The PCS Blogosphere
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The California Department of Fish and Game Commission got to send a strong message and a good civics lesson today when the PSO read into the record a letter to them explaining just how much they have got it wrong in implementing the MLPA. The letter starts by quoting Secretary Chrisman when the MLPA effort was canceled in 2004 for a lack of funding: “This is not about supporting the program,'' Chrisman said. ``It is about simply not having enough staff or money to do the job right.'' Now F&G says it will cost some $34 million for enforcement and monitoring and nobody has the money. The PSO nailed it when they said: “Respectfully, we submit to you that we still do not have enough staff or money to do the job right and this is too important to too many to get wrong.”
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Senator Dean Florez, California’s Senate Majority Leader, showed us his stuff at a keynote speech Saturday night to Coastside Fishing Club. His Oversight Committee is to hold hearings next month on a couple of key issues, and there are going to be some mighty uncomfortable facts coming out. First on Sen. Florez’s agenda for the hearing is the crazy out-of-control budget that is being created through the MLPA process. When this bill was being acted upon by the legislature, the forecasted increase in the budget for this to cover the scientific studies and enforcement was only an incremental $250,000, chump change for the F&G budget. Now the CDF&G is saying that the budget for the MLPA for enforcement and scientific study will be well over $30 million. In this day and age of the belt-tightening California budget hearings, that number attracts a lot of notice, especially because it is a big surprise. No wonder Sen. Florez wants Secretary Chrisman to explain what is going on, especially since no one knows where the $30 million is going to come from. An MLPA that closes down significant portions of the coast and is putting many people out of work ought to at least have the funds to see if it is even a good idea!
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Southern Cal, the MLPA is coming to you, and it is not going to be fun! You will need to put your best foot forward to have a chance, and that is why I was distressed to hear some comments critical of the American Sportfishing Association (ASA) and their role in the MLPA process. It must be that these people just don’t understand how ASA operates, and just how essential their support is to this MLPA process. Either that or these critics want to further some political agenda of their own, but that just makes them stupid! We’d better pull together if we are going to “get ‘er done.”
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There have been many solutions proposed to get more hatchery salmon into the system. If we don’t, then you can kiss our season goodbye and the commercial salmon harvest as well. Recently there have been several different proposals on how to get higher survival of hatchery fish, including the barging or other transport of fish down the river, trucking the fish down for release directly into the ocean, and even creating hatcheries at ocean’s edge. None of these proposals ever gets a hearing at California Fish and Game.
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The SF Bay herring fishery is winding down, and once again the ocean ecology has taken a huge hit as this travesty of an ecological disaster continues. California F&G’s own biologists have been saying for years that the fishery should be stopped. And every year the F&G commission overrides them, due to politics, at the risk of a total collapse of the herring. How do you justify a fishery that only takes the roe and discards all the rest of the carcass for fertilizer? What a waste!
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What an attitude Secretary Chrisman has! Speaking for the Governor in a letter to the PSO (Partnership for Sustainable Oceans), he wants to illegally allow private groups to pay for enforcement. All of that so-called private funding has big strings attached. Read the Memo of Understanding on the RLFF funding of the current process, and get very scared about where he wants to go.
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When the state decided to establish a network of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) on the California coast, it passed the Marine Life Protection Act in 1999. It was not because there was any solid science that said it should do so, but the various environmental organizations were pushing for it, and there was a case for organizing the hodge-podge of MPAs that already existed. But after passing the legislation, the legislature never funded the process, so it sat dormant for several years.
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