The Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission has voted to deny a petition to implement a sweeping new set of rules around the deployment of gear used in Dungeness crab fishing.
With whale entanglements on the rise, last December, the Center for Biological Diversity along with Oceana, Natural Resources Defense Council, and the American Cetacean Society submitted a petition to the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission that recommended a suite of sweeping new deployment and equipment rules intended to prevent whale entanglements.
Conservationists are concerned with continual entanglements and that the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife has yet to complete a conservation plan and secure a federal Incidental Take Permit under the Endangered Species Act, despite five years of working on the effort.
Without a conservation plan and Incidental Take Permit, the state and the Oregon crabbing fleet are left with evolving rules and no legal protection, should their gear result in the entanglement of an endangered species of whale.
As part of its ongoing plan to prevent the entanglements, last year, the state of Oregon mandated that commercial crabbing operations reduce the number of pots they deploy and stick to shallower waters on May 1. And in January of this year, state regulators moved the date to April 1, which took the commercial crabbing fleet by surprise.
Crabbers say they were not consulted on the rule change and that the change will hurt smaller operations that harvest crabs late into the season.
But despite their concern with the recent rule change, commercial crabbers at Friday’s meeting uniformly argued for sticking with the evolving state plan, rather than unilaterally adopt a set of rules set forth in the petition without a sufficient rulemaking process.
Gary Ripka is a commercial crabber based in Newport and president of the Oregon Coast Crab Association. He said the strictures of the petition would put smaller operations out of business and that the crabbing fleet wants to work with the state to end entanglements and stay in business.
“I need you to understand something. If you stand with us today, and if you reject this petition, trust the collaborative process that we managed together for generations, we have your back. We will work with you,” Ripka told the commission.
Part of the petition proposed the adoption of a system of “ropeless” or “pop-up” traps. The petition urged the state to reduce the amount of fishing gear in the water during whale feeding and migration seasons and open a pathway for fishers to use pop-up fishing gear, which eliminates untended buoy lines.
Pop-up gear has been tested in the California Dungeness crab fishery with positive results. But crabbers who offered testimony to the commission Friday roundly opposed mandatory and untested use of pop-up technology.
There’s another problem with the requirement, Ripka told the commission..
“That gear costs small vessels over $300,000. To outfit larger vessels, we're looking at a million dollars,” he said. “We can't afford that.” During Friday’s meeting, ODFW officials said they hope to unveil a plan to test pop-up technology in August.
Representatives of all four conservation groups sponsoring the petition spoke at the meeting. A member of the Center for Biological Diversity said he did not attend the meeting to threaten legal action, but hoped that the commission would adopt the petition.
After four hours of emotional public comment, the commission voted 6-1 to deny the petition and urged the ODFW to continue its efforts toward developing a broader conservation plan.
