 Welcome our invited guests and others that are joining us on the line on behalf of the National Academies and the committee. We want to thank you for joining and participating in our open information gathering meeting. We'll start with some introductions and then get underway with some health keeping items and then our presentation. But for the moment, I will turn it over to our committee chair, Tom Miller, for any initial remarks and to get us underway with introductions. Thank you, Stacey. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to what is now the third meeting of a consensus committee of the National Academy is looking at the distribution of primary benefit. Primary benefits in fisheries, and we are being tasked with trying to determine what data and information are required to assess whether the distribution of those primary benefits is equitable or not. This is a consensus committee that has been motivated by the interests of knower itself. Often Academy committees are mandated through Congress but this is one in which the agency has come to the National Academies to request the nice and input as it seeks to implement recent executive orders surrounding environmental justice. And so I think the agency deserves considerable credit for that. I would like to hear today from a number of regional administrators or from the regional office about their thoughts regarding information and data that are available to help them to determine whether those benefits are distributed in an equitable fashion. The committee is a very diverse group based both in terms of their own disciplinary interests and geographically it's been put together thoughtfully to try and provide a broad perspective of these questions. So we're going to start by asking the committee members to very briefly provide introduction, and then we will move on to some housekeeping issues so to start the ball rolling my name is Tom Miller. I'm here at the University of Maryland Center for environmental science. I'm located at the Chesapeake biological lab which is about 50 miles south and east of Washington DC on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay, and my training is in fisheries. I do a lot of stock assessment and other modeling work related directly to fishery management. I'm going to go around in order that I have people on the committee so next in alphabetical order Lisa Campbell Lisa. Hi, I'm Lisa Campbell. I'm a professor at the Nicholas School of Environment at Duke University and I'm based at the Marine Lab in Beaufort, North Carolina. I'm a social scientist broadly interested in oceans governance questions including questions around fisheries and equity and access. And I'm a member of the Ocean Studies Board as well at the moment so I think that's it for me. Thank you, Lisa. Rachel, Rachel Donkerslut. Good morning everybody. My name is Rachel Donkerslut. My background is in anthropology and I live and work in rural Alaska and a lot of my research and applied projects focus on the community and cultural impacts of resource governance and fishery management systems and decision making. And a lot of my current work is looking at how to identify and measure and include dimensions of well-being and decision making. Happy to be here. Thank you, Rachel. Kailin, go next. Hi, I'm Kailin Kreitz. I'm an assistant professor of environmental and resource economics at Arizona State University and here I'm in the School of Sustainability. A lot of my research has been Alaska based and I currently serve on the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, SSC. Thank you Kailin. Grant Murray please. Yeah, hi everybody. I'm Grant Murray. I'm a marine social scientist associate professor at the Duke University Marine Lab on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Broadly interested in how communities work and how they interact with the environment. I think a lot about values and well-being in terms of the impacts they receive from fisheries management and other interventions. Also look forward to the meeting. Thank you, Grant. Also on the committee but not able to join us today is Matthew Webber, who's an associate professor in resource economics at UC Davis. Next on my list is one of Matthew's. Yeah. Sorry, I think Matt was actually able to join me. Oh, it is. Matthew, I apologize. That's okay. It's not the first time that's happened. Go ahead, Matt. If you'd like to add anything for the introduction. Yeah, perfectly captured. I'm here. Thanks. Thank you. I will learn to take my foot out of my mouth next time I open it. My apologies. Jim, you're next. Here, Jim St. Kerakoff, professor at the University of California at Davis. I'm a natural resource economist by training. I work on the design and evaluation of natural resource management policies, including fisheries. I am also a member of the Ocean Studies Board and currently chairing a standing committee of the National Academies on offshore wind and fisheries. Thank you, Jim. Steven. Hi, everybody. I'm Steven Seifers. I'm an associate professor at the University of South Alabama in the school of marine and environmental sciences and also in sociology. My research is kind of integrating those two fields and we do a lot of work with human dimensions of fisheries, primarily in the Gulf of Mexico where I also serve on the Gulf Councils SSC and ecosystem technical committee. And I am also serving on the fisheries and wind committee that Jim is chairing. So thank you all for coming. Nice to meet everybody. Thank you, Steven. Rashid. Yeah, hello everybody. I'm Rashid Sumaila, a professor at the University of British Columbia. I'm an economist by training. I call myself an interdisciplinary oceans and fisheries economist. Anything connected to the ocean and economics, you will find me there. There's a broad range of things. So, yeah, thank you and that's me. Thank you, Rashid. We have a great team staffing the committee and I'll start by asking Stacy to introduce herself. Thank you, Tom. Stacy, I'm a senior program officer with the national academies. I've been with the ocean studies board since 2012 and in this role for probably approximately the last five years. I'm really looking forward to staffing this committee. Those that know the academy as well know that the staff is expected to serve as generalists staffing projects on a variety of topics. But fisheries is part of my background interest. So these topics in particular are pretty near and dear to me and I'm really excited and fascinated by this particular topic. So looking forward to serving as the study director for this study. Thank you, Stacy. Yeah. Hi, I'm Leanne and I'm a research associate. Fairly new to the ocean studies board. Thank you, Leanne. And last Eric. Hi everyone, my name is Eric. I'm a program assistant on the ocean study board on the study team. All right, thank you everyone will ask the presenters to introduce themselves when they, when they their agenda item comes up. And I'm going to turn the microphone back to Stacy for some housekeeping. Thank you, Tom. I will try to keep this fairly short and painless but the first thing I wanted to just make note of is that this is an open public session of the committee. We will be recording this session. Hopefully you all saw a disclaimer when you logged into the zoom, but this will be recorded and the information gathered is for the purposes of the committee deliberations that follow in closed session. The purposes of moderating the discussion today. I'd like folks to, to please use the raise hand feature in zoom. That way we know who to call on. We will likely prioritize questions and comments from the committee. But certainly welcome questions and comments from others also as time allows. I will just ask folks to please remain muted unless they've been called upon to speak. It looks like so far folks have been doing a really nice job of that and staff will try to assist. As well as needed, but thank you for trying to make an effort to remain muted when not speaking. If you have any technical questions or need any technical assistance with zoom, please don't hesitate to message either Lee and Martin or Eric Unisco both of them are on the line with us today. And to that point, I welcome folks to use the chat feature. It's a great way to exchange information, provide links, et cetera, but I typically do not monitor the chat for the purposes of including feedback into the conversation. So really want this to be a conversation and hope that folks will participate. But just please know that I will not be monitoring the chat for that purpose. I think that pretty much covers my housekeeping items as Tom said, this is the third information gathering meeting of this committee. We certainly can have more, but we will expect to have at least one in person meeting. I think the committee has landed on that likely being in July in at least tentatively in the DC area unless we determine that we have reason to meet elsewhere. So, you know, please follow our website and don't hesitate to reach out if you have any questions about future meetings of this committee as well. Tom, I think with that I can turn it back to you. Thank you, Stacy. We are delighted today to welcome representatives from each of the regional fishery offices around the nation and we've invited these people in for a specific reason. And as I mentioned in my introductory comments, we are tasked with determining determining the catrickers of information required to adequately assess where and to whom the primary benefits of commercial and for higher fishery management accrue, and it is the regional administrators that largely are the sharp end of that process. They are the people who in consultation with the councilors work to make allocation decisions permit decisions licensed decisions. So the committee thought it was appropriate to hear from each of the regions. We gave each of the regional administrators a series of questions. Not that we will specifically stick to those very questions, but we wanted them to give to give them an idea of the kinds of things we're going to be interested in, so that they can be as prepared as possible. For the, for the questions that we asked, we're going to start with each one asking them to describe a little bit about the commercial and for higher questions in their regions, and then we will start going through a series of questions from the community seeking follow up and guidance as we go through our questions. As you can imagine, these men and women are from all across the United States spanning multiple time zones. These are often people whose, whose schedules are very busy so we're going to be constrained certainly in, in time. And so we'll understand that as we go forward. But our first guest today is Mike Pentany, who is the regional administrator of the Greater Atlantic Regional Fisheries Office. And he is the regional administrator for the region that on which I serve of the SSC for the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council, and for the Northeast Fishery Management Council. Mike, welcome to the committee. And I'm going to start by asking you to provide a little bit of introduction of yourself and to the region, paying particular attention to a broad description of the sort of commercial and for higher fisheries that occur in the Northeast. Mike, welcome. Yeah, thank you, Tom. Are we coming through? Okay. You are. Great. So I don't know if it's possible to share by screen. Is that technically feasible? All right, I'm actually on twice. So I'm going to, there's one of my personas is Mike, I'm going to share that screen and see if that works. Excellent. Thank you. And yes, Eric, if you could just ensure that it's that the sharing screen is enabled, that'd be great. So that seems to be working, which is great. So I just thought I'd provide a little bit of context to answer some of the questions and then probably if we have a half hour, I can probably talk for, you know, 10 minutes and then open it up to questions because I'm sure I won't be able to address everything that you're interested in in a brief introduction. But as Tom said, I'm Mike Petney, regional administrator for Greater Atlantic regional fisheries office used to be known as the Northeast regional office until we had a name change number of years ago. I've been in this position for a little over five years, but I've been with no fisheries in our region since 2002. And so 21 years and before that I was a staff member on the New England Fishery Management Council. So I got to know the Fishery Management Council process quite well from the inside, before I transitioned over to, to know a fisheries. And although as regional administrator, my work stands, you know, the full spectrum of of our interest and mandates under the Magnus and Stevens Act, of course, Endangered Species Act, Marine Animal Protection Act, and our grant programs, essential fish habitat, a number of activities, most of my career up until I became regional administrator actually was on the fisheries side of the house. So fisheries is where I have most of my experience and issues like North Atlantic right whales and wind and habitat and Endangered Species Act recovery actions are all actually relatively new to me since I transitioned into the position. So happy to talk about our fisheries and and then answer any questions. So just to provide a little bit of geographic context. This is our region. I'm going to move this out of the way if I can. There we go. That's better. This is our region at large. And technically, according to the way no fisheries allocates our, our regions, the Greater Atlantic region includes the Great Lakes. Although almost all of the work that we do related to the Great Lakes is in sort of grants, mostly pass through grants that we get direction from from Congress and new appropriations. So that's what our enforcement work that our enforcement team does, but by and large when we're talking about fisheries management. We are talking about offshore fisheries from the states, you know, spanning from the states of Maine through generally Cape Hatteras North Carolina is is what we consider our, our general range of jurisdiction, although there are a couple of stocks where that's a little bit different. As many of you know, given your familiarity with the process, we work with fishery management councils into the Magnuson Act. So in, in our region, our most important partners are the New England Fishery Management Council, the Mid Atlantic Fishery Management Council as Tom said, and then also the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, which is comprised of the states of Maine through Florida, although we work primarily with the states of North Carolina, North through Maine. And then just as a real quick snapshot for reference, we have a number of important fisheries in our region. On the commercial side, the highest value fisheries in on the East Coast are sea scallops and American lobster, but also very important economically across the region are our ground fish is our ground fish fishery, the squid fisheries, surf clams and ocean co hogs, summer flounder, black sea bass and scup. And then on the recreational side, both for hire and private anglers as well as shore side anglers are fisheries for summer flounder black sea bass and scup bluefish and ground fish are also are really important. And, you know, when I say important, it's sort of Lee, the number of angler trips the amount of landings and the amount of time and attention that we, that we spend on the management process. And then, as well as value, you know, commercial value and recreational interest and value as well. So just to note, you know, related to these fisheries, particularly related to the question about equity and and benefits that are derived from from the fisheries. I think it's important to at least on the commercial side to recognize that all of the fisheries that I've listed here and most of our other fisheries is this isn't an exclusive list by any means but these are the most important. All of these fisheries are are managed under limited access programs. And so that, you know, as I'm sure you're well aware, limited access programs established 1020 30 years ago. In some cases, itq fisheries individual transferable quota fisheries surf clams and ocean co hogs was one of the first in the country back goes back to the early 90s. The permit structures the permit systems that we have for for vessels to be engaged in those fisheries are pretty much locked up in the, the, the legacy permit holders, and those permits do transfer through the sale of a vessel from one entity to another entity. But by and large, the limit the limited access fisheries and the benefits the most direct benefits of those of access to those fishing opportunities are fairly constrained. And so when we think about equity. It's, it's a bit of a challenging thing for us to work through I think, in part because there's not a lot of opportunity for new entrance. There's not a lot of opportunity for people not previously engaged in fisheries, or in in these industries to get directly involved through access to a permit, unless they have a capital and permits themselves, we talked about selling and transferring permits. The permits themselves aren't actually sold. It's the vessel that's that sold, but it's the permits are attached to a vessel and so, in some cases, you know it's a fully fledged fishing vessel that is sold or transferred to a new owner. It's the full suite of permits associated with that the work around that the industry has found to our permit sale restrictions is often to transfer a suite of permits from a fishing vessel onto a small skiff. Sell the skiff with those permits to a new owner. And then some cases the, and then the new owner will transfer those permits off the skiff and put them back, put them onto the fishing vessel that that they may already own. And then the new access permits are bundled together, regardless of how they were they came to be so if someone has a, you know, qualified with their fishing vessel for a groundfish permit back in the day, say in the early 90s, and they also have a permit for a squid permit based on their history in that fishery. And maybe they have they qualified for a summer flounder and or a black sea bass permit back when those fisheries went to moratorium permits. Then, then those permits are all now linked into a permit bundle, and they cannot be split apart. So, in order for one of those permits to be sold or transferred to a new entrant, new and new vessel, the entire suite of permits would have to be would have to move. That creates, obviously, some, some, some similar challenges with new entrants and an equity in terms of the amount of capital required, because, you know, the opportunity to access those valuable fisheries obviously comes at a cost. On the recreational side, it's a very different story. We don't have any limited access permit structures for most private anglers, you know, it's simply open access. But even on the for hire side where we do issue permits to for hire charter and party vessels. Those are all currently open access. And so we do see, you know, rising and falling numbers of permits issued each year for the opportunity to participate in those fisheries. So in terms of equity on the for hire side, I think there is more opportunity to pursue that because those permits are open access. Just real quick, in terms of primary data sources, you know, largely when we think about equity and the socioeconomics of a fishery we're talking about our fishery dependent data. We have basically five sort of varieties of data sources that we can from which we can glean information about the participants in our fishery. The vessel permit applications have important information in terms of ownership, the structure of a company the structure of of the entities that are involved. And in some cases, you know, it might be one company that has several sub companies that each own a vessel. In other cases, there are various partnerships that rise and fall in terms of those vessel permit applications. And all of that ownership information is provided on the vessel permit application. And then for every fishing trip commercial in particular commercial fishing