0:00:00.9 John Sheehan: As a large federal agency, one facet of NOAA Fisheries' mission is to manage and regulate fish stocks and fisheries, which makes sense, it's in the name. But while the agency itself does play a big role in the process, the recommendations for things like catch limits or gear allowances, which stocks to rebuild, the stuff that really impacts how and what people can fish, that guidance is created by independent citizen councils called, appropriately, Regional Fishery Management Councils. Here, check it out.

0:00:30.6 Speaker 2: All right. Good morning. I'm pleased to call to order the 269th meeting of the Pacific Fishery Management Council in Garden Grove, California.

0:00:39.2 JS: This is a recording of a recent council meeting from November 2022.

0:00:43.4 S2: This meeting is open to the public and copies of the meeting agenda and other documents are available on the council's website. We encourage members of the public to testify...

0:00:52.3 JS: It is but one example of meetings happening all across the coastal US in which decisions are made transparently and openly, about how, who, what, where, and when our nation's fisheries are managed. This is Dive In with NOAA Fisheries. I'm John Sheehan. And today we're going to hear about how these councils work, the important role they play in governance, and how you can and should get involved if you're impacted by these councils' decisions.

0:01:16.7 Kelly Denit: So the councils are independent bodies composed of the council members, the majority of which are appointed by the Secretary of Commerce and represent expertise from the commercial sector, the recreational fishing sector, or academics, NGOs. And they also have state representation on them, but they are an independent entity from the federal government.

0:01:37.4 JS: This is Kelly Denit, the director of NOAA Fisheries Office of Sustainable Fisheries. She works closely with regional offices and science centers in partnership with the councils.

0:01:46.6 KD: Developing those management measures that are then recommended to the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Secretary for Implementation. That is the key role that the councils play.

0:01:57.7 JS: Now, let's back up a second. You've probably noticed me repeatedly saying the word regional. That's because the eight different councils correspond geographically to different parts of the US.

0:02:07.9 KD: We have the New England, Mid-Atlantic, South Atlantic, Caribbean, Gulf of Mexico, Pacific, North Pacific, and Western Pacific. And they are responsible for managing fisheries in the federal exclusive economic zone. So generally 3 NM out to 200 NM.

0:02:24.9 JS: Regions are of course very distinct and require their own considerations and local expertise.

0:02:29.8 KD: There are all sorts of issues that councils grapple with from establishing the amount of fish that should be caught in a particular fishery. Other examples can be bycatch, which is the take of fish that's not the intended target. That can be very different across the councils. Even within a council region there can be such diverse fisheries. Those that are largely driven by interest in recreational components versus those that are commercial and include tribal or subsistence fisheries. And there are numerous different gear types that might be used even within those different sectors. So it's critically important to have diverse perspectives on the council participating in the development of the management measures.

0:03:19.5 JS: Can anyone go to one of these meetings?

0:03:21.8 KD: Absolutely. Council meetings are open to the public. All of them have the opportunity for public comment, in particular when they are making decisions around a particular action. So members of the public are encouraged to participate in meetings and offer their perspectives including bringing new issues to the council if there is a particular concern that a member of the public has with regard to fisheries management in their region. They can go to the council and bring that concern forward.

0:03:52.0 JS: And in a shift that's even more apparent since the pandemic, many more meetings are held virtually, giving greater access to the public.

0:04:00.4 KD: All of the councils have websites where they post the agenda for the upcoming meeting and many now include the ability to participate virtually, as well as the results in terms of the final actions that the councils take.

0:04:14.3 JS: And if you're so interested, that could lead to even more involvement on a council.

0:04:18.0 KD: The best place to start is by going to council meetings and getting involved in the subgroups of those councils. For example, all of the councils have advisory panels, and those are composed of members of the public, fishermen, et cetera. Underserved communities are important to have as part of that conversation. All of our councils operate within the Magnuson constraints in the sense that they are implementing measures that are sustainable and ensuring the conservation of our stocks moving forward. And so you absolutely want to make sure that all of those different facets of our fisheries are part of the decision making. As far as I'm aware, it's one of the only, if not the only, management system within the federal government that is structured in this way, where we have representatives of the fishing industry who are the ones responsible for developing the management measures for their respective fisheries in their regions. And those are subject to review by the National Marine Fisheries Service, but the councils are a critical component of developing those management measures, which is different from any other federal decision making process that I'm aware of.

0:05:36.7 JS: I wanted to get a sense of how some of the individual councils worked, especially because as we just heard from Kelly, the council system is pretty decentralized by design. And again, that's not exactly what you picture when you think of the federal government. So I spoke to some council members to get an idea of what issues and challenges different parts of the country face.

0:05:55.9 Kerry Marhefka: I believe that we have the largest population of recreational fishermen in the US.

