The US Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez has received two letters from Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley and Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine for seeking the Fishery Resource Disaster designation. This would allow Congress to appropriate economic assistance for hard-hit watermen. According to Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md. $15 million is being sought to put watermen to work on projects to restore the bay. She said the idea is to spread the money out over a three-year period to help keep watermen working on habitat restoration and conservation.
Mikulski told that female crabs require “a breather” to help boost their numbers. She also said that the authority is planning to take a three-year breather on the fishing of female crabs; the authority needed to make sure that our watermen continue to work. Based on this the Maryland and Virginia plan to reduce the female crab harvest by 34 percent until winter surveys indicate the crab population has rebounded.
Larry Simns, head of the Maryland Watermen’s Association, opined that watermen engaged in similar conservation and restoration work during the striped bass moratorium between 1984 and 1989. Mikulski said Maryland officials are “very optimistic” the federal government will grant the emergency declaration, because there is precedent for declaring a disaster where there has been a regulatory impact on livelihoods.
Mikulski told that it’s been used in other parts of the country when fisheries have been devastated for a variety of reasons, and this enables them to receive some type of help to restore the very habitat for them to continue working as they’ve done for hundreds of years here. O’Malley pointed out new regulations were “absolutely necessary in order to bring the blue crab back. If the decline continues the entire crab population would simply implode, says O’Malley.
