12 



After Kokechick, as part of the 1988 amendments, there was no 

 burden. You didn't impose any burden on the fishing industry. 



So what the government is asking you to do now is to take the 

 MMPA and make it into a permitting process for which it has 

 never been as a practical matter, and to condition the right to fish, 

 even in State-regulated fisheries, on compliance with any of the 

 components of the conservation regime, including administrative 

 compliance, decals and that sort of thing. 



We are opposed to that. We believe in a general legislative au- 

 thorization to fish. We believe in a system that gives the Secretary 

 of Commerce the regulatory authority to make sure that the statu- 

 tory requirements of the act are being complied with through the 

 use of civil penalties. And we believe in maximizing participation 

 in the regions to build regional consensus. 



Third, you have to be very careful. You have provisions in Sec- 

 tion 118 of the act that is going to regulate accidental takes. Yet 

 the sources of takes are more than the fishing industry. 



The NMFS numbers and the analyses that have been performed 

 by the Center for Marine Conservation and others have indicated 

 in the vast majority of fisheries there are very few accidental takes 

 of marine mammals, period. To the extent that you give the Secre- 

 tary emergency regulatory authority to impose emergency regula- 

 tions when the total take is above PBR, but you have only the au- 

 thority to regulate fishermen under Section 118, you are stuck in a 

 situation where you are going to have to regulate the de minimis 

 takes and let the other sources of takes go by the wayside. That is 

 fundamentally unfair to the fishing industry and won't solve the 

 problem. 



Four, we believe that a long-term conservation program must be 

 capable of surviving the vagaries of Federal funding in the era of 

 deficit reduction. We want this money, the Federal money, $10 mil- 

 lion per year to go to population assessments so we have good data 

 instead of unknown data, for federally funded observers to be put 

 in the hot spot areas. We want to have statistically reliable infor- 

 mation. We want to fund conservation teams so that we can build 

 regional consensus and avoid confrontation. 



We don't believe that this funding should be channeled into the 

 development of a centralized system to register fisheries across the 

 board throughout the regions. This is something that, if they are 

 concerned about fishing efforts for fishing efforts' sake, this can be 

 done through the Magnuson Act. 



We have systems in place in the Pacific Northwest and the west 

 coast that have detailed fishing effort systems and those systems 

 have been used in the last few years to do analysis on marine 

 mammal fishery interactions. So you do not need to channel your 

 scarce resources to do centralized systems. 



The rest of my comments are in writing, and I will not cover 

 them at this point. 



Mr. Studds. Thank you. 



[The statement of Mr. Gilman can be found at the end of the 

 hearing.] 



Mr. Studds. Next, Mr. John Gissburg, Legal Counsel to the Com- 

 missioner of the Department of Fish and Game, State of Alaska. 