0:06:01.4 JS: This is Kerry Marhefka, a member of the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council and co-founder of the seafood company Abundant Seafood, based in Charleston, South Carolina.

0:06:11.4 KM: The South Atlantic region is from the North Carolina-Virginia border down to the Atlantic side of Key West, Florida. Our biggest public comments come from issues that are passionate to the recreational fishing community. We're having large public input around red snapper, which is a really popular species in the South Atlantic.

0:06:29.6 JS: The increase in population to southern states and the dramatic increase in the number of recreational fishers is a through-line to almost all of the issues and decisions that Kerry and her colleagues face on the council. Competition between a shrinking commercial sector and a growing recreational sector is a real tension.

0:06:46.6 KM: I think it's one of the two greatest issues facing the South Atlantic Council in the future. That and I think climate change then coming in and adding an unknown component, but definitely a competition for the resource. And so it's the divvying up of the pie, if you will, between recreational and commercial fishermen and then figuring out sort of how to account for and collect data from recreational fishermen. In the commercial fishery, it's much more controlled, right? You have to have a permit, you have to report weekly, the seafood dealer has to report weekly. It's very, very controlled. With the private recreational sector it is much different. We do not know the number of people who go target these species that we manage.

0:07:30.4 JS: And red snapper being a pretty popular fish with wrecked fishers, she hears about them a lot.

0:07:36.5 KM: We have a situation where every fisherman, which I've never had in my career, 100% of fishermen are saying there's more red snapper than we've ever seen before, which is technically correct. There are technically more number of red snapper than have ever existed in time. The problem is their smaller red snapper and the biomass, the weight of the red snapper has not rebuilt where it's still overfished, undergoing overfishing. And almost all of our public comment right now is relating to that situation. And that's something that is hard. You want to get across to people like it's not that we're not listening to you. We believe you. It's just a really complicated... Sometimes science is complicated and sometimes management is complicated. And there's no one that's not listening to you, but I know they feel frustrated and not listen to. And I think for me, that's the hardest part of the job.

0:08:26.8 JS: But despite some inevitable frustration, public input is key to the process.

0:08:31.4 KM: I can't overstate how important it is. The 13 of us that sit at that table only have a small scope of understanding. Even with that... We have our own expertise and that's why we're there. And we certainly feel like we understand our experience. But it's a wide swath of ocean. So the more information we have, the more we hear from people, the better we can make our decisions. It's a very open process and it is still very democratic, small [0:09:00.4] ____ democratic process where you're not going to always have the outcome you desire, but everything is done in the light and you can see why the decisions are being made. And so what I try to encourage people when they're really frustrated with the process is to the extent that you can, with your time, be there at the beginning of the process. We have fishermen that we assign to go to data workshops and assessment workshops and be on the assessment review panels. Every step of the process is open.

0:09:29.8 JS: It's also a process that's evolving. As important as it is to have a range of voices for public input, the council needs and continues to work toward greater representation on the council itself.

0:09:42.1 KM: We have a very strong female presence on the council. Currently, our leadership right now, our chair and vice chair are women, six of the 13 of us are women. Recreational charter guide representatives, commercial representatives, scientists. So females from all parts of the fishing community, which is really great to see.

0:10:04.4 JS: Kerry has firsthand experience of how the council's decisions have real world consequences.

0:10:08.1 KM: I have had decisions go against what worked for me personally as a commercial fishing family that have crippled me, hurt me financially. But because I'm involved with the process, I never ever felt like it was someone out to get me or someone who didn't understand.

0:10:29.9 JS: Kerry started out working for the council as a staff biologist after college.

0:10:31.9 KM: Through my job, I met my husband, who is a commercial fisherman, and he and I started a company called Abundant Seafood, and we focus on selling locally the fish he catches. And I certainly remember, in fact, I think one of our first interactions before we even started dating was him being mad at me about red porgy. And it's hard, and sometimes you just, you agree to disagree.

0:10:56.8 JS: And she understands very clearly how the council's decisions affect people and families, recreational and commercial alike.

0:11:04.8 KM: As a council member, we take an oath, right? And my oath is not to ensure that I make money or my family business makes money. My oath is the sustainability of US stocks, and I take that very seriously. You are dealing with your own bottom line, and you're dealing with families that you know bottom line. And so it's really hard not to get emotional about that. That's hard right now, especially because there's fewer and fewer commercial fishermen in certainly the southeast US, where we have a lot of odds stacked against us, not just with fishing regulations, but with infrastructure and working waterfront and access and all of those things. And so my job is to really relay, this is what this is going to do to some people. And then we can figure out, do we have any wiggle room or do we not have wiggle room? And there are times you just simply don't. So the best thing I know how to do is to continue to show up at the table to make sure those stories are heard and to try to use my voice to talk about things like, how do we get better data? How do we get better science? How do we make sure we know where this fish is really going and hope that beating that drum will lead to us having better information to make good decisions.

