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troduction of legislation. We look forward to working with you to 

 further refine the House bill so that it accomplishes the objective 

 we all hold, which is to protect marine mammals while allowing 

 commercial fishing to continue. 



I must say, though, that we are relieved that you have slowed 

 down the pace a little bit. We believe that while the House bill pro- 

 vides a good start, there are a number of concerns that deserve 

 some deliberate and thoughtful attention that we feared there was 

 not time for if you had gone to markup tomorrow. So we thank you 

 for allowing the time for this dialog to continue. 



Rather than summarize our written statement which does have 

 some specifics in it, I would like to highlight several areas where 

 we think we can work with you and the staff to narrow the differ- 

 ences between the bill and the joint proposal. 



They fall into three categories or bundles of issues. The first are 

 the most difficult. Just as Dr. Foster said, we have some big issues 

 and some little issues. The first are fundamental differences in ap- 

 proach. 



The second are some issues that are mostly procedural in terms 

 of timing. 



The third are substantive differences on specific issues. 



In the first area, we are concerned that the House bill does not 

 integrate two most important thrusts that came out of our negoti- 

 ated approach, namely to put priority attention on real problems 

 and, secondly, to reduce incidental takes over time. 



We believe that the scope of the regulatory requirements of the 

 bill can be narrowed so that they focus attention and scarce re- 

 sources on marine mammal stocks that deserve our immediate and 

 critical attention. We think this can be accomplished with greater 

 precision in how we define the stocks and a more realistic ap- 

 proach on how we pull fisheries into the program and by adopting 

 a mechanism to set priorities. 



In relation to this issue, we are also concerned that the House 

 bill appears on first read to be a quota-based regime. You are set- 

 ting a PBR that is a ceiling that we seem to be shooting up toward 

 instead of having a goal of reducing mortality over time to levels or 

 rates approaching zero. 



Because there don't appear to be prohibitions on acts in the bill, 

 that is, there doesn't seem to be a prohibition on exceeding PBR or 

 a prohibition on not meeting a benchmark, the penalties are for ad- 

 ministrative violations. So the whole mix seems to be to register a 

 whole lot of vessels and then punish them for failing to complete 

 paperwork. 



The last point in these fundamental issues is the prohibition on 

 intentional shooting of marine mammals. We think this is a real 

 problem. In some fisheries intentional shooting is a greater source 

 of mortality than entanglement in gear. We think it is fundamen- 

 tally in opposition to the policies and purposes of the act. A great 

 segment of the fishing industry has agreed to abide by a prohibi- 

 tion on the practice, and we hope that you will do so, also. 



In the procedural area, the major differences between the House 

 proposal and the negotiated proposal have to do with timing. We 

 think those are minor issues that can be worked out with very 

 little problem with the staff. 



