I may be wrong but I thought they voted down the coastwide and elected to keep the conservation equivalence. Which is state by state.
Fisheries regulators meet today in Wilmington over catch limitsKIRK MOORE • STAFF WRITER • December 8, 2009 State and regional fisheries regulators will continue to allow New Jersey and other Atlantic states to make the best deals possible for their own recreational fishermen while trying to achieve conservation goals for summer flounder.Staffers with the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council had recommended a single coastwide standard for 2010 that would limit anglers to a minimum summer flounder size of 19.5 inches and taking home no more than two fish per day."We would have to severely raise our size limit," said Peter Himchak of the New Jersey Division of Fish and Wildlife, which this year set an 18-inch minimum and six-fish daily limit for Shore anglers.But in a lopsided vote, only New York State representatives supported a return to a single coastwide standard - a limit that would actually give relief to their party and charter boat industry, which has seen its business plummet under a 21-inch minimum size limit and shortened seasons.For years, states have been allowed to work out their own annual rules, under a principle called conservation equivalency that gives states flexibility in meeting the goals. New Jersey captains Tony Bogan and Adam Nowalsky spoke in favor of keeping those rules at the Wilmington, De. joint meeting of the council and Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission.Under six years of coastwide limits that started back in the 1990s, it appeared that recreational quotas were exceeded by as much as 62 percent, but in the last six years when New Jersey used conservation equivalency rules, "we were under for three of those years, and over in three years only because of those drastic cuts to the (summer flounder) quota" that started in 2005, Bogan said.And those estimated overages were far less, he added. "If the council had voted for this, it would have been against their own mandate" to conserve fish, he said.Critics say conservation equivalency has contributed to skewing the summer flounder fishery in favor of some states, especially New Jersey whose anglers capture the lion's share of the recreational quota. The biological structure of the flounder stock and nature of the fishery has changed so much since 1998, the date used as a management baseline, that it's time to return to a coastwide standard, said Tony DiLernia, a spokesman for New York recreational groups.The meeting continues today, with discussions of 2010 management measures for scup and black sea bass, and a recommendation to reduce the quota for spiny dogfish, despite recent efforts to widen the commercial fishery for those small sharks.The council is Web streaming live video and audio of the meeting at www.ustream.tv/channel/mafmctv.
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