trip that is that occurs, there should be an associated fishing vessel trip report. That is a source primarily of data about the fishing trip itself. When did it depart where did it go in broad terms when did it land what was caught what was discarded. Where did the vets or toes to the vessel to the vessel make seafood dealer reports is our primary source for landings data, verified landings data. The, the use of that fish where did it go was it used for food was it sold for bait was what was the price paid per pound to the vessel so we get our ex vessel revenue sources from seafood dealer. Revenue and value information comes from the seafood dealer reports. And then the four hired vessel trip reports so our permitted for hire captains those vessels they are required to submit vessel trip reports as well for all their for hire trips be it for a party or charter vessels. And they generally provide information on the number of passengers. Again, where where did the trip occur what were the primary target species. That sort of information. And then the last sort which is semi independent but it is, it is data that's on the fishing activity is our observer report. So we do have a quite robust fisheries observer program out of run out of our Northeast Fisheries Science Center. They put observers on vessels certain percentage of trips each year across the spectrum of our of our permitted managed fisheries. And the observers primarily are collecting information about discards to validate, you know what what bycatch is occurring on the trips, but they are also able to provide resolution information on fishing activity versus the broad broad strokes that are normally provided on a vessel trip report. The last thing I didn't mention which I didn't include here, because it's sort of an interesting mix between fishery dependent data and independent, but it's not really independent would be our study fleet, which is a very small subset of our commercial vessels that agree to participate with the science center in a study fleet. They provide basically haul by haul data on fishing effort and catch. So there's nothing necessarily, you know, on the socioeconomic side, but there is an opportunity there, because of being a participant in the study fleet they are, you know, a source we can go to for for more data and higher resolution data. So that's primarily what I wanted to sketch out in broad strokes and see maybe Tom if it's okay at this point if there are any initial questions or any additional prompts that you'd like me to cover we can we can take it from there, and I'll stop sharing my screen screen unless there's a specific question that somebody would like to point to. Thank you very much Mike I think you sort of touched on on the topics that we asked you to I'll start a question but just I wonder if you could give me an idea of the frequency of these transfers of these permitted but I think you know I don't have a number off top my hand although I can certainly get you up, you know, a monthly average or something. But we do have a you know we have a team in our office that that's their primary job is handling permit transfers. And so, there's a lot of activity, each fishing year, in terms of vessels coming in and out of activity vessels going into we have a, we have a category for our permits called confirmation of permit history or CPH kind of an arcane term but basically it means that the permit bundles are not currently associated with a vessel, but that the, the, the owner of the permit of holder of that permit is retaining their rights to put those permits back on a vessel if and when they choose to do so. And it allows us to get around some of our regulations which state that a, you know, permit has to be on a boat in order to be repermitted and remain eligible the following year. And it also allows for our fisheries that are primarily quota base where quotas are transferable. So, our Northeast ground fish fishery is the best example in our sector system. That's a permit holders that that choose to be sort of lease only can put their vessel permits in this category of CPH. And then they have access to the quota associated with those permits to then lease out to other permit holders that are that are fishing actively. And so those transfers happen quite a bit between, you know, a single owner might, might move permits in and out of CPH based on on what they want to fish each year. And then also they might transfer permits across vessels, or be be selling or purchasing additional permits. Thank you. Grant. Questions. Just additional clarification. Thank you very much for that. I found that very, very helpful. Can you say a little bit more about what information you have about, or as part of the vessel permit applications about the owners? Do we know much beyond their corporate structure, for example, about who owns them, any demographic information about that? Like what, what level of detail do you have about that ownership? It's not terribly detailed. It's primarily, you know, what is the, you know, who are the officers in the corporation. But we're not, we didn't use to ask even what percentage of the corporation they own. I believe we're now asking what percentage in order to do some more deeper dives into the entity structure around our permits. But there's not a lot of demographic information. If any on there, it's basically name address, contact information, and, you know, corporate structure, if there is one, if there is a corporate structure. Can I just ask a quick follow up? Do you have sort of blank versions of that that we could see? Blank. Yeah. On our webpage, we can point you to that. So you could download all of our forms. Okay. They're available. Thank you. Thank you, Grant. Jim, you're up next. Sure. Thanks. Can you elaborate a little bit about why the permits have been bundled and you can't break them up? I mean, that seems interesting. It is. It is interesting. It's a good question. And it's something that we've been thinking about more and more as we deal with climate change and how our stocks and therefore fisheries might be shifting into the future in terms of what stocks may or may not be available. May not be the same stocks that were available 20 years ago. The fundamental reason why those permits were bundled had to do with an effort sort of capacity control. If you can envision one vessel, you know, actively fishing, say, during the 90s when a lot of these fisheries went limited access. They fished for ground fish. They fixed fish for scallops. They fished for monk fish. They did some black sea bass fishing when that was good. Maybe they did some squid fishing in the winter. And so they ended up one single vessel would qualify for a suite of permits. And allowing those permits then to be split off could theoretically turn the activities of one fishing vessel into five fishing vessels and depending on the bundles. And when you look at the capacity controls over the fisheries, you know, a portfolio of fishing opportunity that a vessel might engage in, they might fish for squid. You know, one time of year ground fish another time of year monk fish another time of year. Well, now if you've turned that suite of permits from one vessel, each fish, you know, fishing each fishery for a couple of months. Now you've got five vessels fishing full time in those respective fisheries. And so the threat or concern about that capacity change in the capacity of the fleet to expand if permits were for those permit bundles were split off. That was the root cause of those rules about saying that that once permits are bundled in a suite, they cannot be split apart. Thank you, Mike. Rashid, your hand is next. Yeah, Mike. Thank you. Thank you. Very useful presentation is shot to the point. I mean, in my view. And as you made it clear, what I got from your presentation is that dealing with equity issues will be different depending on what is recreational fisheries, which is open access, which has no permits. So maybe there's more latitude there to play around. At the same time is the sector that is usually dominated by what to do people right. I mean, so when you talk about groups that are not that rich and so on how they participate in there. So that's a separate thing and then the commercial is where we have this legacy, we have the permits. If you call to play around that right in terms of really so so for the committee this is this are probably two things we will have to watch and see how, how we could contribute to to do this work here. So thank you for that. I'm wondering what, and this is close to what Grant said, you know, how much information can you have the legacy ownership. Can we learn about and how does that mirror in the population, you know, in the given fishing area. Yeah, I agree. I think I think that is a challenge. And it's something that, you know, we have a team of social scientists at our Northeast Fisheries Science Center, economists and other social scientists that are looking into some of these issues. And I know, and this isn't I know directly within your, your, your mandate, but looking at crew, and looking at the sort of trying to get us some of the demographics and a better understanding of the crew that are working on these vessels. So we, you know, while we have some limited information about the demographics of our, of our owners, our permit holders vessel owners, we have even less information in general about the crew. And, you know, I think, and so mostly I think what, you know, we get on the vessel trip reports might be the number of crew. So our science center is exploring and they've done, they've done a crew survey, and they're trying to do another crew survey to get more information about our crew. Now that may not be directly responsive to to what you've been asked by our agency. But as you know, as many of you know, you know, a traditional path from to ownership is is for fishermen start working as a crew crew man on a boat, and and work their way up to be a captain and then eventually, you know, once they have the capital and the wherewithal to get their own boat. And so I think having some information about crew, at least from the agency's perspective is important to see how those kind of how those track and and to learn more about the demographics of our crew and and hopefully future future captains and vessel owners. Thank you. Thank you, Mike. Matthew. Thanks. And I think you might have actually covered a bunch of my question. What I was going to ask is if there was information on crew or more generally, to what extent is their kind of vessel and permit owner kind of absentee sort of fishing in the sense that like, you know, you've got vessel owners permanent owners that actually aren't doing the fishing and it's really just for hire crew and captains. Right. There might be, there's probably not like a direct source of information where we could go to that to find that we don't have any operator on board or owner on board requirements and any of our fisheries. So it's not something that we would directly track. We do issue operator permits. And so the master of a fishing vessel for every trip has to has to have an operator permit. So one could theoretically, you know, do a cross comparison of our of the operator permits we issue each year against the the vessel permits that we issue each year and look for look for matches. But in general, you know, we have, we have a variety of fisheries right in instruction corporate structures in the Northeast we have companies like blue harvest out of, out of New Bedford that you've probably heard about. They're, you know, funded by a private equity firm. They own a fleet of ground fish vessels. So the company is clearly, you know, hiring captains as well as crew to operate those vessels. We have a number of owner operators that, you know, either single hand their boat or have a small crew that they work with. And, you know, that can be to some degree that probably can be can be discerned through looking at the permit owner database and seeing, you know, ownership of in the name of an individual. And that's the, and they own one boat. And then there are other, you know, companies that Atlantic capes would be another one that comes to mind out of Southern New Jersey. Luns fisheries, you know, which are true fishing corporations and they own fleets of vessels and, and, and hire their, their captains and crew. I'll just follow up quickly on that. You also mentioned in terms of the demographic information that you had on the permit and vessel owner registrations that you had an address. I was wondering if that address is considered to be a residence or whether that's like a home port for the vessel. I would have to double check on that. We do ask for we ask for home port. But I believe, at least in terms of the permit application. We need an actual physical address. And this dates back to, you know, the dark ages where every time we issued a regulatory change. Everything went hard copy in the mail. And so our permit holder letters, which were, you know, we would inundate some of our permit holders with, with, with mail from us. And so, you know, our databases include, you know, mailing addresses for all of our, our owners, so that we can at least traditionally have mailed, you know, mailed them. The permit renewal forms, their vessel trip reports, you know, everything was hard copy just until a few years ago as we started to transition online. All right. Thank you. I'm going to give one last question to right, Rachel, given the time. So, Rachel, one last question. Yeah, thanks, Tom. I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit about what do you think for your region, what are the main challenges to collecting data and using data related to equity issues. I think, you know, we're, we're working through equity now obviously you got the briefing from headquarters or as a tremendous amount of attention from the administration through the agency around equity and environmental justice. I think one of the biggest challenges are understanding who our communities are that may be invested in our fisheries that we don't necessarily recognize because they're not the main players. Those of you that are, you know, involved in fishery management councils know that are probably have experienced where the number of people that actually show up and participate in the process, either at the committee level or the full level is a fairly constrained few that are heavily engaged either because they are, they want to be as as as business owners or they're hired to be. And so, when you can when you contrast the number of people that say show up to participate in council meetings actively with the number of permit holders the permits that we issue orders of magnitude difference. So, it's entirely possible that there are communities of of fishermen crew permit holders, other communities that are engaged in on the support side of our fishing industry that we don't recognize because we're on a you know simply unaware. They don't participate actively. And maybe they don't participate actively because we're not connecting with them. We're not making them aware of these opportunities and so from, from my perspective our biggest challenge right now is on the identification of our fishing communities and and particularly the underserved communities so that we can begin to assess what services are they currently getting what services would they like and how can we better provide those services. And just a quick follow up, is it in collecting that data is it capacity issues right now is it confidentiality concerns like what's, what are some of the barriers to getting a better handle on that data. I think it's primarily capacity. You know, we, we don't have anybody who has trained in the regional office we don't have anybody who has training in, you know, direct social science training we have some people who you know probably got an undergraduate degree in economics but they've been, they're not practicing economists or social scientists and, and so we don't really have the structure in the organization the organizational structure to focus on on that as a priority. So we do rely a lot of on our social or Northeast Fisheries Science Center staff so social sciences branch there to work with us on this. But again, it's a small team that are trying with a lot of work, they're supporting, you know, all of our activities. You know, and, and I'm sure they don't have the capacity that they would like to put the kind of focus or attention that they would like to on a lot of these issues. And I know we're out of time now so I appreciate all your questions. I'm happy to answer any more questions time if you need a follow up call or can want to send me an email with some questions and I can get some more detailed responses and links to to any of the supporting information that you'd like. Well, Mike, we certainly appreciate your time and your candor and your responses today. I think as we become more educated on the questions that I suspect we might darken your door again. At some point so we really appreciate your time you're of course welcome to stay around and hear from your colleagues across the region we have a time slot at the end for a sort of panel discussion. But greatly appreciate your time today and the thoughts that you shared with us. Mike, thanks very much. Yeah. Thanks Tom. Welcome to I will be honest, I'll try to stay around for another half hour but I will have to bow out before the, the overall Q&A at the end so I apologize for that. Not a worry, we appreciate your time. So we're going to jump geographically from one side of the nation to the other. It's now my pleasure to welcome Frank Lockhart to the committee. Frank is the branch chief for the ground fish and coastal pelagic species branch for the West Coast regional office here representing the West Coast Frank. So, yes, my name is Frank Lockhart I'm actually senior policy advisor that title I don't know how that made it in there. I am not the branch chief for the ground fish and coastal pelagic species. But in any case, it got into a database at one point in time and I'm having a double of a time getting it deleted from that database so apologize for that so. Wonderful. Yes, exactly. So, but I am senior policy advisor and I have been in the region. West Coast region since 2005. Prior to that I had kind of a very career I was a biologist and started started off doing that and then I worked for the House of Representatives for the now defunct merchant marine and fisheries committee which did the business and ESA and remembers work. Then I worked for Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission. And then I went to the agency and but then I did a detail where I ended up working for the Senate Commerce Committee. And then actually ended up working for the went on another detail to the US Ocean Commission, and was was one of the staff on that and actually Dr San Chirico was one of my sources for information there so it worked with him and his office was just a block and a half away from from me there in DC so I don't know if he recalls that but I certainly recall him. And then I did go to the region and there when I came to the region I was the assistant regional administrator and so I was there for the transition of the ground fish fishery from a limited country to the cat shares program and I also managed salmon. Now, as senior policy advisor I still sit on the council but for a limited number of things. And like for halibut and I do sit on for some coastal pelagic species and the ecosystem work and and habitat and given my background I fill in for people that have scheduling conflicts so I will do a little bit of everything for the region. Jen, Juan did try to make this but as you know she was just hired as regional administrator and depending on your analogy. She's either drinking from the fire hose or on the steep end of the learning curve and so she had. She had a thing that she could not get out of and she she doesn't apologize so I am going to try to share my screen now with a very short presentation. Let's see started off on the wrong one. So, just obviously for the West Coast region and I already gone over all of that. And the map shows the main states we have for