Good News: CHOIR Monitoring Proposal included

January 30, 2009

CHOIR News

Good news!

On Wednesday the NEFMC Herring Committee met to, among other things, craft
recommendations for management alternatives for inclusion in Herring Amendment 4. The Committee voted 7-1 to include the entire CHOIR proposal as its own alternative (with only Mary Beth Tooley voting against it). As you know, we put a lot of work into our proposal that was submitted in early December and hoped all along that it would be included as an alternative and so this decision by the Committee was a great step forward. The backbone of our proposal is the idea of maximized retention, onboard electronic monitoring (cameras) and a strong shoreside monitoring program.

The CHOIR Proposal alternative and three others will now be forwarded by the
Committee to the full Council, which will now need to officially accept all four as alternatives. They will be discussing this at the upcoming Council meeting in Portsmouth, NH, the week after next. We will post info soon about that meeting (on February 9th), but as usual, it will be very helpful if people can show up for the discussion to help support the Committee’s decisions.

While this is only one step in a long amendment process, it was an important
one. Assuming that the full Council votes in the Committee’s recommendations,
this will mean that our proposal will be given a full analysis and will potentially be used in developing the monitoring system that this amendment eventually installs. Again, we have a long road ahead and will need all your support over the coming year but this was an important step forward and so its something I wanted to tell you all about.

Thanks a lot to all those who helped achieving this goal, and please stay tuned for mor information regarding upcoming meetings.