Strengthening Fishing Communities and Increasing Flexibility in Fisheries Management Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to H.R. 1335, the Magnuson-Stevens Act reauthorization before us today.

Management of fisheries in the United States is extremely important, especially in my home State of New Jersey, where the fishing industry is an important economic driver of the State's economy, generating billions of dollars a year in revenue and supporting tens of thousands of jobs.

This bill passed out of the House Natural Resources Committee without a single Democratic vote, and President Obama has threatened to veto it. This doesn't need to be a partisan issue. We should be working together in a bipartisan fashion to make commonsense reforms to Magnuson-Stevens.

There are important fishery management reforms in this bill that I strongly support, such as the flexibility language and modifications to the annual catch limit requirements. However, I am troubled by the language in the bill that makes unnecessary changes to NEPA, the Endangered Species Act, the National Marine Sanctuaries Act, and the Antiquities Act.

This bill would vest much of the authority over these statutes in the fishery management councils instead of with the appropriate Federal agency. It is not appropriate to vest regulatory authority for these purposes in a body like a fishery management council.

Fishery managers play an important role in crafting fishery management measures in consultation with NOAA fisheries. Yet, they lack the expertise to appropriately review and analyze the impacts and requirements of NEPA or the Endangered Species Act.

The legislation, Mr. Chairman, does include specific language I authored on recreational data collection, and I would like to thank the authors for including this important section. The goal of this language is to ensure the fishery management councils are collecting the best information possible about recreational fishing. It would implement a grant program to allow States to improve recreational data collection and require the National Research Council to issue a report on improvements that have been made and need to be made with recreational fishing data collection and surveying. This will help us understand what is actually happening with fishing in any given year and ensure that we aren't needlessly closing healthy fisheries.

Mr. Chairman, there are positive reforms to Magnuson-Stevens in this legislation, but unfortunately it weakens important environmental laws such as NEPA and the ESA in the process. I think that is unfortunate. I wish we could have had a bipartisan bill that actually reforms Magnuson-Stevens in a preferable way.

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