the region itself we have offices in these four states, or one of the most geographically diverse regions in the country. And a lot of the diversity is because the salmon, you know we do manage salmon and they go well in stream. Not really shown on the map but we also a lot of our fishing entities fish off this coast and also go up to Alaska, and then some of the recreation in particular recreational will fish in Mexico. And so we, if you look at kind of the region where people from this coast fish and it's very, very broad. So, just to kind of a, I realized watching Mike's presentation we went in a different direction but here's the four FMPs that we do we have salmon and the fisheries is is from the US Canada border all the way down to mid California. It's really constrained by USA listed stocks. And there's recreational fishermen and then small scale commercial boats. Importantly, this is an important tribal fishery as well so we have to worry about treaty trust responsibilities for this fishery. And then going on coastal pelagic species. These are things like sardines, anchovy, mackerel, squid. Most of the effort is in Southern and Southern and mid California, but it can be coastwide in some years. They are fished primarily using persains. And there was a limited tribal fishery that due to kind of the over fish status of sardines and as well as COVID. That fishery has been kind of on the back burner for for a few years. Groundfish. Groundfish is kind of the most, I don't know, pervasive fishery. It's all over a lot of different. It's the it's the widest variety of fishing techniques and techniques and participants. It's over 90 species, things like rockfish, a soul, whiting and sablefish. Whiting is a our only real industrial fishery similar to Pollock. You need to have very specialized gear and also very specialized processing to do that. So it's the most industrial fishery and the highest volume fishery by far on the coast. As I said, a wide variety of participants, recreational of all shapes and sizes and then we also have small, medium and large scale commercial boats. And again, a lot of our trawlers participate in both West Coast fisheries and go up to Alaska. Our port of Seattle and to a limited extent some of the Oregon ports, you go into those where some some ports will have mostly Alaska fishing vessels in them. And some will fish both. And again, here we have tribal fisheries for halibut and whiting and rockfish that are an important part of our considerations. Finally, we have a highly migratory species FMP. Again, coast wide, but more effort in California, particularly recreationally. These are tunas, billfishers and sharks. There are protected species by catch concerns. And again, there's recreational fishing and then small, medium scale commercial vessels. So some other important considerations not necessarily related to FMPs. Again, I just wanted to emphasize the tribal trust responsibility to treaty and federally recognized tribes. We have treaty tribes up in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and then federally recognized tribes in California that we have to work with on an annual basis and developing our fishery management policies. Other things we have several international treaties that impact our management. We have a, we work with the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission on highly migratory species. We work with the international Pacific halibut commission for halibut fisheries. And then there is a Pacific hate slash whiting treaty that we work with. It doesn't have its own organization, but we work with through this treaty with Canada. And then finally, Pacific salmon treaty as well that those negotiations impact our management. One thing that is different from a lot of the other regions, a lot of all regions have endangered species concerns, but this is a driving factor for this coast. Most of the people in the region work on protected resources. I would say probably two, at least two thirds of the region staff is working some way on endangered species or protected species management. So another important difference Mike mentioned that they do a lot of the data collecting here. The data collecting is shared. And even some of the permitting is shared between the states, the federal government and Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission. I didn't go into a whole lot of detail here. If you want that kind of detail, we can get it to afterwards. Another thing is that we do have a fishery ecosystem plan, which was developed in part to look at cross FMP issues, such as climate change and coastal committees. There has been some equity discussions during these agenda items. Then finally, we do have strong working relationships with both of our science centers. There's a Southwest Science Center headquartered in La Jolla and a Northwest Science Center headquartered in Seattle. And then finally, we tried to look at the questions you provided and kind of went this way rather than the direction Mike went in. But anyway, so the questions you had, how are considerations of equity incorporated? And then what information could equity considerations rely on? This was kind of a difficult question for us a little bit. Mike hit on it on his very last answer. Equity is hard to kind of define what that means and who is who needs to be part of equity discussions. You know, so just like him, the identification is an important issue that we think needs to work on. However, I guess our response is that the council does provide an open transparent process that's available to all participants. Mike mentioned the same thing. You know, are we getting everyone that needs to be part of that discussions? Probably not. I hope and it is transparent. It is widely noticed to the extent we can. And to the extent that we do talk about equity, it is usually at the council process during harvest specifications process or during FMP amendment process that can come up in other content contexts. But those ones, there are usually some discussions of equity. And the kind of the documents that are used, I think this is kind of at the very broad level, we have NEPA documents, RAR and public comment. Those things we'll talk about equity to the extent we know. And there are occasionally it's not uncommon for the council to ask for specific data on issues related to equity such as impacts on ports or certain vessel classes and things like that. So we have things related to this. We talked about, we don't know if ever we're serving everyone. There's a marine resource education program that is part of a lot of the councils and actually started in the Garfo region. This is a program designed to teach people about the council process to let them better participate in that I am actually the regional lead for that. We are, we have started over the last year, year and a half, recognizing this question and actively trying to, how do we reach out to communities that are underserved so that they can participate in the council process. It has been a challenge. It is a real challenge. And, you know, the, you know, everybody who's not in the room, please raise your hand, you know, it's a difficult thing to kind of approach. And so how do you how do you find those communities that are underserved when you don't know who they are. And so we're working on trying to answer that. A couple of things unique, well, somewhat unique to our region in that potentially address a new entrance and and could potentially address equity is that we do have a fairly substantial open access fishery and the ground fish FMP. It's not totally unregulated, but it does allow for new entrance and they're all usually small vessels and the fishery does change somewhat every year. In addition, when the catchers program came online, part of that was a 10% set aside of the quota of most of everything except waiting for an adaptive management program. The adaptive management program has many potential uses, but one of them is new entry and new entrance and to address kind of community concerns. That tool hasn't been used yet it has been passed through, but it is available there. Excuse me and the council has been looking at that. So again, trying to stay within my rough timeline here. The other questions that we were sent. How robust is this information user in your region. Doesn't depend on the fishery and and and so on. So, I think overall we have fairly robust information since we do share data collection with the states and work with Pacific states and and the federal government. We have a fair amount of information whether it is exactly applicable to actually questions we, I think I would just say ditto to what Mike, Mike said in that we collect a lot of information on the corporate entities. Going down to the person and the corporate structure. We do have where they live, but we don't have a lot of data on, you know, kind of things related to, you know, ethnicity and things like that. I can have those those forms. Again, if those are that that's of interest to you, we can send those along. We do in the ground fish fishery have more of that kind of information is one of the things part of the catchers program is that we required a lot of information on the ownership interests and largely to answer the question of excessive shares. That's required under the Magnus and act and so we have a lot of more information on that again I don't know how much it goes down into social economic identifiers. Not much though. And the one thing that I probably should have put up in a bullet here but you know there are there are efforts by both of the science centers to do. They do do surveys occasionally of kind of economic concerns including there used to be a survey by someone at the Northwest Center. We would look even talking to crew members, you know, talking about crew members and their participation in fisheries. It was all voluntary, but she was actually fairly successful in getting kind of that kind of those kind of considerations. And, but nothing, there was no formal mandatory kind of information gathering there so. Anyway, I think that is it for me on the presentation but again happy to stay and answer questions. Frank, thank you very much for the presentation. I thought the Garfo region was pretty big. You, you win the prize I think for the geographic range. So one of the things that I would just like your thoughts on you said about how difficult it is to identify, you know, those who are not in the room that must be made even more difficult when they're on cultural differences across a region as big as this. So, so is that something that you actively work on, or just as something that you're aware of. We are actively working on it as Mike said there has been a recent push to focus on these kind of issues. And so, both at the council level and the regional level and then as I said through this marine resource education program. All three kind of entities are looking into this. And the challenges are even just how do you go about that, you know, again, you're, you're, you can't just send out a form because you don't have any addresses for our four people and so the way it has been working just to give you a flavor of what's going on is that we're working with our state folks who are the people most often in the ports are observer program often is or is also out in the ports a lot and so we're trying to work through those entities to just find out who are the people that you know are out there fishing and participating but that they're participating in the council process. We have made some identification of folks that could potentially go down a road of kind of incorporating those people into the process. But just let's say for the marine education program we, what do you do. Do you, you know, it would be nice to have something that all can attend but oftentimes language is a huge barrier. A lot of the Vietnamese fishermen that we know of, and to a certain, but also probably more so Chinese and Hispanic. They don't speak the language so that that you know going to a education council workshop, you know, would not help them and unless we had interpreters, you know, for them, or what they do in the marine education program in the southeast is that they do have a Spanish family program for outreach that they do. Anyway, so, yes, it's something that we're working on but I wouldn't say that a whole lot of progress has been made and it's continuing, continuing to be worked on. Great. Thank you. I see four hands in front of me. So Jim you're first. Hi, Frank. Good to see you. I actually have two questions. I hope that's okay, but hopefully they're short. So one is maybe some reflections on why the 10% set aside hasn't really been utilized yet. And two, in the decision making around the FMPs, you know, obviously the consideration reports comes in but do you have examples where the consideration of a port or the impacts on different ports led to a different decision, rather than just classifying what might happen. Well, first of all, about why adaptive management hasn't been used well. One of the things is that it was anticipated that in the first few years of catch your program that it probably wouldn't be used because you want to let the catch your program come into play so catch your program started in 2011. Yes, in my mind, as the person sitting on the council for that I was thinking, well, you know, at least three years and maybe five years, you know, there won't really be much need there. But where it is right now is that the council has discussed this they did a five year review and there's been a couple of other agenda items. I imagine that the people that are getting that pass through, you know, want to keep getting that pass through. And there that is the discussion that the problems that could potentially be addressed by the adaptive management program haven't been so large that the council has felt that they needed to act. And the other side is actively pushing to not act. So those two things I think have led to a little to no action on that. As far as kind of you know action on ports I think maybe it's actually related to the best example I can go as kind of a negative example. When the council did a buyback in the early 2000s to get rid of excess capacity. They ended up impacting two or three ports and kind of Southern Oregon and Northern California where almost Crescent City had almost all of their vessels eliminated in the buyback. And so that port went from an active port to a pretty much desolate port. The council was affected by that and that did affect their discussions for the catcher program. They were worried about creating those kind of problems. So I one of the reasons that they put in things like for the catcher program the first couple of years of the catcher programs, you could not get rid of all of your quota, you had to wait a little or might have been one year I can't remember I'm sorry it's getting to be a little old but anyway there was a time where you had to hold on to your quota to allow you to get familiar with the program. And so those are kind of the, I mean, the only two examples that kind of pop into my head, you know that there were kind of equity considerations that the council wanted to address. Thank you. Thanks Frank, Stephen. Hi Frank, thank you for the presentation. I also have two, two kind of quick questions. If that's okay so the first one was, you mentioned that the NEPA process is one of the ways that that social or equity information comes up. I wonder if you could talk just a little bit about, you know, the type of, of information or depth of information that you typically see in the NEPA reports, and then the second one is related to that of where the, you mentioned the council sometimes directly requests equity information and these are those targeted towards the science centers or where do those requests go to. What was the second one. So thank you. Okay, so as far as the kind of the NEPA and the RIRFA. Again it is more focused on kind of the economic side, you know how much money is flowing into ports, what size classes of vessels are participating in the fishery. You know, what is kind of the turnover in fishing effort and how does it shift, you know, over the years and things along those lines. Again it is not really focused terribly much on demographic information it's more on a kind of a port side port vessel size and vessel type kind of information. There is some mention occasionally, you know, of typical demographic, some demographic groups, but I would say it's very small. It is not, there's not a lot of information there. And holy cow, oh the council requests. So, again, even the council requests are kind of focused on this every once in a while something will come up in an initial analysis that indicates well maybe this port may be more affected than another port. So they'll ask for more information on specifics related to that. And it really depends on the question. Sometimes that question would go to a management team. But our council has management teams that are comprised of federal and state biologists, not necessarily scientists. They often do a lot of the analysis. And obviously the science centers can be called upon and then even the SSC can be called upon to answer these types of questions, but they're usually fairly specific. Most often again related to things like impacts on ports impacts on vessel classes and things along those lines. Yeah, thanks. Thanks Frank for this presentation. It's been super helpful. I was curious, could you talk a little bit about, do you have specific data needs or requirements related to the tribal fisheries and that federal trust responsibility. And if you do, is it the feds collecting and providing that data? Are you getting it from other sources? Could you talk about that dimension of your region? Again, we work with the tribal managers. The most tribal fisheries, I would say the vast majority. I'll say all of them. All of them have some management capability and then there's also a couple of commissions. There's the Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission and the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission that have scientists there. So the tribes themselves collect the data and provide it to us. And so we work with them to get that data. And it's something that is an annual process. It's fairly well resolved now about how that goes about getting done. And so, but there are some issues that we have to work with individual tribes, but most issues are the tribes themselves will already put information into the system. And this is actually something I probably should have put on the slide. We have something called PACFIN and RECFIN, which is the databases that support commercial fishing and recreational fishing. So the tribes are part of that process and they put information into those two databases. And is it primarily fishery data or does the data collection include like demographic data on impacts to tribal participation or how many people are participating or is it fishery status? It is primarily fisheries data, but there will be, again, it is in my recollection during, you know, a harvest specifications process or a fishery amendment process or a major change like going to catchhairs. There will be some of that information revealed by the tribes, mostly via kind of not public comment but comment by the tribes to the council. This is how this is going to affect us. And, and it's done that way. I don't believe there's any standard report on tribal participation that goes into the system. Gotcha. Thank you. Helen, you're next. Great. Thanks. So Frank, at the beginning of your presentation, you talked a little bit about how there are certain groups of fishers and communities that are active, not just in the region that you're talking about today, but also up in Alaska. You touched later on survey work and then you were talking about issues that are important at a community level like climate change and community well being as I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about maybe data limitations or challenges or if you don't think there are any. You could say that as well, but related to the fact that if we're thinking about equity and access, we, at a very high