as the abolishment of Guam’s marine preserves or providing misinformation to the public about local resource management…The department and other resource agencies have made several attempts to rectify the misinformation spread by WESPAC. However, they disregard our corrections and continue to misinform the public. Because of this, considerable time with limited staff is dedicated to providing accurate information to the public.”
In an undated letter to council chair Martin, Kennedy requested that Martin provide a written response to the allegations made in the letters and that the issues be discussed at the council’s meeting to be held March 17-21.
According to a press release by Scott Foster, director of communications for the Honolulu-based Western and Central Pacific Network, on March 17, “Duenas apologized to his council peers for any embarrassment he may have caused….Duenas’ apology for ‘embarrassing’ the council was made not once, but three times during the course of the [council] meetings…. Duenas asserted that he was acting not as a council member when taking the offensive actions, but rather in his role as president of the Guam fishermen’s cooperative.”
After Duenas’ apology, Foster said, Simonds “attempted to downplay the issue, which had involved the Governor of Guam and other officials, by calling it ‘a tempest in a teapot.’”
— Teresa Dawson
Volume 18, Number 11 May 2008
Leave a Reply