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Opinion Editorials Coastal Voices Guest Opinion: MLPA still rushing along
Coastal Voices Guest Opinion: MLPA still rushing along
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While crab season progresses. The people who want to limit your access to your renewable ocean resources are still hard at work. Meetings of some kind are happening almost every week.
Each coastal county has dipped into the money pot being offered to help with outreach. This means the outside interests trying to control access to our state waters can point back and say they had full stakeholder participation. Sure, they say that, until you send in a comment to their web site ( This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ) their auto reply is “The MLPA Initiative is not a state regulatory or administrative process, and is not required to post, summarize or respond to comments.” So, if it is not a state regulatory or administrative process, why does the Web site get state (ca.gov) domain usage? Why? Because these private groups have bought your state government. Our local representatives have been buried by an insanely short timeline and threatened with massive area closures if they do not stay at the table. Our state representatives say that they are helpless because of the memorandum of understanding signed by our governor. So we are stuck going along with these outside interests.
I will continue to fight to keep a safety area open around our
harbor so that we small boat fishermen are not forced to travel tens of
miles in our consistently rough weather to catch a fish. I have been
and will continue to speak out about the importance of our crab fishery
and how these fishermen also need close-to-port access and all of their
traditional grounds open. Crabbing is too important to our local
economy to threaten with experimental, ineffective MPAs.
You can help. Please join me and our local fishermen for an old-style crab feed. Local crabbers are donating their catch, and local fishermen will be cooking crab at the fairgrounds Sunday from 3 to 6 p.m. All-you-can eat plates will be $10, and whole live and cooked crabs to for $6 each. The proceeds will support our effort to insure that fishermen are represented at every meeting and protected by a lawyer if necessary. The next meeting is of the Science Advisory Team in Eureka on Wednesday and Thursday. It is not quite time for more protests, but that time may come this spring. I will try to help you stay up to date. Our local editor deserves our thanks for keeping this line of unofficial news open. Kenyon Hensel is a local fisherman who has been closely involved with California’s MPA process. |
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