level could be thinking across region here, but we've already broken things down we're hearing from you are hearing from somebody from Alaska separately and so I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about. How does that data or how could that data come together or maybe not. Well, again, just to kind of go back to what Mike said at the beginning, I think the biggest challenge is is finding out about the underserved communities and you know and trying to reach out and see if there may be issues that are just not being captured because just like him when you know we have the people that show up to every single council meeting. And then we have other people that show up to most council meetings. And then we have every once in a while, you know people coming that don't come very often. That is actually keep on pointing out in rep the M rep program has actually led to more participation so we've had we have done some reach outreach and and that's worked and people are participating. And the broader thing you know we do work well with the Alaska region and particularly on you know on halibut and ground fish and endangered species. We have to our salmon. Some of our salmon swim all the way up to the Bering Sea so we do actually have active USA consultation work that we do with with the region on that. And so we have a pretty good handle on the people that do go fish up there. And it's not it's not a hidden thing you know our, we actually like the whiting fishery. We will regularly hear from them well our play we believe we're not going to catch as much whiting this year because the public a and b season is blank, you know and so we're going to put our money there and money and time there. So we have that kind of information. And it's directly from the industry, usually related to maybe to your question related to kind of equity and access, you know, I don't again we don't know there may be people that would love to, you know, fish and our fishery and go up there but just like Mike, a lot of that is a limited access program. So with the exception potentially of the adaptive management program, most of it you, you would have to spend a significant amount of money to enter a fishery, particularly up in Alaska I think the buying quota up there is more expensive than us and we're pretty sure about. So, I don't know if I'm quite answering your question so if you, if I, if I've got it great if not if you could ask a more refined. I shouldn't say not more refined but just ping me where I got it wrong. I think you touched on it I guess I was just thinking as we sort of silo and today we hear each of the individual presentations if there's anything that you thought we should be thinking about that relates to these cross regional sorts of considerations. And maybe there's not. Well, I guess that's a hard question for me to answer every once in a while. We do hear, you know, I, although I've never directly worked in HMS management I have been at meetings where they talk about ground fish and HMS and some of the HMS folks. And we do talk about why I wish I had access to this. I wish I had access to that and you know I or even some of them, and I can even bring this back from my Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission days. Fishing fishing vessels used to fish for a lot of things. But as management came online with the Magnus and act they they were siloed into particular things and then instead of being, you know, just a person that fishes for whatever is available and the highest price for they were forced into certain fisheries and some of them would like there to be more discussion of allowing them access to other fisheries but those kind of comments have become fewer and fewer after the years have gone by. But that's a hard question for me to answer it's almost to me that's, you would need to ask the industry and the, and the, you know, the interest in public that that kind of question, but sorry that's all I can do. All right, Frank, thank you once again for your presentation and your thoughtful response to our questions. We're going to take a 10 minute break so I can fill my cup of tea back up. And we will start up again at 230 with Gretchen Harrington who I see is already on the call who's the assistant regional administrator for the Alaska regional fisheries office. And before I go I have to leave now I will try to make it back for the general purpose discussion. I think I can right now. I just want to let you know I'm going to drop off for for at least a couple of hours. So, right. Thanks. Thanks very much. All right, thank you. And the clock says it's to 21 so it will be a fairly short break to 230. Thank you. Who is the assistant regional administrator for the Alaska fisheries office. And Gretchen, you're back. It was just a matter of tissue and you slid off screen. So, welcome to the meeting I know you have been on for a little while you've got a sense of the flavor of the questions we're interested in. We greatly appreciate you making time to talk to us today. And I'm going to turn the webinar over to you. Thanks Tom. Hello everyone. I'm Gretchen Harrington with the Alaska region. And I did sneak away I was trying to turn on my light we have a rare sunny day in general Alaska so it made me a little dark at least in my square. So I apologize if it's too dark, but I will be showing a presentation so I'll go ahead and start that. Thank you my presentation. We see it as a, as a sort of tabbed version of it it's not in presentation mode. Now it is. Okay. Yeah, so we, we don't use zoom and so. Yeah, a little bit awkward getting it started. Anyway, so, hi everyone. So, what I'm going to talk about today are the real in response to your questions. Specifically information on the Alaska region. A lot of what Frank and Mike had talked about is very similar in the last region as well managing under the Magnus and Stevens act using the Council process with our Alaska Fisheries Science Center collecting a lot of the data that we use we also have an ACFIN and a state of Alaska that has a lot of history managing fisheries so they collect a lot of data so our process. Issues and challenges are very similar to to what they explained but there's some unique Alaska things as well. So for an overview we have commercial fisheries recreational subsistence and an emerging section sector for aquapulture mostly focused now on shellfish and help in the in the near shore. We work with Alaska Department of Fish and Game US Coast Guard US Fish and Wildlife Service, as well as our science center and other offices. We have Alaska native tribes and tribal consortiums communities and local governments, non governmental organizations, and, and other general public. It's kind of a confusing chart but I think it's very interesting and kind of gives you an overview of the complexity of our fisheries so. We have a wide variety of fishing vessels participating in the federal fisheries off Alaska, and they can be grouped into these different categories based on the fish species they target and the gear used. They're how they're licensed, and then each license have it has a specific endorsement, and then eligibility to participate in cat share programs and I will get into more detail in our cat share programs and then by regulations so we, we take a very complex matrix of fisheries and we chop them up into small pieces we issue over 1200 tax so total allowable catches and I will get into more detail on this but I thought this was a good overview of, you can see our different programs. And also some participate in more than one program, some participate only in an individual program, and these are help define when and where they when they fish where they fish what they catch and what gear they use and what type of vessel they are. So who manages the fisheries off Alaska, the National Fisheries Service, we work very closely with the North Pacific Fishery Management Council. We have Alaska Board of Fisheries and Alaska Department of Fish and Game and the International Pacific Halibut Commission. So, our regional administrator John Curlin wasn't able to make it today because he is at an IPHC commissioners meeting. We primarily manage ground fish in the Bering Sea in Gulf of Alaska so Pollock, Pacific Cod, number of species. We also manage crab in the Bering Sea in conjunction with the state of Alaska so we have a fishery management plan and the Magnuson Act that delegates specific management measures to the state of Alaska but we control the entry we've done a rationalization program or which is what we call a catch share program. We also have a small scallop fishery that we also manage with the state of Alaska under a federal FMP. We have a halibut fishery, which is managed in conjunction with IPHC that sets the harvest limits and then the North Pacific Fishery Management Council makes the allocation and there's smaller fisheries for herring, a large salmon fishery that's managed by the state and then there's a few other much smaller fisheries. So the thinking about equity in fisheries management is interesting I think in my career that that concept has changed a lot from when we first started doing our rationalization programs like the halibut and salmon fish IFQ program. But I think the council and NIMS in our decision making, our primary job is ensuring sustainability, right, so we achieve equity in that sense of that if there's fish to harvest then they're available for people to harvest them. And that we consider all affected parties in the development of fishing management programs and regulations I think both the council and the agency do a good job of really figuring out who's going to be an impacted and how. And we have provisions for entry level access for most of our programs and we the council has built that in to some extent. We have measures that ensure the benefits and burdens of fishing are distributed fair and justly among stakeholders this is largely driven by the provisions of the Magnus and Stevens Act. And we do that through sector splits which means taking a harvest amount of a certain species and dividing it among different sectors so here vessel type. We have cat share programs. We have the community development program which I'll talk about. We have an IFQ program for halibut and salmon fish and then what we call crab rationalization which is our cat share program for the crab fisheries we also have a number of other cat share programs. Also, and this is I think really important especially in lately is we really try to manage the ground fish fishery to minimize its impacts on other resources so minimizing by catch of species that are important to other fisheries like halibut salmon and crab, minimizing impacts to habitat closing areas, making gear modifications, things like that. So those are, those are a lot of the things we think about when we're designing programs for the ground fish fisheries. The sector splits so that allows the different gear types, and it helps level the playing field for different gear types to minimize conflicts over, over resources, facilitates management and it's based on historic participation, economic needs, cultural significance, conservation needs. And we regularly review and adjust to ensure continued fairness and equity. We have cat share programs. We have besides the ones I've mentioned, we have the American Fisheries Act. Amendment 80, which is the non-poly ground fish and the Bering Sea, the rockfish program, and when the council sets the initial allocations, it's based on historic and recent participation. It's under the Madison Act, but the council has also explored a lot of other tools or our catcher programs are extremely, extremely complex because of that. We usually provide provisions for to promote equity for new entrants. Through the crab rationalization program established a separate type of quota share for an allocated that for crew. And we had crew data from the state of Alaska commercial fisheries injury commission. We also have done a lot of community protection measures. So there's a, there's an element of learning from each cat share program. Our first one was halibut sable fish. The first one was the crab rationalization program. The council learned a lot from that program when it did the crab rationalization program. And so a lot of the features of that program that make it complex were there intended to, to allow the crab to be delivered just in historic communities. So accounting for that historic community participation in the fisheries as well. Sorry. I'm monitoring enforcement. We have heavily monitored fisheries we have complex copper. Catch accounting and a very robust observer program. And we review regularly review our catcher programs and the council has them on on different review schedules and those reports are all available on the council's web page. So I think one of the, to me one of the most interesting programs is the community development quota program. And that is represents 65 coastal communities that was enacted by statute. We didn't have the authority under the Magnuson Act so so statute. This was created in a separate in separate statute. The communities, those were then grouped into six nonprofit CDQ corporations, and they receive allocations of multiple ground fish specific halibut and crab species off the top so once the council sets the total allowable catch a portion depending on the fishery is then allocated to the CDQ group. There are also constraints on how the CDQ group spends their, their incomes and so they have invested heavily in the bearing sea fisheries. Most bearing sea fisheries have a very large CDQ ownership so it's in addition to the allocation so they've taken the allocations with the income they've earned from managing those allocations they've invested more heavily in in our fisheries. So we put a lot of that money back into their local communities in for fish processing so and other things like that in the state of Alaska just completed its tenure review of the CDQ program, and that report is also available on the council web page. And then we have the halibut sablefish IFQ program that was our very first one that was really focused. Again, and I said equities changed over the years so that one was focused on equity. Among fishermen so among participants and so there were a fair number of things added to that program. Share classes ownership caps. The quota was divided by areas to make sure that the fishing was spread out so if you have quota for an area you can only fish in that area. It increased the value of the fishery it also took a derby fishery that was dangerous and wasteful and it was allowed it to spread out over time and become a lot more safe. Also reduced excess capacity. But crab fishery so it manages multiple stocks in the Bering Sea. It had was called what we well what we call at the time a three pie program so it provided. And to help fishermen and communities and processors. And it also provided crew members share based on recency and community protections. You know one of the things though that we've noticed over time is when the Council designs these programs and puts these measures in place these constraints so like crew. It was really important at the time that the crew shares had a recency so that only crew active people that go on boats and fish can qualify for these quota share. So if you get these shares they're like oh hey wait those are constraining I want to have more flexibility so it's a it's a constant trade off right between providing flexibility and and then making the constraints that keep it. Keep it available for different user groups. So we have a lot of data we like data in the Alaska region. We have a really robust observer program many of our large vessels or catcher processors and are 100% observed, meaning at least they have sometimes two observers on the vessel to making sure every hall is observed. We have a partial coverage category for smaller boats which still averages. Maybe around, or between 20 and 30% observer coverage depending on the fishery and everything we have electronic monitoring that we use not only for compliance but for catch counting. All of our rationalization programs have some economic and socio economic data collection program built in. And we've learned a lot over the years every time you do something new and different you learn benefits and drawbacks. We also do a survey, our Alaska Fisheries Science Center surveys for stock assessments. And we're figuring out when I think at the slide a little bit later on local traditional knowledge and how, how we can start to use that in our in our process. So, our primary data sources to catch counting system for the amount of fish harvested and and who's harvesting it and where they're harvested and what are the, what's the bycatch. I think I need to go into that detail but I think this is an interesting graphic of showing all the data that goes into our catch accounting system and then where that data goes and how it's used so it's used for in season management. Protected fisheries for participants so we know exactly how many salmon are harvested in the Bering Sea Pollock fishery for example, with. We have economic and socio economic data, we have an annual economic status of the ground fish fisheries the safe report that that looks at that. We have excess of data from the state of Alaska. Also in the state of Alaska they have the CFC permits so fisheries that they manage they collect the data on participants. We have community profiles and a separate report which is, I wrote it out, it's having a really great report annual community engagement and participation overview so that's produced by Alaska Fisheries Science Center that looks at each community. And then how that what's their participation in the ground fish fisheries, a little more demographics about the communities we also have census data. And other other work trying to understand the composition independence on fisheries in the communities in Alaska. So this is something the Council is looking at and it's a priority to figure out how to improve how we include local and traditional knowledge. I would say it's something we're learning a lot about and trying to the Council form the task force with diverse members and they put together a plan that's currently out for public review. But I think it's still going to take a while before we figure out exactly what data is out there that's useful for decision making that we can incorporate into our decision making process. And how do we, how do we collect that information and present it that's in a meaningful way. And we also we manage subsistence halibut, we do not manage subsistence salmon, but we're, we're collecting data on halibut use for subsistence users. And this was just the questions you asked so I think I will leave it at that and see if there's any questions. Thank you very, very much for a really interesting overview of fisheries I know very little about one of the things that struck me was that one of the ways the region has seemingly worked to include equity is frequent change. And when there is appearance of inequity there are data that are going to bear to change. You said you collect lots of data but are those are those decisions data driven or are those decisions more perception driven. Yeah, that's a really good question you know honestly I think it's a bit of both. You know the Council public process allows participants to tell their story. And so a lot of times, that's a lot of what the Council considers and then Council staff and the agency we work to understand that as well. What data do we have that would either support or would actually consider what we're hearing from the public. And I think, in your right it is in some ways a little reactive as far as if we see something happening, because we've implemented one program. We implement the next program to try to mitigate that. But, but most of it I would say we do do a lot of qualitative analysis I think that's, that's just par for the course. We are able to have enough data to do quantitative analysis when available, and we do have data on who participate like when I talked with colleagues from like the Caribbean region, like they don't know who participates or where even they land. We know that we know