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by Janice M. Plante
GLOUCESTER, MA - The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) has accepted 245 bids totaling $9.6 million under its voluntary Fishing Capacity Reduction Program for groundfish.
Acceptance and rejection letters were mailed out on March 8, so people who submitted bids should know by now - one way or the other - the status of their own situations.
According to NMFS Fishery Administrator Jack Terrill, packages with applicable paperwork were mailed to all successful bidders along with their acceptance letters. Once the necessary forms are returned, NMFS will be able to hand over the money almost immediately.
"The turnover will be quick," said Terrill. "We expect to make payment by wire transfer to individual bank accounts within a week to 10 days of receiving the forms. We would like to make the majority of the payments by the end of March."
The $9.6 million - $10 million minus the money NMFS determined it needed to cover administrative costs and program details - was enough to remove roughly 21,500 days-at-sea from the groundfish fishery.
NMFS has already "canceled" the multispecies permits associated with the 245 accepted bids. Award recipients do not have to give up other fishing permits or scrap their vessels.
Home states
The state-by-state breakdown of the accepted bids is as follows:
| |
| Maine | 52 |
| New Hampshire | 8 |
| Massachusetts | 108 |
| Rhode Island | 21 |
| Connecticut | 7 |
| New York | 20 |
| New Jersey | 20 |
| Maryland | 2 |
| Virginia | 2 |
| North Carolina | 3 |
| Georgia | 1 |
| Florida | 1 |
According to Terrill, the bid selection process was absolutely cut-and-dried.
"We went strictly by the ranking procedure," he said.
The ranking system was based on "cost per unit capacity" and was designed to remove the highest amount of fishing capacity "in the most cost effective manner" to the government.
High, low bids
NMFS received a total of 502 bid applications, about half of which came from Massachusetts alone. The next highest state was Maine.
The bid amounts from the 502 applications totaled $99.2 million, but only $10 million was available for the program, so high bids didn't even come close to making the cut.
The average accepted bid turned out to be roughly $39,000, though that figure isn't really reflective of the range of bids received by NMFS.
In the end, based on the ranking formula, the lowest accepted bid was $1,400 and the highest was $127,000. The upper end permit was associated with "very high fishing capacity," said Terrill.
Ironically, the fisheries service received about a dozen bids for over $1 million each, and two people even submitted $9 million bids.
Some industry members referred to the $9 million bids as a joke, but the permit holders went through the effort of submitting the necessary paperwork in proper order.
Latent effort focus
Congress approved the $10 million buyback money roughly a year-and-a-half ago with the intent that the program focus on latent effort.
According to Terrill, that goal seems to have been met. Roughly a dozen-and-a-half of the successful bids were attached to active groundfish vessels, but the rest all appear to involve latent effort from boats of all different sizes with all different kinds of capacity.
Congress is currently debating appropriating more money - another $10 million - for yet another buyback round. The appropriation is still being negotiated within congressional committees, however, and might not become available for some time to come.
From 1996 to 1998, NMFS - again using funds specifically appropriated by Congress to respond to the groundfish fishery "disaster" - conducted a $25-million vessel buyback program, first through a pilot project and then through a larger scale program.
That program, however, differed significantly from the current one. First, it required award recipients to relinquish all fishing permits and, second, it required them to scrap their vessels or transfer the boats to nonfishery-related uses.
The $25 million program resulted in the removal of 79 vessels and their associated multispecies permits, as well as 463 "other" fishery permits attached to those vessels.
