NOAA and it’s environmental partners are bound and determined to force paid monitoring and eventually EMS on the fishermen. The last EMS study that was delayed and delayed so that NOAA’s partners could put out misinformation about about costs. And still 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. 4 to 7 times greater in duration. It underestimates number of hauls by claiming average trip has 5 haul backs, when in reality we are looking at 40-60 hauls per trip, an underestimation by a factor of 10. Even at these severe underestimations the report puts EM start up costs at $59,575 plus an average annual cost of $50,619 plus an estimated first year learning fee of $42,684 for a total of an estimated first year cost of $152,878. 15 to 25 percent of a groundfish boat’s GROSS income! That doesn’t even take into account the underestimation by a factor of 4-10 of groundfish trip effort. (GMRI A Preliminary Cost Comparison of At Sea Monitoring and Electronic Monitoring for a Hypothetical Groundfish Sector) Captain Mark Phillips – Read the Nature Conservancy EM project application
click here Federal Register Notice; Request For Comments.
click here 20:02
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