who fishes, what they catch where they catch we have really specific data on the fisheries. And I think that that's that really helps in our decision making. Yep. Thank you. Rishi. Yeah, so thank you very much I mean I, I came into this. I mean that Alaska is likely to be ahead or one of the ahead management councils because of, especially because of your community development quota that I've given that as an example around the world so, and you didn't disappoint that's good. I see a lot of interesting stuff in there in your presentation. And so I'm wondering one of the things we had earlier is this legacy, people have this legacy issues and so it's very difficult to be as flexible as you guys have been as Tom just alluded to so do you have legacy issues and how do, how do you negotiate around them to be able to be this kind of adaptive and flexible. Well, I'll start my response but then I might ask a little bit more on the meaning of legacy so I think in Alaska, one of the things we benefit from is we have healthy resources. So that allows more. Well, we have healthy resources but we are in a time of climate change so things are changing, but I think for most of the development of these programs we had healthy resources. We also have one state right so things are simpler for us in negotiating and how we do this for. Can I ask what you mean by legacy. Is this idea that permits or quotas have been allocated to, to groups or entities and it is their thing so you cannot easily bring in new entrants and so on. Right. That's what. Yes, yes. That's what I would have assumed that I wanted to make sure I had that right so yes we do have that issue now that we have these programs. Even though we're always very clear that you know a quota share is a is a privilege not a right. It's still field they make investments they get loans they. They have a lot of this. And so they really do feel it is a right I think the council has built in new entrance. There is interest in their programs, specifically for new entrance. I know in the Gulf of Alaska. So most of our rationalized fisheries are in the Bering Sea. There is interest in more rationalization of the fisheries in the Gulf of Alaska those are smaller fisheries, and there's more people. So it makes it a little bit more difficult, but I, you know, people do talk about having a CDQ type programming the Gulf of Alaska, do other things like that. Um, but yeah I think changing an existing program it would be very hard we have a few tribal entities who are interested in changing the halibut stable fish program, because in that program, like I said the main issue was fishermen and dividing it among dividing the catch among fishermen, but they didn't allocate to communities or provide the ability for small participants in local communities and some of the people who were initial issues for economic reasons sold their quota. And now they can't buy it back because it's too expensive or they don't have the capital so so yeah there's a lot of issues. I think yes there's a lot of legacy issues. I agree. Yeah, yeah, thank you but somehow you money to negotiate that so there's some learning right, but can be done from your system. Thanks. Yeah. Rachel, one last question. Yeah thanks Tom thanks Gretchen that was really interesting. You know some of the challenges working in Alaska around census data given given the size of some of our smaller communities and villages and I was curious. Can you talk a little bit about the challenges related to the collection of impacts to tribes or tribal participation and fisheries like is there could there be sharing across federal agencies in terms of this or have you guys given any thought to how we could get better data on understanding those types of impacts giving this the size of the community of the communities that have been affected. Yeah, that's a really good question and one we struggle with because Alaska is different than the lower 48 is you probably know this but we. It's a CDQ program but that didn't provide allocation to tribes it provided allocations to Alaska natives in this CDQ groups. We also have Alaska native corporations that are also not coordinated with the tribe so how do we get information from tribal participants we've we've tried. And one of the things that is really important to me and that we're working on is how to more clearly communicate. Instead of like you know here's 1000 pages are usual analysis of dense and there's so much information but like how do we provide information to the tribes in a way that's digestible so that they can provide their input in a meaningful way. We do work with US Fish and Wildlife Service, the state of Alaska, we provide systems information we consult with tribes. But I think, because of these other things, it's more difficult for tribes in Alaska to participate they don't have the same amount of infrastructure. So let's say for example tribes in Washington State have because they're able to hire more staff things like that that there's not that economic. So I think that's something we're working on. Okay that's that's really helpful. Is it possible for information sharing across federal agencies like could, could you work with BIA to get like information on the Alaska native role to understand how many participants are currently. When you say participants so they are not going to be participants. Most. There are Alaska natives that are fishermen in the NIMS managed fisheries right we manage fisheries in the EBC. And by and large there's not a tribal, it's not like in Washington State there's not a tribal participants in our fisheries. Now they're impacted. And, and value their input we hired a tribal liaison to help with that. But they're not not directly really regulated fishery participants so it is different than Washington State in that sense as well. We send them things we request, or we provide information for consultations. There is a lot of data collected on tribes by. Like I said he was fish and wildlife Department of Energy that actually do manage tribal fishermen. But we don't. But you could, like regardless of treaty rights or status, you would be able to know, or you could potentially know, like how many, how many tribal members historically participated in Halibut IFQ, versus, you know, over time like would you be able to have that information. Okay, I think we could, you know I don't know if anybody's looked at that. I think it would be fascinating to know how many Alaska Natives were initially Shoes of Halibut Quota Share, because what we hear anecdotally is the, the most of the Alaska Native initially Shoes. A lot of them sold for various reasons over time. That would be fascinating and I don't, I would have to see how they could go about figuring that out. But we don't have tribal treaty rights like in Washington State it's so yeah. Lisa I see your hand is up. Last quick question. Yeah, I was really interested in the efforts to think about local and traditional knowledge and and how it can work. And you mentioned some of the, you know, big broad picture challenges about that I just wonder if there is there a policy guidance or a document something that explains like the rationale for that program that we could get access to. Yes, yes. So our council does an amazing job. They post on their agendas and I can email it to the folks that reached out to me but the on each council agenda they post all the documents for that agenda item and there is a document that's out for public review that talks about the council's task force and the work they did and what they envision in for the future. Thank you. Yeah, I'll email that after this. Thank you Gretchen. Thank you for really, really interesting presentation on a system I knew very little about and the thoughtfulness that the council has put into this and the office has put into this is really very impressive. So thank you very much. I suspect we may be darkening your door at some point, because this was a lot to take on board, but thanks very much indeed. Yeah, thank you. Also, I just want to add that I will not be able to be here from four to 430 something else and I apologize. No, no, not a reason to apologize. Thank you. Let's take another huge geographic leap we went from the northeast to the northwest. Now we're going from Alaska to the southeast so strap in and because it will be a very different system. Welcome, Andy Strelcheck to the webinar. Andy is the regional administrator for Noa's southeast region. Andy, welcome. Thank you, Tom. I just want to do a sound check. Hear me okay. Coming through very clear. Perfect. The committee for the invitation to speak to you today and also accommodating my schedule, which has been a very busy day. Like you just noted, Tom, I think you'll be experiencing a little bit of whiplash here. Very different fisheries in terms of how we operate in the southeast relative to Alaska, going from the nation's largest commercial fisheries now to the nation's largest recreational fisheries. I do not have a physical presentation for you today, so I'm just going to speak and walk through the questions that you had posed and do my best to answer those questions over the next 20 or so minutes, leave some time for you to ask questions. But as noted, we have a very diverse region. My office manages fisheries from Texas to North Carolina, including Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. We work with three separate fishery management councils. We have very diverse fisheries that operate in the region from commercial fisheries, large scale commercial fisheries to recreational fleets of private anglers and four higher vessels. Most of our fisheries that we manage can be very contentious deal with a lot of allocation decisions because they're divided between the commercial and recreational sectors with regard to access. And so I'll talk some about that. But in terms of the Southeast region, the fisheries themselves, those are also very diverse. Our primary species of management are reef fish or snapper grouper species. And so the South Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico has upwards of 40 to 50 species of reef fish that each of those manages. Often those are caught in conjunction with one another. And so a wide variety of snappers, groupers, jacks and other reef fishes that can be caught together. We also manage species of coastal pelagics like mackerels, as well as highly migratory species that occur in the region. And then we have some lobster and shrimp fisheries as well. The Caribbean is very different, but in some ways very similar in terms of very diverse fisheries of snappers and groupers. In the Gulf of Mexico, the primary commercial fishery is the shrimp fishery which operates by trawl. There's also a shrimp trawl fishery in the South Atlantic Ocean. No industrial trawl fisheries in the Caribbean. Most of our fisheries are prosecuted using hook and line. We do authorize long line gear. And then there are some limited use of traps for black sea bass in the South Atlantic and spiny lobster in both the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico, South Atlantic Ocean. So I think the take home that I wanted to just start you with is that it's a very diverse fishery with a lot of diverse participants that are prosecuting and harvesting those species. The responsibilities are shared not only obviously with my office, but also with, I think we have eight coastal states and two territorial governments, as well as the Southeast Fisheries Science Center that performs our science and research for federal fisheries management. You had asked about considerations of equity into the decision making process. I'll focus on kind of our overarching federal mandates, but then try to get into a little bit of the specifics with regard to equity issues in the region. As I alluded to earlier, our primary issues with surrounding equity pertain to allocations between sectors, primarily the recreational and commercial sectors, but also we do allocate in the Gulf of Mexico quotas among states for red snapper. And then back in 2007 and 2010 we implemented IFQ programs for grouper and snapper in the Gulf of Mexico and made initial decisions about allocations for those programs. We also have a small program for wreck fish individual transferable quota program in the South Atlantic that's one of the oldest in the country. All of those IFQ programs are based on kind of historical participation and I'll talk a little bit about kind of the challenges we're facing now and how equity is kind of playing into considerations before the councils at this point. In terms of how equity factors into the decision making process, as you well know, the regional councils are intended to represent diverse sectors and viewpoints. So that's the starting point to ensure fair and balanced apportionment amongst the sectors and representation of the councils. I will say that I think this is an area where certain constituent groups feel like we could do better. There's a viewpoint that the Gulf of Mexico fishery management council is unbalanced and therefore resulting in inequitable decisions related to fisheries management. But overall a lot of the work that we do obviously is driven by the Magnuson Act and considerations of optimum yield in terms of what will provide for the greatest net overall benefits of the nation. We obviously consider national standard for in our allocation decisions to ensure we don't discriminate between residents of different states and then if it becomes necessary to allocate or assign privileges. Those allocations are fair and equitable among fishermen and recently calculated to promote conservation. I will say that's also an area of contention based on allocation decisions in our region between sectors and the viewpoint that's led to at least the agents being sued over some of those allocation decisions. And that it's not been equitable to shift some record or commercial allocation to the recreational sector. And so that's certainly ongoing debate and issue dealing being dealt with in the court system at this stage for one of our primary reef fish species in the Gulf of Mexico. We also to the extent we can with rebuilding plans consider conservation and management measures that allocate harvest restrictions and recovery benefits both fairly and equitably amongst the sectors. And in fact recently the South Atlantic Council is an example past an allocation action that kind of results in reducing the impacts are equitably distributing the impacts across sectors when the quotas are being cut. But then as the stock recovers also equitably increasing those benefits back to both sectors. So those are some of the considerations we deal with with rebuilding plans. And then a lot of the work obviously we do includes work with executive order 12 866 with regard to maximizing that benefits from the nation the regulatory flexibility act. To determine if a provost action is expected to play small entities at a significant competitive disadvantage, as well as social effects analysis that are contained in all of our amendments and fishery management actions related to fishing communities and those engaged in the fishing industry. In addition to all that we have a number of executive orders pertaining to environmental justice equity and underserved communities, and we have tools related to social indicators for coastal communities that include social vulnerability that are at a level related to the kind of place based community so we can look at the effects impacts of our regulatory decisions related to that social indicators tool but it is at a scale related to the community and not at a finer scale for equity considerations. One of the challenges that I wanted to know with all of this is that there's limited guidance obviously in terms of how both the agency analyzes and kind of explicitly accounts for equity considerations but also how the council nymphs kind of balance equity consideration in light of a lot of other mandates and requirements imposed upon them with regard to decision making. And then as kind of a couple of examples of kind of recent ongoing work that I think is useful so in the IFC programs in the Gulf of Mexico recently there's been a lot of concerns that with new entrants they are having challenges obviously gaining access to the fishery or the price of obviously leasing allocation or buying quota share is really out of reach for many and so the council working with the agency formed an IFC focus group and this is unlike kind of our typical advisory panels and we created this focus group with intentional representation of diverse groups of people that participate in the fishery so not just shareholders and those that are directly operating in the program but those that are ultimately like a public participant or a crew member or those that might not have shares or allocation because we really felt it was important that we get those diverse group viewpoints with regard to how the program was operating. We're also embarking in the region on equity and environmental justice focus groups so we have a national strategy that's soon to roll out but we're also doing a regional implementation of that strategy in the southeast region and over the course of the next four to six months we intend to hold 20 plus focus group meetings throughout the entire region, South Atlantic Gulf and Caribbean to discuss with entities in our fisheries how we can deliver our services in a more equitable manner. What are the barriers and challenges with equitable access to our fisheries and then what changes and recommendations would they make for the agency so that's work ongoing and I look forward to obviously seeing the results of that and ultimately how that translates into changes in terms of the management process going forward. You asked about what information could equity considerations rely on in our region. I mentioned earlier the NIMPS social indicators for coastal communities tool so that's already something that we have in place now and is at the community place based level in order to meet the requirements of national standard aid of the Magnuson Act. There's also what will be available soon a community environmental justice explorer tool that's being developed and this builds off of our social indicators tool to describe coastal community conditions and that can be used to partially address some of the environmental justice mandates and the recent executive orders at the community level. We eventually hope to be able to use self reported race, ethnicity, sex and age information through our federal fishing permits in the Gulf and South Atlantic to examine equity in our fisheries. We have collected some of that information. It's kind of gone through some fits and starts and was not required at one point in time. So it's definitely has some gaps and limitations to the data. And then we're also embarking soon on a cruise survey that we conducted in the southeast, which will provide information on demographics of cube crew members. The other thing I'll note with our IFQ programs, we do collect ownership percentage data on permit holders. That obviously is a requirement to ensure that share caps and other caps aren't exceeded within the program. And so that information is available for evaluating obviously size of businesses, both large and small, as well as participation within our commercial IFQ programs. You asked about how robust the information is in the region. Does it depend on the fishery and can we provide some examples? I would definitely say that the information is limited. I talked about obviously the demographic challenges of the data that we're collecting from our permit system and some of the gaps in that data. We obviously will be able to use that data, but it's not necessarily fully complete. We also have the social indicators data, but it's at the community level, right? And so ideally it would be better suited if we could use it above the fishery or even underserved population level. And then the ownership data for permit applications can be sometimes incomplete or inaccurate for non-commercial IFQ permit holders. So there's certainly gaps in that data that could be improved to help obviously with small business questions and other information that we collect