February 16, 2010

Halibut Moratorium Program – Potential Changes to Angler Endorsement Calculation

At the Portland meeting underway right now, the NPFMC just voted (9:30AM 2/16) unanimously to take initial and final action at their April, 2010 meeting on a change to the angler endorsement calculation.

This issue was taken up during ‘staff tasking’ and details of how they intend to implement the change are unknown at this time.

The issue was raised earlier in the meeting citing that because Moratorium rules were developed to be ‘business focused’ rather than ‘vessel focused’, some multi-boat operations ended up with more endorsements per vessel than may have actually been in use during the qualifying periods, ie some of you may have received 6 person endorsements for all of your fleet when some vessels may have been only 4 person boats. The net effect was to increase the # of endorsements by about 4% according to NMFS – but recall that the overall impact of the Moratorium will be to reduce the fleet by 40%.

They proposed a way to change the system to take into account vessels rather than businesses. Unfortunately meetings took place offline but they published a memo which is extracted here:

From 2/16/10 NPFMC Meeting Handouts (Charter moratorium fix.docx)

Alternatives for businesses that would be issued multiple permits:

Alternative 1.  Status quo. All permits issued to a business receiving multiple permits would be issued with an angler endorsement equal to the greatest number of charter vessel anglers onboard any vessel used by the business to generate a permit as reported to ADF&G on any bottom fish logbook trip in 2004 or 2005,  but not less than 4.

Alternative 2.  One permit would be issued to a business with an endorsement equal to the greatest number of charter vessel anglers onboard any vessel used by the business to general a permit as reported to ADF&G on any bottom fish logbook trip in 2004 or 2005, but not less than 4. Each subsequent permit issued to the same business would be issued with an endorsement equal to the next greatest  number of charter vessel anglers onboard any other vessel used by the business to generate a permit, whose catch history has not already been used by the business to determine an angler endorsement, as reported to ADF&G on any trip in 2004 or 2005, until all permits are issued.  The year selected for determining angler endorsements must be the year selected by the applicant for permit qualification.

So we can expect that some of you will have to go through some still-to-be-defined change process to reduce your max endorsements. This change, if enacted, may cause issues with some who have changed vessels and gone from 4 packs to 6 packs, etc…

We will forward additional information as it becomes available.

Comments/Questions - please contact John Blair at john@seagoalaska.org