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President Clinton has also stated that his aim as President of the 

 United States is to return to these neighborhood small businesses 

 and to regain an even stronger economy. 



Each fishing vessel in the port of Gloucester, Massachusetts, is 

 a small business, employing three to eight fishermen per vessel. 

 We have thousands of these vessels up and down our coast. But 

 unlike some of our land-based stores, the fishing industry gen- 

 erates approximately 6.6 jobs for every fisherman that goes to sea. 



In Gloucester, Massachusetts, my hometown and the oldest fish- 

 ing port in the country, one commercial fishing vessel buys ice by 

 the tons from the local ice company. In addition, that same vessel 

 buys hundreds of gallons of fuel from the local fuel companies, hun- 

 dreds of dollars' worth of groceries from the neighborhood grocery 

 stores, and hundreds of dollars worth of gear from the local fish 

 chandlers. The fishing boats will also usually spend hundreds of 

 dollars for local services, be that of engine repairs and electric re- 

 pairs. 



When the vessel is finally ready to put to sea, it has incurred, 

 in general, several thousand dollars' worth of expenses before it 

 has left the dock. The small business is already in the red before 

 the engines are started. 



An offshore Gloucester dragger will spend an average of 10 days 

 at sea. Some of the time is spent traveling, and some of the time 

 is spent in search of fish, while the rest of the time is spent actu- 

 ally fishing for fish. If successful, the vessel will return with ap- 

 proximately 30,000 pounds of mixed groundfish. The crew will 

 spend the day helping to unload fish to the fish plants. 



That vessel will again hire about six longshoremen to do the ac- 

 tual unloading and create more employment. The plant that the 

 fish is sold to will hire dock workers, fish cutters, fork truck opera- 

 tors and truck drivers, sales personnel and brokers. 



The fish will then be distributed to either freezer cold storage or 

 fresh fish stores, creating still more employment for the small but 

 life-giving city businesses. 



Also a fishing vessel gets hauled out in the shipyards for repairs. 

 The other small business we never think about in reference to fish- 

 ing vessels are the intangible insurance businesses in the service 

 of the commercial fishing vessels. 



In my short my report, I have named 14 small businesses whose 

 livelihood depends directly on fishing vessels. The what has this 

 sudden closure of fishing grounds by Federal Government authority 

 done to Massachusetts small businesses? They have been com- 

 pletely caught off guard, shut from lending institutions, cut off 

 from the work force. Vessels that carried seven crewmen go to sea 

 with four. Vessels that fished with four crewmen now go with two. 



We in the fishing port of Gloucester, working with Mayor Tobey 

 and the city council, are trying to open new markets for underuti- 

 lized species such as herring. But with the sudden closure, we 

 haven't had the time to retrain and retrofit our fish plants and 

 fishing vessels. 



It seems like we have the plague when it comes to getting loans 

 from banks and other lending sources for our fishing industry. Our 

 city and State leaders are trying to redirect industries in this coast- 