through our permitting process. You asked about the sources of information. I've already referred to the NIMP social indicators tool several times, so I won't repeat that. We do have the federal vessel permit database with obviously some of the gaps and caveats that I mentioned earlier. Those limitations are that we require that information to be entered on our online system as of August 2021, but prior to that time it was not a requirement of the applicant to submit that data. And so there's limitations, obviously, in using that data going back in time. And then, as I mentioned, talked about the focus groups with underserved communities. These are really going to help us inform our decision-making process related to fisheries management and in particular identification of underserved populations. One of the key first steps really for us is identifying some of the groups that we need to be working with that view us as a partner and where our services could be better utilized or weren't even aware of obviously the service we provide. And so that will be obviously a critical, informative step in that process. You asked if there was additional information you think would be informative in decisions. As I've mentioned, I think any of this basic just demographic information of participants in federal fisheries is really key and as well as for information on subsistence use of federal fisheries. And those will be vital steps in attempting to address equity in our fisheries. And then research to gather information on underserved communities in our region and how that historically or currently being excluded from participating in our fisheries would be helpful in considering equity in our region. So a lot of just basic kind of data gathering that's needed that would help inform our processes. And then the last question I believe you asked was limitations in terms of collecting this data. Certainly funding is always kind of the main limitation as well as staff time and staff expertise. In my office, we have one full time social scientists, there are certainly others in the Southeast Fisheries Science Center, as well as one contractor at my office. And so social social science data collection is key, but we certainly don't have a large amount of staff to actually be able to conduct and support this work. And then, you know, demographic data, I guess it's been a challenge in terms of even just getting approval to collect that information. And that's certainly kind of one of the limitations with regard to potentially concerns going forward that we might actually lose accessibility to collect some of this data through our permit system. So overall, those are the kind of main challenges, main issues and limitations as well as some of the success stories. So be happy to take any questions you might have. Andy, thanks very much for that really detailed overview. And once again, I think it's impressive to hear the range of issues and the range of fisheries that each of the region has to deal with and how different they are from one to another grant. Yeah, thanks, Andy, for that presentation. I agree it was very, very useful overview. I had some questions about the focus group thing that you're planning to do. And I gathered it was with 20 plus focus groups was under served communities. Can you say a little bit more about what prompted that and also what the data are going to look like in terms I know that's we're anticipating things that haven't happened yet, but will those data be available will they be in summary form. What they're going to look like. Yeah, I'm not going to be the best to kind of speak to how the data might be available be presented. What I can tell you is the impetus for it was our national equity and environmental justice strategy that the National Marine Fisheries Service is connecting right now. We should be hopefully releasing that within the month. But each region will also be producing a regional equity and environmental justice plan. And so given some of the limitations and knowledge and information we have with regard to working with underserved communities we felt was really important as a first initial step to go out and conduct these focus groups to seek input and information from various areas from throughout the region. And we do have set questions that are going to be asked of each of the groups that information will be synthesized and summarized and ultimately inform our regional strategy for the region in terms of how that data gets kind of packaged and summarized separate from that regional EG put the EG plan I'd have to get back to you on that. Rachel. Thanks. Yeah, no, this has been really helpful and interesting. So building off of the last question. So some of the other regions that we heard from today they talked about that initial step of even needing to identify or having a better sense of who the underserved were. And have you guys given any thought to that like how would you do outreach, or have you kind of identified already like these are the types of participants that we need to target through these workshops and be given any thought to how you will do that and then I have a another question that I think is very short that I'm hoping to sneak in. Yes, so we have given a lot of thought to that. And I'll just give like a couple of examples so unlike some of the other regions that have a lot more engagement with the tribes. We've never really been engaged with a lot of our federal fishery management actions or just federal management in general with the tribes in our region right so targeting working with tribes in our regions through a liaison is one step obviously in the EJ process. We have a Vietnamese shrimping community. So there's language barriers and challenges and communication that we plan to kind of work directly with them but then the social indicators tool and other mechanisms we're using obviously to best identify kind of underserved communities in our region and going to setting up the focus groups and going to them in order for the, you know, meetings to be successful and impactful and Puerto Rico is a great example where we had originally planned to do two focus groups and the advice given to us was that we should expand that before because the Puerto Rico can be very different with regard to the demographics just based on whether you're on the north southeast or western side of the island and so we're working with many others in those communities obviously to kind of identify key stakeholders constituents that we can work with these focus groups. Oh, great. Okay, that's thanks. Thanks for answering that so thoroughly at the very end you said there's a challenge to getting approval to collecting some of this data. Can you talk a little bit about that is that is that the paper reduction act or are there other barriers to systematically collecting this type of information. Yeah, so I mentioned kind of in my comments about with our permit system prior to it being online. When it was a paper based system and fishermen were filling out the demographic information or didn't fill it out. Ultimately it was getting returned to them or holding up permits right so there was a decision made not to collect that or require that information to be collected. More recently and you're correct the paperwork reduction act requirements for demographic information. My understanding is there may be limitations with regard to the information that we would be able to collect going forward in the future, even though we're authorized to collect that information now. Maybe more limited in scope going forward. Stephen and then Caitlin Stephen. Thank you hey Andy thanks for the presentation all the really helpful information. I'm curious you mentioned quite a bit the NOAA social indicators and their, their use for doing place based, you know, comparisons. And at one point you you commented on some potential changes to where they could be even more useful and I believe you said something about like if they were selectable down to a fish a specific fishery context or something like that. I wondered if you just talk about that a little bit more. And from your unique spot of looking at three regions. If you had thoughts on if the types of changes in that context might be generally useful across those three regions or if it's something that that would need much more thought like within a region type type approach. Thanks Stephen good to see you. Yeah so when I mentioned was that the social indicators is at a place based community level. It's not available at a fishery or even I'll say underserved population level right so to the extent that we could have the drill down further right when we're working on a fishery management plan or action related to specific fishery. It would benefit obviously us in the decision making process and evaluating the specific benefits impacts that that particular regulatory action decision would have on on that fishery or that community or underserved you know population so we just don't have that level of data to be able to drill down to that level. In terms of your second question I guess I'll answer this more broadly and I think I mentioned it in my kind of earlier comments you know the challenge I see with the how equity and and all of these mandates kind of get entered into the decision making process is that there are a lot of mandates and requirements and it's a balancing act with the fishery management councils to reach a decision right and so how does equity way with regard to a decision relative to other mandates under the act and having kind of more specific guidance, direction, you know process would I think be really beneficial and I see that kind of across all three regions. I think you know the interesting thing from my seat is with the Caribbean. There's substantial kind of equity issues with regard to kind of funding of fishery science resource and management in the Caribbean just because the fisheries are smaller. But from an equity standpoint of kind of how we work with them in the management process. They're probably the farthest along with regard to translators bilingual communication right opportunities to more regularly interact with constituents at a very community level because of this smaller geographic area in which they're operating so hope that answers your question. All right, and last but not least Karen. I think you're starting to get close to answering the question I had. This is a little bit of a variation of how additional information would fit into the management process and you talked about specific management plans or actions but I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the difference between more qualitative information that you might be collecting versus more quantitative. So a lot of these indicators are very quantitative but I thought it was interesting how you were describing some of these focus groups you're doing and you could think about that as a scoping exercise but also presumably you're learning about concerns people have or something about community composition maybe and things like that and is and is that something that you're grappling with or that people have talked about. I'll use an example that I hope you think is relevant so in the Gulf of Mexico with our individual fishing quarter programs I mentioned earlier. A little bit of kind of general frustration with regard to access and ability to enter the fishery based on costs information. Right now we are working closely with the Fishery Management Council to review their goals and objectives for that program. Right they were primarily set in place 15 plus years ago to reduce overcapitalization avoid derby fishing conditions improve safety at sea. Right now 15 years have gone by and we've learned a lot from the programs similar to what the previous speaker was saying and so we are first looking at kind of how do we update the goals and objectives and based on those decisions about how those goals and objectives are changed. We can then use quantitative or qualitative information to then shape decisions about equity and portion meant for the fishery going forward so hope that helps. Alright Andy thank you very very much for your time today. It is always interesting to find out more about these different regions and I knew a fair amount about the South Atlantic and the Gulf but not so much about the Caribbean so I particularly enjoyed that and hearing the way you're facing some of the challenges with engaging communities who have not been historically involved in the management process but have been involved in fisheries themselves I think that's been very helpful for the committee so thank you very much for your time today. Thank you. We're going to continue the geographic hopscotch across the nation and we've saved the biggest jump for last I think we're going to go from the southeast all the way over to the Pacific Island regional fisheries office. My agenda says Sarah Malloy but I'm not sure Sarah can make it with us today. So, Jared are you running? Yes, I am. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you for stepping in. I don't know how much of the previous conversations you've been able to listen into. We have asked the presenters to tell us a little bit about the fisheries and the sort of management culture and then to offer some thoughts and comments on the general questions we asked without necessarily feeling obliged to answer every single question and then we'll ask you some clarifying questions at the end of your presentation. So, Jared, thanks very much for joining us. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that Sarah sends her regards that she was not able to make it. For introduction purposes, my name is Jared Mokhayao. I am the regional assistant regional administrator for sustainable fisheries here in the Pacific Islands and I think a lot of you know about the Pacific Islands but I'm going to kind of go a little bit more into detail of the areas that we cover. Everyone's familiar with the state of Hawaii, very sunny sandy beaches and things like that, but we also have a large area of jurisdiction that also includes American Samoa down in the South Pacific. And if we continue on towards our eastern path towards Japan, the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas is another jurisdiction that we serve, as well as the island of Guam. And so while we are sort of spread across the central and western Pacific, there are a lot of commonalities in terms of the islands that we serve. A lot of each one of them has its own unique cultural history. In Hawaii, there's a relatively intact Native Hawaiian culture, but we certainly have a lot of western influences. Native Hawaiian population is about 20% of the Hawaiian state of Hawaii's population. To go down to American Samoa, their culture is almost entirely intact. 90% of the residents there are indigenous Native Samoans and they run their seat of government in their culture. So they kind of split the half with part of it being western with a democracy but they also have their chief and Matai system strongly in place and incorporated into government. So if we move on to the Northern Marianas and Guam, they've been heavily impacted from immigration, going back all the way to the 15th century with the Spanish visits there and so their population has been fairly reduced. But there are still a lot of part Chamorros as well as Carolinians who have moved up from down in Micronesia into Guam and Saipan when the Chamorros were sort of their population was diminished. So, aside from Hawaii, I think the three island territories of Guam, the Northern Maras and America Samoa are largely represented by their native populations. On our fishery management councils, the representatives that hold the seats from the state governments as well as the governor nominees are generally native islanders by blood. And so their perspectives are largely represented in the council discussions and decisions. And so that's sort of like a general overview of our region as well as our composition. Lastly, I'll just say in Hawaii, while we do have a lot of mixing of populations, a lot of the Hawaiian cultural values are still recognized in our state constitutions, the way that native Hawaiians have managed their resources, a lot of that has been incorporated into the state management system. So, it's certainly the concepts of traditional management is still alive and well in all of our jurisdictions. Now, when I move into the sort of the overview of our commercial fisheries, I kind of wrestle with what to present. I think I'm just going to present with what is the largest fisheries first. The largest fisheries that we have in the Pacific Islands region is our pelagic long line fisheries. These are two separate fisheries, they're based in Hawaii, as well as one down in the American small but I'll start with Hawaii. We have a deep set tuna fishery. These vessels are about 65 to 100 feet in length. We have 165 permits available, of which about 150 are active. The fleet catches about 26 million pounds of tuna and other resources every year. Their ex-vessel revenue is about $109 million, so it is by far our largest fishery in the Pacific. The composition of the fleet are largely Vietnamese American, European American, and Korean American. Very few native Hawaiians participate in the fishery. The crew are mostly foreign, and one of the reasons why is that going on these vessels are about three weeks out at sea. A lot of people don't really like to be out sea, at least the native people from Hawaii. So the fleet really has to look afar for crew to work on these vessels. And we get most of our information on the demographics and composition from interviews that our fishery science center conducts when we're doing cost set surveys. The second largest fleet that we have in the Pacific Islands in terms of volume and value is the shallow set swordfish fishery. Again, this is sort of a component of the long line fishery where vessels during certain seasons, a smaller number of them about 20 will jump off of the deep set tuna fishery and move into the swordfish fishery, which generally operates between October to March every year. In terms of catch, it's much smaller, 1.3 million pounds in 2021. The revenue is just shy of about $5 million. And the demographics are largely Vietnamese American, although some of the other ethnicities, European American and Korean American, some of them go into those fisheries as well, but a very small amount. They're primarily the Vietnamese Americans that do this fishery. When we do look down to the South Pacific in American small, we also have another pelagic long line fishery that targets albacore. And these are the kind of tunas that you'll get in the can, whereas in the Hawaii, the tunas are mainly for fresh seafood sashimi and poke markets. American small has about 60 vessels in the permit program. Unfortunately, only 11 of them are active and there's a combination of global market issues and just economics make it very difficult for the fleet to be viable. And we are concerned that this fleet may go away just because they're not being able to sufficiently keep revenue streams moving forward. It's about 2.3 million pounds of albacore fish caught every year. The value of the fishery is about half of what the swordfish fisheries, about 2.5 million pounds. And the fleet demographics are almost all American small and either Native American smalls or expats that have moved from the states into American small. So I'd say about 90% of the fleet is American someone. Now, those are our big commercial fisheries, and we say big in relative terms to other fisheries of the nation, but our other commercial fisheries, which in terms of number of participants, the largest we have is pelagic troll and handline fisheries. And so these are small boat fisheries, generally vessels about less than 50 feet ranges about, you know, 15 to 50, 60, 60 foot, and they go they are daytrippers they they they trailer boat to different parts of the island, drop their vessels into the water, and you know troll for, you know, about six to eight hours and come back to shore. So all the island areas have these pelagic troll fisheries in Hawaii there's about 1500 vessels in Guam there's about 500 