Federal notice drops Amendment 80 halibut plan from Alaska co-op reporting

A Reporting Change With a Bigger Question Underneath

The Amendment 80 Halibut Prohibited Species Catch Management Plan is being dropped from the federal reporting package Alaska fishing cooperatives file each year because, in the words of the notice, it "is no longer provided to the Council." The North Pacific Fishery Management Council now receives one report a year, and the voluntary halibut-avoidance material has been folded into the single Amendment 80 Bycatch Report.

That surviving report covers excluder use, deck sorting, vessel-by-vessel bycatch performance, incentives to cut bycatch, and consequences for boats that perform poorly. It is voluntary, and the notice estimates two hours per response.

The National Marine Fisheries Service Alaska Regional Office sponsors the collection under the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act. Across seven report types spanning several cooperative programs (the crab rationalization report, the rockfish report, the Amendment 80 cooperative annual report, the separate Amendment 80 bycatch avoidance report to the Council, two American Fisheries Act reports, and the Pacific cod trawl report), 25 respondents carry 623 annual burden hours. The heaviest single filing is the AFA catcher vessel inter-cooperative report, at 40 hours. Not every cooperative files every report: the collection mixes mandatory and voluntary submissions, with the Amendment 80 and AFA cooperative annual reports required and the crab rationalization, rockfish and Pacific cod trawl reports filed voluntarily.

What a Paperwork Notice Doesn't Say

Here is what gets compressed into a paperwork notice. The reports are intended, in the notice's words, as a resource for the Council to track the effectiveness of cooperatives and their ability to meet the Council's goals, as a way for NMFS to monitor the internal fishery management practices of cooperatives, and as a tool for the cooperatives to give feedback on the programs. At the Council's June 5 meeting, Austin Esterbrooks of the At Sea Processors Association said, "there really is no other fishery in Alaska or possibly the world that provides the level of transparency of data that we do."

How to Comment

Comments are due within 30 days of the notice's publication, filed through reginfo.gov under OMB Control Number 0648-0678. An earlier 60-day round opened January 20 and has since closed.