0:12:26.0 JS: For another perspective, I spoke with Marcos Hanke, the chairman of the Caribbean Fishery Management Council and a longtime small business owner and fishing charter boat captain. And at first, you might not think that the experiences of the South Atlantic and Caribbean councils would be that different. After all, they're sort of neighbors, but of course, that's completely wrong. For starters, the Caribbean islands under the council's jurisdiction, Puerto Rico, St. John, St. Thomas, and St. Croix, are about a thousand miles off the tip of Florida. The geography, climate, ocean conditions, and fisheries are all completely different too. In fact, the US Caribbean islands themselves are so different from one another that the council has had to implement their own specific form of management.

0:13:10.4 Marcos Hanke: The island-based fishing management that was just approved last year, remember that we have St. Thomas, St. John, St. Croix, and Puerto Rico, all of us with different cultural and ecological characteristics. For example, in St. Thomas, the fishermen consume different species than what we do. We need to address differently from each island.

0:13:33.1 JS: One example would be conch.

0:13:33.2 MH: For all the islands, conch are super important, right? But especially for St. Croix, it's extremely important culturally in terms of money, in terms of landings, in terms of all of the aspects that make a fishery valuable. You cannot think about St. Croix the same way you think about Puerto Rico. And the other layer of that is the market, and the way the markets behave in St. Thomas and St. Croix, especially St. Thomas. All the disembark, all the landings go to the streets, and they are sold immediately there. Here in Puerto Rico, you have a little more complex system, bigger chains of restaurants and hotels and so on, all those differences play out here.

0:14:19.1 JS: But just as in other councils, their process relies on and encourages public participation.

0:14:24.6 MH: Usually the things that are hard to solve are the ones that bring people to the table, right? I think for the good reason, because that's the only way to find the right path. One of the facts of the virtual life that we experiment on the past, the benefits of that is that we have more people participating and connecting to the meetings. Before, for you as a stakeholder from St. Croix, if you had a meeting in Puerto Rico, it's tough to travel, right? There's a lot of money and logistics is not so easy. And now I think that's actually must be one of the best examples how island-based management benefit everybody.

0:15:05.7 JS: Marcos is a lifelong fisherman.

0:15:07.7 MH: I fish recreationally all my life since 2 years old. My dad tied myself on his sailboat to fish on the rivers in Brazil where I grew up. Fishing is my life, right? My dad just passed away in January and...

0:15:23.5 JS: I'm sorry.

0:15:24.3 MH: Thank you. He was a dentist and he always wanted me to be a dentist. And for him, when he introduced myself, he always say, "Oh, he's a marine biologist." And I say, "No dad, I am a fisherman. That happened to be that study marine biology.

0:15:41.8 JS: And he's very proud of his time on the council.

0:15:44.3 MH: Everybody that have the opportunity to engage, to step up to the plate should do it because from my experience, there is no huge agendas behind or whatever. If you have the merits, you have a very good chance to be part of the council one way or the other. Remember that it's council members and other panels that we need into the future.

0:16:08.4 JS: And Marcos sees its practices of inclusion, diversity and transparency as essential tools to resolve conflict.

0:16:15.7 MH: If you are transparent with the people, even on the hard times, they know what you believe. They know where you work. They know what you come from. And if you're clear, people respect you more and they disagree with you in a respectful way, which means that we can sit down on the table and talk and find the best solution or the best path. And I think that's the power of transparency, is not to be transparent just because, it's just because that leads you to a productive conversation. There is a funny story in a public hearing one time, one guy came to to give his speech, right? He was really mad about something and say, "You guys, you guys from the office that never get wet and so on... "

0:17:07.5 MH: And you could see all the friends behind him shaking the head. No, don't go that route. Don't go that route. And I couldn't say anything, it was a public hearing, right? And after the hearing, the guy went back to me, "Oh, Captain Marcos, I'm so sorry. I didn't know what a kind of trouble I was getting. I lost my point. I lost my opportunity." "No, your point was well taken. Don't worry." But actually it was very funny. I tried to understand how important it is to be a bridgeman for conversation and smart decisions. I think we are living in a world of polarization and fishery management and discussions are not apart from that. And I think the challenge into the future now, more than a specific issue, is how many bridgemans you're going to have on the room to sit down and to find the common ground.

0:18:06.2 JS: Which is exactly what should happen in government and what these councils are all about, sitting around a table, hearing all viewpoints and coming to consensus. Marcos Hanke, is the Chairman of the Caribbean Fishery Management Council. We also heard from Kerry Marhefka, a member of the South Atlantic Council, and Kelly Denit, the Director of NOAA Fisheries Office of Sustainable Fisheries. To learn more about how you can absolutely get involved with the council in your region visit our website fisheries.noaa.gov. I'm John Sheehan, and this has been Dive In with NOAA Fisheries.