vessels in the Northern Marianas is about about 100 vessels and American small is the smallest which about five vessels. Hawaii has by far the largest fleet, as well as catches they, they average about 2.5 million pounds of fish a year, the revenues are generally shy of $10 million. So the other island areas these, they're very small. The data sets that we rely on for these fisheries are collected by the states and territories. So we have no federal permit or reporting requirements for pelagic troll and handline fisheries. All of the data streams are collected through the various local resource management agencies. So Hawaii is the only one that has a sort of a license system. All the other island areas are completely voluntary cruel surveys. And that's kind of a, from a fisheries management standpoint it's unfortunate that the local territories have not adopted a mandatory permit data collection system data is all done by surveys which makes it difficult for accuracy in terms of, you know, how many people are fishing, what are they catching, and even the sales data are done through surveys through vendors so that gives you a little bit of a taste of the pelagic fisheries in terms of for hire. That's also a difficult one. In the state of Hawaii, they've defined every vessel that takes passengers for hire as a commercial fishing operation. So everyone that's onboard that vessel, while the captain and the crew are commercial, the catch is commercial as well. And so the data that we get is just all commercial. And so that that's sort of wrapped up into the revenue for Hawaii about $9 million of which a portion of that is from what we call the charter sector passenger for hire sector. Let's see. I don't know if I should I stop for a second or should I just continue to roll on through the presentation take questions after. I think you should just wrap up. I think people are sort of interested in hearing the whole story before we break for questions, but there will be time for questions at the end. Okay, great. So how have we considered equity into our decision making process. So, largely, as I mentioned before, each of the representatives of the territories, America's small Guam and northern Maranhas really bring to the council decision making process. The perspectives of the local territories in Hawaii. While council members may not necessarily be of indigenous native Hawaiian blood. A lot of the cultural parts of fishing are really rooted in the native Hawaiian culture and practices so a lot of those perspectives are brought forward, regardless of the council members are in Hawaii and most of the islands, the traditional fishing has been trolling and handlining for pelagic species, as well as some near short bottom snappers and groupers. By large, the number of participants are of native traditional Islanders are really focused in those pelagic control and handline fisheries and so a lot of that is, as I mentioned mentioned by the state. When we get into the pelagic long line fisheries this is a fishery which requires a lot of revenue and capital to get started in. All of them are limited access fisheries, which means there is a finite number of permits in Hawaii are 165 permits were initially issued based on historical participation in the fishery. And at that time you had a lot of local Japanese who really were the the the practitioners who brought long line fishing to Hawaii and so a lot of the local Japanese had obtained those permits. As time went on the permits became freely transferable. And so people who were moving out of the fishery started to find a market hey I could sell my permit to someone who has been crewing my vessel. And so that's how a lot of different ethnicities moved into it from the European American, as well as some of the migration from the Vietnamese that were sort of displaced from other long line fisheries in the continental United States as well as down in the south. And in shrimp fisheries came over to Hawaii to engage in pelagic long line fisheries so that's where you get some of the Vietnamese and as well as some of the Koreans. Today, a market value for Hawaii long line limited entry permit is about 350 to $400,000. And these are sort of done through brokerage brokers in the industry. And so native Hawaiians obviously are at a disadvantage because they are a smaller population they are social economically the lowest in terms of homeownership job markets and things like that so this is by far out of reach for most Native Americans. Excuse me Native Hawaiians in American small, they saw what happened in Hawaii and so when they created their limited entry program. They again, initially, they liked the part about historical participation because American small, almost all the participants were native native Samoans. What they differed is the permit eligibility and transfers and new issuance they did not like the free market system. And so they really clamp down on that and so in order to get a permit, you'd have to have a participation in the fishery, or get some native someone who did participate to be part of your organization so they really did not want to see what happened in Hawaii where the fishery exploded with a lot of non non locals. And so they really kept that permit system, the eligibility criteria to the advantage of the local citizenship. In pelagic trolling handline fisheries. These are full open access there are no federal permits required to participate. The states again don't have any limited entry so the only real, I guess, barrier to participating in this is just having a boat. And there's a lot of different ways that people can get a boat. So, in terms of the federal fishery management I think our focus really into getting participation would be in our long line fisheries because the other fisheries. You know we still pay attention to them but there's no real federal barriers to participating, except for capital. And so we are looking at different ways of providing capital to underserved communities to those other fisheries. Now, I think one of the question is what information could equity considerations rely on. And that's a difficult one for us here. Although we have a lot of native peoples. There are no federally recognized indigenous groups or tribes. And so you know what we really have to do is look at demographic data that are collected by the state organizations. There's a lot of communities that are comprised of predominantly native indigenous peoples minorities or others underserved communities. We don't collect a lot of that information through our permit systems. We do collect some of that information through all the fisheries whether it's federally managed or not through surveys that our fishery science center conducts. We do get surveys on perspectives of native participations in some of these other fisheries. And so, although there's been a big push from NOAA to sort of look at equity environmental justice, I think a lot of in the Pacific Islands that has always been sort of the focus. A lot of the conversations have been driven by the native indigenous groups and the membership of the council. So I think it's something that we've always lived with, but I think we could continue to fine tune. And part of our environmental EEJ strategy is to looking into what more of these communities would like to see, not in terms of management, because I think they have access to those fisheries. And they appreciate that the federal government is not managing the pelagic trolling handline fisheries. And so, you know, we always say, hey, be careful what you ask for, because as federal entities, our job is to, you know, manage the resource, which usually means restricting activities that you have traditionally done. And so what we're really hearing from communities is more, you know, opportunities to participate in grant programs, how to be more competitive in grants, how to see more federal funding come to the territories to support fisheries development through grants and other means. And so that's where our most of the requests for assistance has been given to us from local communities. I want to touch on something that we've done to get towards further participation by underserved local communities. The Magnus and Stevens Act has a section for both the Pacific Islands as well as the Alaska to provide communities with access to fisheries that have they have traditionally depended upon, but may not have had the capabilities to support continued as substantial participation, possibly due to economic regulatory and other barriers. And so there's a carve out in Magnus and that allows nymphs to work with the councils to develop programs that really get at putting native peoples into fisheries that they have that they participated but don't necessarily participate in today. So there's two components to this program that we have. One is a community development program that provides the council, the authority to develop regulatory programs that might promote the participation in fisheries and some of the things that we've discussed that haven't really come to fruition yet but is to reserve a certain amount of permits. It could be the long line permit, reserve a certain amount of permits that is commensurate to the indigenous population and reserve those permits for the native Hawaiian population. So, as I mentioned, the Hawaii long line fishery has 165 permits. They're looking into ways that where we could reserve a certain number of those permits for indigenous peoples. Now, even though you reserve a permit to participate in the fishery, you need a vessel, you need capital, and a lot of the communities don't have that. So the second component to the Western Pacific Community Development Program is a demonstration project program, and this is a grant program that provides funds to eligible Western Pacific communities to demonstrate traditional cultural fisheries and fishery practices. And so these are fundings. In the past, we've been able to purchase vessels for communities that want to engage in training their adolescents and younger adults in participating in pelagic troll and handline and skipjack fisheries. And so that's where a lot of our focus has been going. One of the issues we are finding is that as funds dry out and these are discretionary programs, we haven't been able to fund these programs in the recent time. So I think, you know, I'm not going to touch on these other questions because I think I'm not really sure if it's sort of applicable to us, but we certainly are looking at ways to promote further outreach of who these communities are, who's interested in participating in the fisheries that we manage, and to really try and promote that. But I think, you know, personally, as well as what we see fishermen are happy that the federal government is not actively managing the fisheries that they really participate in. And so they say, hey, thank you very much. But, you know, you keep your federal regulations to yourself and we'll continue to conduct our pelagic troll and handline fisheries. And we'll let you know what we need you. So I think that's where I'll sort of wrap up and open to questions on any of those topics. Jared, first of all, thank you very much for giving us an overview of both the cultural importance of the fisheries and the region's efforts to account for those cultural differences. One of the themes we've heard from a lot of the presenters you raised as well and someone said it's sort of the problem of those who are not in the room please raise your hand. I wonder if you can talk through your efforts to do that because your early comments suggested that you may have been more connected to cultural communities than the other regions have been. So what do you think of the particular challenges the Western Pacific region faces and how are you going about reaching out to those communities? Yeah, that's a great question. I think, you know, sometimes you can get lost in your myopic views as, hey, we're a council. We have representatives from the territories. The council has advisory panels that really try and find who's participating in the fisheries to represent these advisory panels. A lot of the effort is done by the council going down into the communities and trying to literally beat the bush going into holding meetings and talking with people who is interested in participating in this process. The issue we have is that we're not managing the fisheries that a lot of the native peoples in the islands participate in. A lot of them, we're basically the top of undersea volcanoes and a lot of the fisheries are coral reef fisheries which are really in shore, you know, from the shoreline to about, you know, 100, 200, 300 feet deep. And they simply don't exist in the federal waters. And so that's a difficult one for us where the majority of the people are not participating in our federal fisheries. So we'll continue to go down to the territories and say, hey, we're managing this fisheries and in American small, they're very participatory because they are the majority of the federal fishery participants. In Hawaii, the territories of Sina Mai and Guam, it's a lot more difficult to get people to come up because your federal fishery management council, where do you guys manage? What do you manage? We don't do that. And you don't manage us. So I guess going back to your question, what does the outreach look like? The outreach really looks like, you know, people on the ground, we have representatives that live there that are integrated in the community and really just trying to keep ourselves relevant in the federal fisheries. And if they're interested in developing them, long line fishing development has been something we've been looking into. There are people that have been interested, but has never really taken off in Sina Mai and Guam. Rachel. Yeah, thanks, Jared. This is super interesting. So when did limited entry come in in the Hawaiian fishery? I'm trying to track how American Samoa learned their lessons from the... The Hawaii limited entry program began in the 1990s. And there was a lot of different reasons for that. Long line fisheries could come up virtually to the shoreline before. And so you had a lot of conflicts between the long line vessels, which would lay out, you know, 40 miles of line and the pelagic troll fishery, which are primarily the local residents and they would run over each other lines. They would shoot at each other. And so two things happened. One, to limit the number of long liners that could come to Hawaii. And number two was to push them far offshore. And so we did eventually push them 15 nautical miles from shore so that the local troll and helen could have a relatively free zone where they... And that's sort of the outer limits of their range. So they could continue to practice unencumbered by long line vessels. And Americans Samoa started about 2002. So about 20 years later that they saw the possibility of influx. They started seeing foreign vessels coming in and trying to get permits. And we would be issuing permits. They would partner with someone and they didn't want to see that happen like Hawaii did. Gotcha. And could I ask just a couple more clarifying questions around... Could you better explain... I'm struggling with the disconnect between... Sounded like there's efforts to reserve a number of permits. So, you know, the Alaska CDQ program is a portion of the tech. But it's kind of like you were talking about the Western Pacific CDQ program as like a portion of permits to support like active participation. Is that fair? Yes, it is fair. We've had several limited energy programs. And the first attempt was at a bottom fish. Our Northwestern Hawaiian and bottom fish fishery had 17 permits. And this fishery no longer exists because of the Papahanao Moko Kea Marine National Monument. There were 17 permits. And the council was looking at reserving 20% of those permits for native Hawaiians. And while the council was going through the rulemaking action, the president declared a monument and killed the fishery essentially. So that died. So the council started to look at the long line fisheries like the next limited entry system where they could reserve the permit. What the council ran into with that fishery was the fair market value of the permit was at the time about 200,000 to 300,000. Now it's gone to 400,000. And the thought was if you wanted to take permits away, nymphs would have to buy those permits back first. And so I think that caused a halt in the thinking. Do we have the money to buy, you know, 20% of those permits? And I think the answer was no, we don't. And so the council is still trying to find different ways of looking at how it could, you know, either reserve or have some sort of partnership where more native Hawaiians could enter that fishery. Okay, gotcha. And it's the carve out that it means that you guys don't have to necessarily deal with differentiating between residents of different states. That's what's kind of protecting that local access. That does. Yeah, I mean, that's always been an issue for us about creating programs that would violate national standard. And so finding ways. There's been some ways thought about it. Yeah. Communities and the eligibility criteria that's in that Western Pacific Development Program might help. You have to be a resident or descended from a resident of the indigenous populations of the Pacific Islands. That was questionable as well. So, you know, we haven't gotten into too much legal but national standard versus, you know, a specific language in the Magnuson that seems to counter each other. Gotcha. Okay. And then you've got good demographic data on fleet participation or permit holdings. Are they all residents of Hawaii? No, they're not. In the long line of fishery, we have permit holders across the western states. There are some, the majority are from Hawaii, but we do have permit holders from western states. They're not a lot, I would say about 10 or so. Okay. Thank you. Thanks for. Everyone is American, right? All the fishers are American. It's just a quick follow up, right? Yes. Yeah. Okay. Good. Ron, please go ahead. Yeah, Jared, thanks for that. I wanted to go back to the separation or lack out there between the four higher and commercial fisheries and just make sure I understood that properly. I think I heard you say that their four higher landings are recorded as commercials so we really can't separate out how much that sector is taking versus commercial. Are the permits also lumped together or are the permits separate designated separately? Yeah. So, no, they're not separated. Every charter vessel owner, operator in the state of Hawaii has to get a commercial license from the state. But they can demarcate, you know, it's a charter operation. So, of the 3,000, 3,500 commercial fishermen in Hawaii, I want to say we could tease out how much of those are charter for higher vessels. Okay. And then in theory, we could link that to, I mean, it would be extra work, but link that to landings. Yes. Yes. Yeah. That could be, that can be teased out. Thanks. I want, Rashid, please go ahead. Yeah, so the permits, do they have, are they permanent permits? Are they, do they have a lifespan, you know, and depending on your answer that could build some flexibility, right? Could you repeat that? Go ahead, please. Go ahead. No, I think I missed your question. My question is, those permits you mentioned, are they permanent? I want you to give them out? Are they giving out? Permits, they have to, they have to apply for it every year. It's an annual. Every year. Every year. Okay. So that deals quite a bit of flexibility, maybe. Yes. Yeah. In Hawaii, it's because it's a freely transferable. They change a lot. For business reasons, for other reasons, we will issue a permit to someone and they will move it to someone else. It's very difficult to track, but we have that. We have that information. And we're starting to build a longer term database so we can follow this permit through the hands it changes to. Okay. Yeah. No cash shares, right? Do you have cash shares? No cash shares. Not yet. We have workshops on cash shares and so far the industry has been reluctant to do it. I think they do fear a consolidation if that goes into place. And so they're, they're really reluctant to, to go to cash shares. Yeah, understandable. Some extent. Yeah. Thank you. I think once again, I want to thank Jared for, for his presentation and his thoughtful answers to our questions. We have sort of 15 or 20 minutes left. That was to be a Q&A with, with the regional administrators. As you know, many of them were unable to stay on for the duration of the call, but I wanted to take this time to. First of all, we'll see if there were any broader questions from members of the committee that sort of cross the briefings that we've heard today. Well made the point in one of her questions. I think when we were dealing with the Pacific about movement into the Alaska region and that we've sort of, by doing this series of presentations region by region, we tend to silo it. So I want to give the opportunity for any questions about lessons learned across the endeavor. So the opportunity for particular follow up questions from the committee or from other members of the audience. That cannot be possible. No question, no comment. Stacy, please go ahead. I'll just take a moment because, you know, I was trying to jot down as we went along, but there were several requests for documentation of some of the things that we heard. So I'll just take a moment first to sort of reiterate your thanks, Tom, to our speakers today, and also just to ask if, if each of them could just provide, you know, any supporting documents for the questions that were asked today or for the points that were made. And certainly please expect that we will follow up with some of the specific requests that were made, but I just thought I'd put a plug out there preemptively for any, you know, documents that you think might lend themselves to supporting what we've heard today. Thank you. Thank you. Rachel. Yeah, I just wanted to put this out to our guests that are still on the line. So we've heard across regions about this community social vulnerability index or the this set of indicators and I'm just curious from your regions. Are there any compelling examples where you've seen that this suite of indicators has been helpful in terms of informing a council analysis to improve equity or or to take into account, maybe underserved populations are there, or has, you know, in addition to that I guess if you have any thoughts on additional indicators that might help your region in this arena. And I know that's probably a difficult question to answer on the fly but when I when I review that set of indicators it looks like and we were just talking about this like it looks like they're still somewhat siloed in terms of, this is the fishery dependent indicators. And here's the underserved communities, but they're, I don't necessarily know if and how they overlap to show kind of the, how it all ties together in terms of informing an analysis. Rachel, I apologize, were you directing that at me or someone else. I put it, I just put it out there it's kind of an open floor. I'm just wondering across across regions. How that's utilized. I'm not the expert certainly with social indicators and the EJ tool but what I would say is I think your assessment's fairly spot on right in terms of there's certainly kind of limitations with regard to how it is used versus kind of the kind of initial intent purpose to develop for the tool and that's where I get back to my comments about better guidance kind of consideration for the councils to utilize tools like that and information to reach decisions. Okay, yeah thanks so much. I was looking for more. I just wanted to make sure I had a good understanding of how it's used and how it might be improved. And I was able to return from the West Coast region and I think, you know, Andy's response is great maybe I'll just add a little bit to me it gets back to that kind of question that I think I heard from all the people that, you know, or trying to address equity, you have to kind of know to whom you're trying to give equity and and what the kind of the problems are and that's hard to identify, you know, and to me it always goes back I mean the council process is an open process and so you know, that's I think why all of us said we're looking at identifying those underserved communities to potentially address that but I think, you know, Andy hit it spot on that the tools were designed for a specific purpose based on what we knew then, not necessarily for addressing all the equity concerns. So, thank you Frank Rashid. Yeah, so a quick kind of reaction to France comment now. You know, it's hard. It's hard like you said to identify these groups, you know, but maybe some little efforts could actually activate people you know here on campus at UBC, where we are university city there's a combination here that people can go to university people or not university people can live on campus. And they have science, they put in science around the campus and the scientists, everyone can live here. I mean, it's quite funny, just that statement right makes a big difference to people who think hey, this fisheries is not for us for historical reasons. So there might be some little efforts that can be done like that. Just say, I know it's an open process but some people have been excluded and they feel I'm not part of this. So somehow we can do. That's a little kind from experience here. Regarding, yeah, listening to all of you is really quite informative. I learned a lot, mainly because maybe I don't know much about all the regional management council so this is great. What I came up with is that there's likely to be a lot of learning across this regional councils from what I have from you. Almost each one of you can learn, could learn from the other and I know that our differences peculiar to regions and that has to be taken into account. So my question and something that you don't need to do here I think is, if there's one thing you can put out there that you think could be learned from your council by the others. And last question number one, if there is one thing you want them to stay away with if they want to achieve equity. So these two things could be very helpful for the committee. I think as we ship our work and come up with some terrorism. Thank you. I think those are interesting points for she the particularly the point about learning across the councils because they are experiments in a way right in their region they all have a different flavor a different. They developed different sets of traditions for how they operate and so I suspect there is learning. So one of the ways learning occurs is if the councils and the regional offices talk to one another. I know from discussions with Mike Penn, Anthony that he had just come back from a series of meetings in Washington with all the regional administrators so so how often do you guys get together. In a structured way like like that. Is that an infrequent occurrence or a frequent occurrence where into council discussions occur or into office discussions occur. So we have a leadership council that you were referencing from Mike pending the meets twice a year in person, usually once in Washington DC once in the region. We also have what's called the council. Council coordinating committee right that meets twice a year in fact there's a meeting coming up in about a week and a half here in the southeast. And that's where all the regional fishery management councils as well as regional administrators attend so we have at least four meetings a year in person and then the regional administrators. We have a regular scheduled meeting that is done at least monthly every six weeks. And that's regular schedule calls with one another so there's a lot of cross sharing and information that we can learn from one another and certainly for my region in the southeast right I work more closely with Mike me and Sarah Maloy because of the issues that we're facing both in the Caribbean as well as on the Atlantic seaboard, then maybe other regions. There's a lot of coordination. Thank you I think it's helpful to know those structures exist were the, were the, with this committee to make some recommendations about structured learning to be able to comment more intelligently about how that might occur. I was particularly taken by the community development quotas in Alaska which seemed to be a, I had not come across them before that seemed to particularly interesting way to ensure community engagement. Has that been one of the consequences of that that the CDQs has have driven broader participation in the fishery management process or is it still small groups from within each seat seat seat CDQ. I don't think Gretchen was able to stay on so that wasn't a question that may not have an answer. She's not here. Other thoughts, questions, comments grant. Yeah, this is maybe a similar to what Rashid was asking but I'm interested in data coordination as well it seems to me that one of the common threads across these regions was the permit itself. How similar are the permit applications in the different regions. Do they ask the same questions are they widely different. Are they idiosyncratic to each region or are they similar related question is there. There also seems to be ad hoc lack of a better word initiatives in the different regions are a shorter term, less comprehensive, more historically contingent efforts in each of those regions. Have there been efforts to sort of compare and contrast those as well and are they similar or different or are they. Like, are they idiosyncratic, which is the impression I kind of got some long story short, do the permit applications look the same in the different regions for one and two or do these ad hoc efforts compared to one another. Maybe I'll start off a little bit here. And so, in the West Coast region back when I was a RA, I mean we did have the new catchers program and developed kind of a new permit for that. We did look at other regions. And, and think about that so I think there is a lot of overlap, but there's also a little bit of idiosync idiosyncraticness I don't know the right word is there but you know that we each have our own needs that we need to address and and that adds just a little bit of difference but I think it's largely very similar in the in the information that they gather. At least that was you know when we specifically looked at that we did look at a few other regions permit application forms and, and we copied a lot of it, but you know, I think I'll stop there. This is Jared I'll just jump in where Frank left off I agree that there are some basic data fields that are going to be collected on permits across the regions. But there are some differences that each region has. And, you know, in the discussions of a national permit we have a national permit system that headquarters runs and each of the regions. So the regions contribute to. But the permit system itself doesn't is not flexible enough to accommodate all the needs of the different regions so summer regions have created their own permit system just because the fields are different so short answer grab there's some similarities. There's a lot of differences, but I don't know if anyone's gone through and taken a look across the board of of where it is and I think if someone does and be very helpful for us to build a national permit system where it can accommodate everyone's needs. It doesn't really have to, you know, I mean just having the information, make it available people can see across the board, you pick up elements that will help you. And that's good enough, right, you can lead to improvements, but clearly to be hard to have one system that applies everywhere. The goal I think. Just a quick response before I invite Rachel to ask a question. I think it is fine if you view the regions as the siloed centers but if there's a lot of exchange, then the more similarity you get, the more you can leverage the data that comes in through that system. Rachel. Yeah. So I'm most familiar with Alaska and issues like barriers to entry and the grain of the fleet and things like that are often front and center and I think we've heard, you know, some of that today in the presentations and I'm curious with the current data you have that's available is rate of new entrance already something that's collected or easily accessible or the residency of new entrance is that something that could be. It's already kind of known across regions in terms of who's entering the fisheries and where they might call home. I think the residency issue might be up in the air for some but do you guys know that through quota holdings or permit holdings across regions. I can as part of the five year review for the catch your program this was there was some exploration of this. And once again it's a difficult question because what is a new entrance to somebody that owns quota somebody that has a permit, or is it a crew member. I heard a couple other people say, you know, getting a good handle on crew members is very difficult. And we could potentially it probably not that difficult to see new permit holders, we could probably figure that out pretty pretty quickly but is. If they're, you know, the brother of the former permit holder is that a new entrance, you know, or a family person, you know, those kind of questions come up. And then, like I said, the crew members is very hard. And I think I also said, there were some voluntary surveys that were done by a couple of the centers on the West Coast but that it would be hard to kind of expand that to get a really good idea of new entrance so it's a difficult question. And if Frank's comments, I think Frank has said it well. The main information we would have is really down at the permit level right in terms of assessing who's applied for a new permit who didn't maybe exist in our database previous to that. The challenge is that if we're talking just permits, it's limited access fisheries that that's primarily helpful for primarily our commercial fisheries in the southeast we have some open access permits for example or South Atlantic for higher permit where people may come and go have lots of entities that apply for permits from other regions that may have no intent to using them. So the private recreational sector is permitted at the state level with many exceptions in terms of permit holdings but we don't have anything analogous to permit data for private recreational anglers in the southeast which represent a good portion of our catch. Gotcha. So if I'm understanding you, you could technically look at new entrance for a year and compare it to existing, you know, within the years long duration of whatever program was implemented and you say, this big person, this person may have never held quota, since the program was created, but in defining whether that person constitutes a new entrant based on if they ever crew if they have family relationships that's where the nuances is where it kind of gets lost was that what I was hearing. Yep. Okay. Thank you. Thank you Rachel Matthew. Yeah, I was wondering if you guys could just speak to why collecting information from crew is hard. Is it just simply because of a lack of resources that would prevent or that gets that makes it challenging to collect something you haven't historically collected, or is there just something fundamentally challenging for getting information from crew members. For example, through like just, I mean, again, I know in Alaska, at least for for crew, you typically have to register get like a license through fishing game. So, why is it hard. I can't speak for other regions but I think what you just said is why it's hard for us at least currently in the southeast is we don't have a commensurate system that requires them to have licenses for crew members in the southeast we permit the vessel, the vessel owner, but not necessarily the crew members themselves. We have a little bit for the West Coast same thing there's no crew requirement. And in addition, besides the, the, you know, factory vessels. While there's a lot of kind of continuity for for a lot of vessels, it also changes, you know, people will be called at the last second, you know, to become crew. And, and so, you know, how would you get access to that information, you know, and we did at one point under the cashier program talk about, you know, requiring crew information to be sent in. And there were just, you know, under APA we have to have explained why we need it. And it was difficult to kind of explain why we needed it in a way to actually actively manage the program so not to say that you couldn't make a case for that but at that point in time given everything else that was going on we never did make that requirement. And so, I think it's, you know, again a combination of things. And it's it's just, you know, to consistently get crew information is very difficult. And add one more perspective for the Pacific Islands. In our long line permits, we have a lot of companies, a lot of them are family owned, but we have a pretty good portion of them that are limited liability corporations that kind of move around. And so, in the permit itself you would see the name of the company that we would issue the permit to. But in order to know who it is, and whether or not they have an in this proportionate number of shares in the fishery, you really have to dig deeper into some of the other information like who's on the board of directors. How has that changed over time. There's there's a loophole within our system that allows a dual Hawaii and American Samoa permit holder to catch big itunes that it won't be counted towards US limit. And so, there's a lot of companies that have been created to get a permit. And then you really have to look at the board of directors to see who's moved around. So it does get a little daunting after a while but we do have all of that information, but to go back to the question can you track entrance new entrance to the fishery. Yeah, if you consider a new company that they just created a year ago as a new Yes, but if you look at the board of directors same guys, maybe no. All right. I appreciate everyone's indulgence. Stephen, did you have a question your hand was up I was going to give you the last word. Sure. I mean Jared answered a lot of it right there but I was just going to go back to one of the points Gretchen made in her presentation about Alaska and mentioned that she noted owner on board as kind of an equity focused policy that have been developed there and I was going to ask how difficult it would be to assess owner on board in the various regions but it sounds like from Jared's comments there, even in that system it'd be very difficult because of the structure of individuals versus, you know, corporations. So if anyone has any additional thoughts on that. I think that seems to be something that's important in the equity lens but seems quite challenging to look at if I'm reading the various responses. I'll just quickly comment I think it could be done in our region, but it would take some work and it were not automatically set up to do that it would not be just push a button for spreadsheet thing it would take some considerable staff time to figure out how to do that. Alright, well, on behalf of everyone on the committee, Jared, Andy Frank, and those who have spoken to us earlier but had to leave thank you all very much for your time today. We appreciate making your time available to us we know how busy your time tables are. I know I personally have learned a huge amount that will inform my thinking on this topic. As I said in my introductory comments you're at the sharp end of this and the thoughts that you have given to us and shared with us and the thought that you've obviously put into this question outside of this committee process has been really good to see so I thank you all for your time. And please be assured if we have questions, we will be darkening your door. If something crosses your mind. Please reach out to Stacy or Leigh Ann I think you have had their emails shared with you, but once again thank you all very very much for your time. For the committee I'm going to suggest we come back at 44550 that's a sort of 15 minute break. It'll give me time to fill my tea cup again. And we'll see you all in about 15 minutes but Frank, Andy, Jared thanks all very much for your time. Thank you. Have a great day.